I can’t believe that the World Trade Center attack was six years ago. Actually, I can, it almost seems like a dream. That’s a cliche, but true. I can remember looking up and seeing those towers fall. Everyone screaming and then, everyone quiet. We didn’t know how to react. We still don’t.
I was drawing that day, and I was making a drawing of the second tower on fire, when it collapsed. What a thing to have seared into your consciousness. I swear, I don’t think any of us standing on that street in downtown Manhattan watching it fall even realized that there were so many people in there. How can you? If we realized at that moment what we witnessed, most likely we all would have fainted from the shock. It was only in the days and weeks that followed that the realization sunk in. I remember keeping the radio on 24 hours a day in those first few weeks after 9/11. Honestly, it wasn’t so much that I was worried about news of another imminent attack, it was more that I just needed to hear a human voice in my apartment with me. It calmed me somehow.
There are a lot of news stories this year about, is it too much to keep remembering this? The question is, once you have experienced that, how do you forget it? Any one who was in New York when it happened has a scar, and I think even if we don’t consciously think about the World Trade Center on September 11, our emotions and nerves have a memory. We will feel strange, out of sorts, and just overall emotionally fatigued from the memory of the shock and overwhelming sadness of the day. Forget the anniversary of the 11th? It doesn’t seem possible. Let the media do what it wants, people here in New York will always remember that day and think of all the families whose lives were changed.
If you would like to share your personal story of what happened to you that day, please log on to the blog site, the day new york stood still, and write a comment.
It was a dream, a nightmare, a scar that should not be removed, so we can be reminded to cherish those we love, and the Freedom we are blessed with in this country. It breaks my heart every time I start to think about it.
No, I’ll tell you. I was home, up state, 93 miles north of Manhattan. I was listening to Howard Stern when he and Robin announced the first strike. News coverage began quickly and they claimed they were watching it. I had given up cable when I moved north, but I quickly took apart the radio antenna, dug out my little portable TV and hot-wired the antenna to it. Just in time to get a local channel and see the second strike.
I didn’t want my sone to see it, so I turned it off. But it hit me like a blow. There’s 60,000 or 80,000 people in those buildings. My stomach lurched and I wanted to throw up. When Arlene turned to me she looked alarmed at my face. I quickly turned the TV back on to show her. The first building was collapsing. I couldn’t watch any more.
I may have left the city, but I am still a New Yorker. A piece of me died with all those people and those two buildings. I had spent time in them, a good friend had office space from the Port Authority in them, I had toured unfinished floors and felt them sway, been down to the 5 story tall “bath tub” where the two towers finally rested. I’ve dined in Windows, taken my Aunt Gussie to the Observation Deck, snuck around the back to see the rubber King Kong in the Plaza.
A week later, I made the trip down to the city by commuter bus. Seeing the changed skyline from the Lincoln Tunnel Jersey-side entrance was –and still is– a terrible visual. That same friend, James and I, walked from where he lived to within a few blocks of the WTC base. There was a 6-story high pile of smoking steel, visible through the buildings.
That was enough for James and I. We went back to get lunch and be New Yorkers.
“…and be New Yorkers” – exactly. After 9/11 I remember how polite and overly accommodating New Yorkers were to each other; and then the first time I heard a cab driver cursing at a wayward pedestrian a few weeks later. Rudeness and impatience – it was good to have them back!