Late one summer several years ago my good friend Gwen decided there was only one thing she wanted to do for her birthday. She wanted to gather up her close friends on a Saturday afternoon to go down to New York City to have a birthday celebration at Serendipity. Since this was a special day, Gwen's boyfriend Vito generously offered to drive everyone from our Connecticut college town to Manhattan. And that is how one Saturday I found myself driving down the Merritt Parkway towards New York in a Jeep with no top on it, my blessed hair whipping me in the face.
What an awesome experience, however, to be so close to the open road. We arrived in The City a little after four, and it was just a regular joyous Saturday on the streets of the Big Apple. Soon after we got there, Gwen mentioned that we needed to pick up friends of hers who were students at NYU. They lived in a dorm all the way down on Water Street. Turning to me, as the car's resident New Yorker, Vito timidly asked "Mary, how do we find Water Street?" Based on the streets' name I knew that it was "way-the-hell" downtown. So I said to him "Find the World Trade Center, Vito, and start driving towards it, thats how you find anything that's South in New York City."
Find it Vito did. At one point we were driving on a large avenue that had the Towers at its base. Never in my life did I have such a breath-takingly close view of the Trade Center. Gwen's roommate Kate was next to me in the backseat, and she asked me quietly "The Twin Towers are also the World Trade Center, right?" I was so mesmerized by the view that I was distracted when I told her that yes, they were the same thing. At the same time, I had been feeling extremely uneasy, like I'd made a terrible mistake sneaking home to my city that day. It was September 8th, 2001.
My unrest only grew as the day went on. My feelings didn't really make any sense. I had gone down to the City from Fairfield for the day before without telling my parents. It wasn't that I was afraid I was going to be caught and reprimanded, it was much more of a gut feeling-like my survival instinct was kicking in. We took a cab from Water Street up to Serendipity's on the Upper East Side and during the ride it seemed almost as if I had to take deep breaths. I remember that I picked perhaps my first New York fight ever with the maitre d at the restaurant because after waiting almost an hour to be seated, the Little Snot informed us that our entire party had to be there. The entire party was not there because Vito was still driving around aimlessly lost in Chelsea. My sense of dread grew as the night wore on, and I was glad when Gwen finally admitted that she wanted to stay in the city overnight, because it gave Kate and I the permission we needed to high-tail it up to Grand Central to get on a train back to Connecticut. When I made it back to my Fairfield apartment two hours later, I felt safe again.
That Monday night I went to the ATM to withdraw 20.00, for what I still can't recall, and I went to Monday Night Mass with my roommates. I came home late that evening, did not-enough of my reading for Art History class at 11 am the next morning, and fell into a blissfully guilty sleep. When my clock radio went off after nine the next day, I could hear snippets about a plane crash. I shut it off, brow furrowed, and toddled off to the shower anyway. My roommate Stacy and I were the only ones at home on this morning, and we joked about how Stacy's boyfriend Corey had left his glasses in Stacy's room the night before. I can still hear Stacy saying "I don't know how the kid drove home last night!" The phone rang, and Stacy said to me "That's probably him going 'Yah seen my glasses??'"
Stacy turned her back on me to retrieve the phone, and I got a cold feeling. I thought "That's not Corey." and "It's bad." It was Stacy's mother calling to tell us that the Trade Center was on fire. I think that in our lifetimes, the distinct moments that change Who We Are are very rare. This was one of those moments. I turned on the television and saw that there was only one Tower remaining and right there, in that instant, my life was never really the same again. There in my Fairfield living room, with Stacy-who is still one of my best friends, I watched the remaining tower fall, I frantically tried to reach my parents-particularly my mother who was at home a mile and a half from the site, and I stole away to my bedroom to double over in tears whenever I thought no one was paying attention.
In the days that followed, I walked around in a bit of a haze. It was September 13th when my mother called to tell me that the eldest son of a family whose children I'd grown up with in our apartment building had been in Tower One, the same building I'd watched fall, and that he was now missing. Aaron worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. He was outgoing and boisterous and just a little bit diabolical and I wish I'd known him better. When his obituary appeared in The New York Times later that year, a line from it read: "he seized souls, not letting go until he made them merry." He also reminds me to be thankful and happy when I return home from work safely each day. I've thought of Aaron on every birthday that I've had since I became older than he was when he died.
My mother's birthday came at the end of September, and it was always an occasion that I was expected to come home for. This year I was scared, though. I couldn't imagine what the city would be like after such a devastating event, and the longer I waited to return, the longer it would be until I had to deal with it. At the beginning of that week, I was on the phone with her, and casually tried to say something like "Sooo...it's been rainyand how would you feel if I didn't come home...?" I was met immediately with a "WHAT?!?!?!" and quickly back-tracked "Just kidding, I'll be on the 2:40 train." I felt like a ghost walking through Grand Central, especially when I got to the bulletin board that was plastered with signs of those who had gone missing in the towers. Grand Central kept that bulletin board up for over a year. St Vincent's Hospital had a similar display that they just took down at the beginning of this year. Our grief became a part of our daily lives, but in those first few weeks we were still struggling to get used to this.
The worst part of that first return to the City was when I got to the corner of 14th Street and Fifth Avenue. For years, I would get to this corner and look downtown at those amazing buildings. I would always sum up the view of the Twin Towers from 14th and 5th as the one image for me that encapsulated the thrill of living in New York City. When I got to that corner that day, it was the very first time that I saw with my own eyes that yes, the towers really weren't there any more. While I was in New York on that visit, I noticed that there was this dark ashy gray cloud over the city and thought it was a storm cloud, neglecting to notice that the sky all around it was crisp and blue. It wasn't until I took the train back out of the City a few hours later that I realized that cloud was no rain cloud, it was a cloud of dust and debris. Back in Fairfield later the next week, I was watching the evening news one night before rehearsal and literally felt my heart rate speeding up without reason and pounding in my chest.
The weeks began to pass, and became months, which have worn on into years. When I moved back to New York City after getting my degree from Fairfield in 2003, the place I returned to was not the place I'd left four years earlier. In spite of the fact that I was so afraid to come home in those days right after September 11th, I also had and continue to have an enormous amount of guilt that I wasn't in New York City on its darkest day. I made my first trip to "Ground Zero" on New Years Day 2002, the second trip later that summer. Since then I've made many more. I've watched the documentaries, I've read the accounts, I was in the audience at "World Trade Center." It seems what I'm looking for is closure, and, perhaps, even forgiveness for not being here. One thing that seems clear, however, is that September 11th taught us to be passionate in our quest to care for one another. With our five years of retrospect, it's now clear that when those planes hit those buildings on September 11th, nothing the FDNY could have done would have prevented the buildings' collapse. Those firefighters refused to accept it, however, and the nearly 3,000 lives that were ended that day were not ended without a huge struggle.
Swinging back to the title of this entry, however, something that frustrates me particularly is that five years later, I still don't have the capacity to express exactly what I want to say about the events of that day and how they have colored all the days that have followed. At this point, it's a possibility that I may never find the exact words because September 11th is just so complex. One thing that is clear is that a new era began that day, an era in which we must not take our freedom for granted. For New Yorkers particularly, every day that we leave our homes to go to work in Manhattan offices we are each committing a small act of bravery. September 11th illustrated that tomorrow isn't guaranteed, so take no one and nothing for granted. In the shadow of this day that changed our lives, I think many of us have been living with as much dignity, courage, and love as we can.
