story592.xml

story592.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-05-13

It was difficult to write about this event until a friend in Minnesota sent me a holiday card, in which she wondered how she could explain this to her daughter when she could not understand it herself:


In Response to Caroline Rose (Draft 3.5)

I am not sure how you can explain it,
not even to an eleven-year old
at the top of her form.
We have had months to think about it,
ask, ?Where were you??
without the rest of the question,
talk it through.
I was about to leave my apartment to vote,
then to work,
five blocks east of the World Trade Center.
The man on the radio said to turn on the television.
I saw the second point of impact
the way you did,
and thought, ?I will vote, then find out
if the trains are running,
to go to work.?
After I voted, in the Senior Center,
I stopped by the television room there.
A man said he had an appointment,
at eleven o?clock,
at the World Trade Center.
A woman said the appointment
might still be kept
if it was on a lower floor.
It was on the seventy-eighth floor.
She responded that it might be cancelled.
My neighbor exited the subway
at Twenty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue.
She looked up to see an enormous fire,
then went to work.
The trains stopped running;
it took her more than two hours
to walk home.
When the bridges and tunnels were closed,
there was an enormous rush to gather supplies.
In the market, a little boy asked his mother
why she was buying so much food,
and what could she answer?
They were running low.
There was a television on at the bank.
We stopped mid-transactions
to watch the building fall.
Over the next weeks,
we were numb,
we were small-town quiet,
we spent a lot of time talking.
I was running errands downtown
and passed a site about which I had wondered.
It was a cemetery, stuck mid-block;
200 years ago, it was in the country.
A woman I had never met
struck up a conversation.
This often happens here.
We enjoyed that the cemetery was established
by a man named Preserved Fish.
I found out more about her than necessary:
what she pays for her apartment,
that she has kids.
This often happens, as well,
but as we parted, she offered me a hug,
and what could I do?
I hugged her back.
This was new.
One of the candidates for public office
had his headquarters on the street where I live.
It is a neighborhood commercial street
with an all-night diner, cleaners,
Swatch shop, kosher Chinese restaurant,
that Gray?s Papaya you have seen in many movies
at the corner.
He stuck an ironing board outside his storefront,
plopped on it a small colour television,
and placed in front of that
rainbow-coloured folding chairs,
right in the middle of the sidewalk.
For the whole first week,
people gathered,
talking it through.
The posters went up right away,
all over the City,
memorials to individuals
were stuck in street tree pits,
candles lined the sidewalks,
rememberances from many places were everywhere.
They filled Union Square,
since its construction, a park
where peace marches assembled,
and still do.
The posters were heart-wrenching,
hand-made and copied quickly:
one man was last seen
wearing a purple polo and black jeans,
one woman was the pastry chef
at Windows on the World,
several had tattoos
of a rose or a cross or a dragon,
many had children.
A lot of detail was crammed
onto letter-sized paper
until we knew these people,
whether we really did or not.
They worked at the top, trading bonds,
or at the bottom, in the elevator pits,
and the names were from every country in the world.
They were from every place in the United States;
the pastry chef last worked
in a restaurant in San Francisco,
where my sister now works
as the pastry chef.
Over time, things stabilized.
Everyone returned to work,
but not everything returned to normal.
That first day back,
I came out of the subway
and turned to look west down Fulton Street.
There was a gap where buildings had been.
At night, it was brilliantly-lit,
so that the remains and the cranes
were without shadow.
The smell was incredible,
unforgettable
when we dared to think about
what we were smelling,
and it was heavy.
The streets downtown
got cleaned twice a day,
and still do.
In these months, we have
absorbed it, somehow,
until something small shocks us again:
I pulled my money from that bank branch
five times last month,
twice to buy theatre tickets
from the booth in Two.
I knew that man in graduate school;
he was from Australia.
I cannot get to New Jersey by train from downtown.
There is no FM National Public Radio.
Sometimes, it is a bigger shock:
A woman I know will not shop
in stores where clerks are Arab.
The clerk in the newsstand
in the apartment house next door
might be Arab.
He was looking glum,
so I struck up a conversation,
as often happens here.
He lost two friends
who worked in the World Trade Center,
and another was in the hospital, badly hurt.
I felt with him.
A man I know does not mind
if his telephone is tapped.
Racial profiling has resumed.
I doubled my donation
to the American Civil Liberties Union.
How would I explain it
to an eleven-year old?
These people were jealous of people in the United States.
Even living here, they did not understand
life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
They did not see that disparate cultures
can agree to differ
and that people across a vast land
can function as one society
and survive (even) themselves.
A few years ago, in a hostel in Switzerland,
I was asked why I like being a citizen of the United States.
I liked it, in part, because
anywhere in the world, I could say,
?The President of the United States is an idiot,?
which he was,
and I would not be arrested.
What response could there be?
I do not recall one.
In part, I could not imagine my home
being anywhere but the City of New York,
the Capital of the World.
You can ask an eleven-year old
to keep her mind aware
and her heart open,
and to work
so that anyone in the United States
can always speak her mind
anywhere.
We got all the cards,
the presents,
the phone calls
to talk it through.
Thank you.


Heidi B. Andersson/s
22 December 2001