story5041.xml

story5041.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

It was one of those clear fall days that is so incredible in the City because they are in such stark contrast to the norm and the surroundings. I had just dropped my son off at his Brooklyn elementary school and returned home. My husband, who was supposed to already have left for a meeting in downtown Manhattan, was standing in front of the television: "something awful has happened. a plane crashed into one of the trade towers." i knew immediately it was no accident -- the day was too clear and the towers too tall for someone to accidentally fly into them. just as i was telling him this the second plane hit. i heard the explosion and felt my house shake. i thought immediately of my neighbor who worked across the street from the Towers and of my son, suddenly so far away. I walked outside to see the impossibly blue day suddenly clouded by gray, debris already starting to float across the river to my house, my neighborhood: bills of lading singed from fire; an insurance claim form; an improbable agronomy of new york state list. I rushed to pick up my son, cancelled his dental appointment -- the receptionist couldn't quite understand the urgency to cancel! -- and walked through my culturally diverse neighborhood looking into the ghostlike faces of people I would never have noticed before. I waited for word from my neighbor, who narrowly escaped a fireball at Century 21 and his wife, who witnessed it all from her office in downtown Brooklyn. Walking home a flaming briefcase landed at her feet, a burning sock landed on her companion's head. Nothing seemed real, not like a movie, but like a nightmare from which there is no escape: '"wake up, wake up!" I called my neighbors, police officers who had helped me rid my neighborhood of drug dealers earlier in the summer, but they were already at Ground Zero. I prayed for them and their families, all cops and firefighters. I prayed for my son's soccer coach, a firefighter -- he was missing for many hours -- and for one of the coaches who didn't make it. And I prayed for all of the kids in my son's school, many, as it turned out, who lost a parent or relative to the massacre. But mostly I cried. I find myself still crying even though I've moved away from the City, a move planned before the tragedy, but one done with more urgency afterwards. Now I live an hour away, but there's not a day that goes by that I don't remember the sounds, the smells, the smoke, the sadness... but I have hope for the future. I have to. I have children.