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2002-05-01

A View from 23rd Street
September 14-15, 2001

We are very grateful for all the calls and e-mails we have received from family and friends around the country, and from as far away as Jerusalem and Yerevan, inquiring about our safety and emotional well-being in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center.

We have tried to respond individually, usually with short bursts of detail, to convey that we are safe and, to date, have accounted for all relatives and friends who work and live in or near the attack site. While we still anticipate getting tragic news about people we did not know were at Ground Zero on Tuesday morning, we are grateful for now that our personal circle appears to be unbroken.

It is now late Friday. President Bush has visited the disaster area, and it was good to see him here.

Writing this message will give me a way to collect my thoughts in a more reflective fashion than I've been able to do since Tuesday and, if you don't mind, share them with you as a way of relating what we were doing physically and how we have been coping emotionally with the surrealistic city we now find ourselves living in. It may also give me the opportunity to arrive at some understanding of events that seem incomprehensible. I hope you will not find this tedious or worse, presumptuous.

Tuesday began without a hint of the madness to come. It was bright and sunny. We went through our usual morning routines as we prepared to walk Sarah to school and then go to work. Barbara and I stopped off to vote at 23rd Street east of First Avenue in the New York primary, then split up to head to work ? I headed toward East 42nd Street and she headed toward the courthouse near City Hall. Barbara noticed smoke coming from downtown and said there was a fire, which we assumed was nearby, as it was very thick and seemed so close, and fire engines were responding from our nearby fire station.

Barbara took the subway and was coming out of the City Hall station ? about 10 blocks north of the WTC ? when the south tower collapsed. She had to duck into a building to get away from the smoke and dust. Debris from the building flew as far as City Hall. The courts were closed shortly afterward, and the Daily News had her go to nearby Beekman Downtown Hospital to report on the emergency care being given to victims.

She had a very long and emotional day, coping with accounts of falling bodies and debris, of choking under clouds of pitch black smoke, and screams that will reverberate forever to those that heard them.

Like most other people, I was watching the unfolding events on television in my office and was slow to comprehend what was happening. Later in the morning I went to Sarah's school, which was being shut down for the day. We talked about what had happened, in rudimentary terms, and although I don't think she appreciates the complexity and enormity of what happened, she said, "I know why they picked the World Trade Center. Because they are famous buildings."

Although Barbara called us almost hourly throughout the day, Sarah kept asking me if Mom was safe, and I could honestly say she was. When Barbara came home at about 8:30, Sarah leaped up and said she was going to make dinner for her. She then toasted an English muffin and scrambled some eggs in a bowl for us to cook while Barbara, who was coated in dust, showered. After eating, she and Sarah fell asleep on couches in the living room, and as unsettling as the day had been, it was calming and reassuring for me to see them like that.

I was glued to the television all night, in the way we all had been in November 1963 when President Kennedy was killed. This event has made us an American village again, and for the first time in my memory, all of the United States is sympathetic to New York, appreciating both that this was an attack on America in which New York and the Pentagon were symbolic targets, and that the international primacy of New York as a financial and communications center made it an obvious target that spared virtually all other US civilian centers as the object of the terrorists' madness. In the last couple of days, I have seen police cars from Virginia, firemen from Ohio, delivery trucks from Indiana, and so much more from around the country.

There is also an appreciation for Washington and our national government that is somewhat unusual in this era in which citizens tend to disdain the capital, and the press unendingly dissects personal scandals at the expense of intelligent policy analysis, and politicians make a point of rhetorically distancing themselves from the very national institutions they hope and claim to lead.

By the end of the first evening, after a full day working the phones (when they worked at all), we had finally heard from our various friends and relatives and school families who work and live in the WTC area. One had an especially harrowing story. Our friend Diana Merenda, who went to school with Barbara, worked at the WTC and called her husband to say the buildings were under attack and she was trying to get out and to head to his midtown office. They exchanged intensely personal words, and she was not heard from again for more than four hours. Nearly incapacitated by smoke, she ended up on a ferry to New Jersey, having gotten there in a near tidal wave of escapees who linked arms and tried to divine their way to the river, which they could not see for the pitch black smoke that blinded them to such a degree that they could not see their own hands. She was treated for smoke inhalation, and her husband went home to Manhasset, got their car and made a long and circuitous journey (from Long Island to Westchester and Rockland Counties, across the Hudson north of the city and back down along the Palisades, all in massive traffic) to get and bring her back at 2:30 in the morning.

On Wednesday, Sarah and I stayed home for a while, took a walk, stopped in to reflect and say a prayer at the nearby St. George Episcopal Church, got some pizza and went to her friend Siri McClean's for some play time. The McCleans live in Waterside apartments on the 37th floor, facing south/southwest/west. The Twin Towers were the center of their dining/living room view. And it was gone. For all the television I had watched, the calamity did not register on me as dramatically as it did when I looked out and, in a real dimension, without the filter of TV, saw what was there Tuesday morning but not there Tuesday afternoon. This was not a dream or a Hollywood disaster movie in which Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone was going to save the day. One can only imagine what those who live or work there every day, or who are literally on the rescue teams, must think. And one cannot comprehend how those who witnessed other mass destructions that were unexpected and unprecedented - Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima obviously come to mind - could ever recover. The view from our own window is out on the East River, which is usually rich with boat traffic and taxiing seaplanes. In the distance we have a clear view of airplanes taking off and landing at LaGuardia Airport. In the last few days, of course, the only river vessels have been police and fire emergency craft, and with the exception of Air Force jets and police helicopters, the skies have been clear of aircraft. Apart from that, though, you would never know from looking out our window that something was wrong. All the buildings that are supposed to be there are right where they belong. However, there has been an exceptional quietude because the FDR Drive, which usually hums with automobiles, has been closed to all but official vehicles. For the first time since we have lived here, I can actually hear the ticking of our living room clock when the window is open.

Earlier in the day, in the morning before Barbara went to work, I rode my bike uptown, because access on my normal route - south along the East River, around Battery Park, up the West Side past the World Trade Center and World Financial Center - was not only blocked but forever changed. The streets were strangely empty of autos. Pedestrians and bicyclists were nodding to each other, saying hello, waving to and saluting each other, and there seemed to me to be far more than the usual number of people walking with arms around each other, but it was all without smiles. There were only grim and sorrowful expressions.

Barbara spent the day at one of the coordinating centers for family and friends searching for word of their missing loved ones. Hundreds of people were holding fliers with pictures and phone numbers, filling out missing persons forms, crying, shaking, desperately anxious to talk about the lost in the hope of good news. She spent an arduous day conveying their stories to the newsroom. By the time Barbara got home, she was drained, which those of you who know her well know is a rare occurrence.

There are many levels of accumulating emotional despair in this crisis - for those who are missing loved ones, those who are searching the rubble, those who are relaying the poignant stories, those who are investigating the crime, those who are leading the city and nation - and they are all real and deeply disturbing. Even when you turn off the television and get outside, nowhere near the World Trade Center, you cannot escape the now common sense of New York. On street after street, there are posters of the missing plastered on bus stop shelters. Today I walked by one of the places where the families of the missing have gathered ? the archway entrance to Bellevue Hospital on First Avenue and 27th Street. I did not want to linger or add my maudlin sentiments to their grief. I almost felt too lucky to be allowed in their company. But as a New Yorker, I just wanted to pat the shoulder of someone who lost family ? simply, anonymously ? and read as many of the posters as I could, because people who love put them up, and they deserve to be seen. Although there is no reason to identify or single out the missing by their ethnicity, I automatically freeze every time I see an Armenian name, perhaps because it brings the reality of the crime a little closer to me, or because I am more likely to know the family since ours is a relatively small and tight-knit community. So here is a name ? Peter Mardikian ? who called his wife from Windows on the World on the 106th floor and has not been heard from again, and whose sister was clutching his picture, telling his story.

School resumed on Thursday, and Sarah and her friends were glad to see each other. Less than half the class was there, however. Quite a number of families either kept their children home or have left for country houses or to be with relatives outside the city. Our own focus has been to try to maintain as close to a normal routine as possible, even as we adapt to the circumstances. For example, several of our friends who live near the attack site have been evacuated from their homes, and the realization of that fact has made more of an impression on Sarah than what little she has seen on TV of those awful video images of planes crashing into the Twin Towers. One schoolmate has spent the afternoons at our house until her mom, a single mother, can pick her up and take her to the hotel that her company is putting her up in until she can get back home.

I have talked to my sister Renee about the possibility that we'd have to leave New York and come for the mother of all sleepovers at her house upstate - if living conditions here deteriorated to a danger point or we came under renewed attack. We are carefully monitoring the environmental conditions, for example. For part of Wednesday and much of yesterday, we smelled smoke from the attack site. Yesterday, as far north as my office on 42nd Street, there was a sooty, gritty texture to the air as the winds blew northward from Ground Zero. There have been conflicting reports of asbestos levels in the air. Mayor Giuliani has said there is no danger, but doctors on the scene have asked for a large volume of asbestos masks and have told individuals that the asbestos levels are high. The World Trade Center, after all, was built in the mid-sixties, and the internal pipes ? thousands of miles worth ? were coated with fire retardants, including asbestos.

The head of security for the New York Federal Reserve Bank, who lives in our building, said that the Bank was moving its operation to East Rutherford, New Jersey, because, although their building had not been structurally impaired, the ventilation system had been so compromised by the dust, debris and chemical pollutants that they could not ask their employees to work in that environment until they were certain it was cleared and safe - and that could take a long time.

Yet while we've talked about a contingency plan for departure, my overwhelming urge and need is to stay in New York, to maintain as close to a normal life as possible, to accommodate the changes that have been forced by this dastardly deed without compromising our values by allowing terrorists to uproot our lives. These sound like grand philosophical words, but there are practical aspects to them. Sarah, for example, at 8 and a half, has in the last two months become confident enough in herself to go on sleepovers ? upstate to my sister's, across the street to the McCleans', and elsewhere. Her piano playing has hit another noteworthy stride ? she is playing Beatles songs with great enthusiasm and skill - and her teacher is coming over tomorrow for the usual Saturday lesson. Fourth grade has just started, and she has an excellent teacher to whom she has responded very nicely. We would hate to uproot her and risk a setback to her confidence because of what may be an unfounded and ephemeral fear of harm at the hand of terrorists, and we would hate to teach her the lesson that a brazen act of terror and cowardice would drive us from our home. But we cannot be blind to the fact that terrorists in fact perpetrated a very real and deadly attack and could do it again, in a time and place that could put us among the casualties. So, we try like everyone else to balance the scales and act as wisely as we can. For now, the risk seems contained, and our pride in New York too great, to do anything but stay and be ourselves as best we can.

There is something about New York today that is akin to what must have been the character of London in the Blitz. It is more than a sense of our being under siege, of having to climb out of and rebuild after the rubble. Even in our contempt for the people who did this, New Yorkers are being casually kind and tolerant and graceful toward one another and the many who have come here to help. They and the rest of our fellow citizens are involuntarily sharing in an endeavor far bigger and more important than any of us individually. (In more banal settings that seem ludicrous by comparison, athletes talk about how they and their teammates "banded together" to show "great courage" and "overcome diversity" in order to . . . win a few more baseball games than the other guys, who were praying to the same God for the same good fortune. Seems sort of silly, doesn't it?)

Why do I want to stay? It is more than the fact that I am a New Yorker, that I was born here, that this is my home and my hometown, and that I do not want to cower to a miserable malevolent force. It is more than a garish hometown nationalism - New York has always been the place to be, that people want to come to, now as ever. It is probably more than simple human nature and instinct, too, since I am spending a lot of time thinking about and analyzing it.

There is much in this week that reminds me of The Bridge of San Luis Rey ? the Thornton Wilder novel examining the lives of five people who died when a Peruvian footbridge collapsed. The search for meaning and a rationale for why those lives were on that bridge at the fateful moment leads to the inevitable if unsatisfying conclusion that there is no sense to it at all; it was just random. If there is a redeeming coda to the tale, it is to love and be loved while you are here, for that is what makes sense and endures.

My dear dear friend Bob Wurwarg went into work late on Tuesday, and at the time he would normally be coming out of the World Trade Center subway station, he was on a commuter train from Rockville Center to Penn Station, so he missed the plane crashes. An acquaintance was delayed from his normal schedule because he voted on the way to work. A friend stopped for a bagel and coffee on the ground floor and ran out when the first plane hit. The head of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading firm that lost 700 of his 1,000 employees, was late because he decided to take his 5-year-old son to his first day of "big boy" school at Horace Mann. It was not wisdom or virtue that kept these people alive and took so many others. Some people who were lingering outside for a cigarette break also lived, while firemen and cops and EMS medics who rushed to helped the victims perished in the collapse. Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General, delayed her departure to Los Angeles for a day so she could celebrate her husband's birthday, and she ended up on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon. If there is any sense to this, it resides in a providence I cannot interpret.

I suppose a Bridge of San Luis Rey analysis can only be retrospective. It is a way to process what has happened, but not a guide by which to live or plan future behavior.

In the last day or so I have also been mindful of the parable of the appointment at Samara, in which the merchant's servant is threatened by a woman who turns out to be Death at the marketplace in Baghdad. The servant desperately flees to Samara where Death would not think to look for him. When the merchant goes to the market himself and asks Death why she threatened his servant, Death says she was not threatening but was herself startled to see the servant in Baghdad because she had an appointment with him in Samara that very evening.

There may be an awful holy grace to events like this week, and to life on this earth, or there may be nothing more than coincidence, a random collection of atoms or the plain old luck of the draw. Whatever you believe, in the end, you have to do what feels right and safe.

To me, it feels right and safe to be home. May that feeling flourish.

With the warm regards and love of my family to yours,

Bob Tembeckjian

P.S. It is now Saturday morning. I did something both incredibly mundane and important ? I took our laundry to the local laundromat and told the proprietor I'd be back late this afternoon to pick it up. I will. And it will be ready.

Barbara, Sarah and I are going out for a walk, and to buy some extra large size clothing that Sarah's school is collecting for the relief workers. Tomorrow we will join friends in worship. While answers may not be revealed to us, there are some words about the Bible by Sir Walter Scott that may help.

Within that awful volume lies
The mystery of mysteries.
Happiest they of human race
To whom God has granted grace
To read, to fear, to hope, to pray,
To lift the latch, and force the way,
And better had they ne'er been born
Who read to doubt, or read to scorn.