Happiness is a warm boot: Remembering September 11

On September 10, 2001, Bob and I flew home from a visit to Canada. We had just become engaged and I wanted families on both coasts to meet my fiancee, and my hope was that the connection would be strong enough to convince them all to travel to California in February for the wedding. It was my second time around and not something you can count on. But I knew this marriage was going to last and I wanted this wedding to be the memory we all held in common, not just in photographs but in the sensory river that is life experienced in all its minutiae. As a family, a community, a nation, we become the sum of these memories, they bind us together, force us apart, we navigate them hourly, daily, and at the end they are everything, the river on which we flow.
In Ontario the Indian summer nights were kind, crickets and lawn chairs, images darkening through the long twilight.  Sitting on the cool grass my fiance, whose post-war Japanese mother had married his American father, chatted amiably with my uncle who was only one of two pilots to escape the bombardment of his airfield in Ceylon in 1942.  I marveled at the changes that could happen to bring us together within the span of one lifetime.

The flight home was tiring but uneventful, sleep welcome.

Before the alarm summoned me to a workday, the phone rang, it was barely dawn, I was groggy, but within seconds the television was on. I sat, tangled up in sheets, watching in disbelief and horror as the events of the morning unfolded.  I thought about my co-workers who were within a block of the Towers attending a convention, and it looked like New York was coming apart at the seams. My bags, from the flight, were still sitting in the living room, unpacked. I couldn't leave the bed.  Didn't want to, it felt safer somehow. As the morning lightened, the church bells that mark the hours near to our Los Feliz apartment began to ring out, incongruous, celebrating unknowning, a timer clicking on and a man hurrying to turn it off. Then they were silent.

The planes. I had been on one just hours earlier.  The towers - seen from a safe distance as helicopters buzzed, cameras captured. I had been in New York several times over the previous years, working on projects at St. Vincents Hospital, one of the places I knew would begin to prepare for the injured (who would never come as most simply perished). But as the focus stayed on the towers, I saw them not as they were trembling that morning, but as I remembered them a few years before, when I'd been speaking at a conference in Manhattan. The turn-of-the-century hotel where I was staying occupied the block next to World Trade Plaza and the view framed by my room window was completely dominated by these two soaring obelisks, darkened by the perpetual shadow they cast on the ground below.  It was not a pleasing sight - the white slits designed into the base contrasted like tall ghosts with the gloom, the towers stretched far out of sight, their sheer magnitude impenetrable, unforgiving. Something about it made me uneasy, perhaps it was just the anxiety of preparing to speak before a room full of physicians.

It felt prescient now as I watched the screen, my view now far up where they alone reflected the clear light of a bright day. They looked so beautiful, heroic as they imploded, compacting neatly, I thought, going straight down into the earth.  We joined in the river of these images, made memory.

In early December Bob surprised me a whirwind trip. We were going to spend four days in New York to celebrate my birthday. It seems now to be a testament to our national determination to heal that by December we were even contemplating taking a holiday in a place where the violent memories were still fresh.  It was a busy four days - we sat in the near front rows of a hit Broadway show, ventured downtown further to see the newly-famous Blue Man Group, then the Rockettes Christmas Spectacular.  New York seemed to be as alive and vibrant as ever, full of itself, dizzying.
     Except for the air.  Even by the beginning of December, three months after the Towers fell, the remains, now reduced to micro-particles remains still kicked up from the ground, blown from cracks and crevices where the exploding debris had settled into every part of the city.  It was omnipresent: Acrid, mettallic, earthy, gypsum, wood, pulverized glass.  Everywhere, a suble, constant reminder we were still in the organic process of assimilating what had happened.  We were absorbing it, into our bodies, into our still-fresh memories.

The Blue Man Group show was only a few blocks from Ground Zero.  We briefly considered venturing further south, but the power of what had happened was too great.  It was too soon - we knew we would see the same images captured on film, the grey dust, poking ruins, swarming volunteers now joined by masses of heavy machinery shoveling away the debris.

Then a visceral memory, from my first visit to New York decades earlier. I was with my mother and we were walking down 5th Avenue on our way to a cheaper hotel when someone ran across the street and was hit by a car.  There was screaming, and a crowd quickly coalesced from the river of pedestrians, circling, then pushing an shoving to surround the injured man.  My mother stopped and turned to join them, drawn as if by some invisible force.  To see.  I turned away in anger, dragging my suitcase a good block before she caught up to me, breathless, equally angry. We barely spoke for days afterward, each of us lost in our own place in this drama, the voyeur, the witness.

The air was the river of that memory.  In silence we skirted the destruction, fiercely determined to stay with the living, to keep moving forward.  In the clear winter afternoon we simply stood hand-in-hand for a moment, facing the direction of the void that had once been crowned, contemplating the hidden world beyond. Our future, so vibrantly bright, so full of promise.  It seemed incongruous to shift from one reality to another.  I turned to the nearest store window, we went inside. And then I bought a pair of boots because my feet were freezing and the world had gone cold.  For a moment, it had gone very cold.