Saturday, September 18, 2004
tomatoes and maples
Picking tomatoes in my garden. Bending, kneeling, reaching between the tangled vines and leaves, plucking, persuading the fruits to pop clear of their hats. Cruiser snuffling along between the rows, gobbling tomatoes that have fallen to the dirt. Toppled tomato cages, overheavy and dragged down by squash vines, yet offering clusters of tomatoes that promise to become red. A balance between autumn temperatures and sun summer warmth. The maples in the distance, reddening in bursts--here is one, there is one. A burgundy-colored maple leaf slips along the grass to my foot.
Monday, September 13, 2004
pleasures
Balmy, bright, breezy Sunday afternoon, standing barefoot outside in the grass, hanging damp laundry on the line, gazing across the field at my neighbors. My favorite red wine to follow.
Overcast brisk Monday morning, barefoot in the grass, quickly unclipping cold, dry laundry from the line, folding crisp t-shirts and pants down the front of my body, the wind flicking my nightgown around my calves, trying to avoid being seen by drivers on the road. Coffee waiting inside.
Overcast brisk Monday morning, barefoot in the grass, quickly unclipping cold, dry laundry from the line, folding crisp t-shirts and pants down the front of my body, the wind flicking my nightgown around my calves, trying to avoid being seen by drivers on the road. Coffee waiting inside.
Saturday, September 11, 2004
Today is the third anniversary of September 11, and the first where I feel mostly normal. I ate granola and drank coffee with John this morning, pureed tomatoes and mulched perennials, read a novel and napped. As I ran errands in the car I composed the first lines of sonnets in my head: "The late summer crickets' high-pitched keening," "Rugged field laid flat for winter, coming," "Sweet belly of a mountain, maple red," ...
I have not been wallowing in memories as I did the past two years. I have had no flashbacks. It has receded. I've reread my journal from that time, a scattered and not-quite immediate remembering. I post some of it here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
September 11, 2001
Tuesday morning was a gorgeous a late-summer day in New York City. I got up, drank coffee, showered, dressed like the minor executive I am, and went outside to wait for the bus to my new job. The bus stop is in front of our apartment house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We live on Broadway, leading down to the East River.
Very often when I go outside I glance down to my right where the East River separates us in Brooklyn from the island of Manhattan, which is the place most non-New Yorkers think of when they say "New York." Ever since John and I moved here I have enjoyed the site of the twin Towers, so secure and strong, a symbol of being in New York. I have sketched them and remarked upon them in letters to friends and family. Those two Towers and other landmarks like our Williamsburg Bridge and the Empire State Building, and Brooklyn Bridge, even the Statue of Liberty visible ½ block away convince me every time I see them that yes, I do live in New York.
Tuesday morning I didn't take note of the Towers because I was interested in reading something in my New Yorker magazine, and the bus was rounding the corner. Soon I was on the bus and riding the few miles to my office. I missed my last chance to see the twin Towers as they were.
The neighborhood where I work is called Fort Greene. It is a residential neighborhood, brownstones and playgrounds and stores and restaurants. When I got to the office, early as usual, another early arriver said that there was a fire in the World Trade Center. I thought he was joking, and went outside to look. High in the sky there was a noticeable and strange plume of smoke floating past. There was a fast-rising urgency of people and sirens. I went back inside and called my husband John. He works in Manhattan at 6th Avenue and 27th Street, in a midtown neighborhood called Chelsea. He had not heard yet. We spoke briefly and hung up so he could go outside to see.
We had a radio in the our little Fort Greene office and everyone gathered around it to listen. The announcers didn't really know what was going on! A plane had hit the trade center—-unbelievable. I read later in the NYT that a local announcer joked about it being kamikaze pilot. Another plane has hit, oh God, and something has happened at the Pentagon in Washington, too—-it must be terrorists.
Usually outside at this time of day are young African-American youths playing basketball in the two City Park courts across the street. It's a big park, and I don't even know the name of it. Dekalb at Adelphi and Carlton. At my Venetian blind-shaded, sunlit desk I swallowed herb tea and tried to get some news online from CNN or the New York Times, sources I thought I could trust more than a nervous talk radio host. The websites were slow to come up from all the zillions of other people trying to access them, and when they did they showed photos of those two dear Towers smoking and blazing like in a disaster movie. I could hardly believe it. Then I tried to start my workday, but I really couldn't concentrate. A young woman arrived late to work, crying.
I called John again, and he told me what he saw standing at the corner of 6th, the flaming smoking Towers. I kept trying to believe that I could go about my regular day, but when I heard my husband's shocked voice I finally gave up. I told the Executive Director's young assistant I was leaving, left the office and walked down the block to Fort Greene Park, which has a big hill overlooking the city. And there were the enormous top thirds of the Towers, the wrecked and whole upper floors like the tines of a grey comb only three miles away, hazy with smoke on the otherwise gorgeous pristine sunny day, black smoke and orange-red fire, so large and close. Glittering things fell away from the burning, pieces of building or I don't like to think what else. Helicopters circled, a fighter jet zipped by far overhead. At first there were only a few people there on the hillside, but more and more came, and we all watched and crowded around those of us who had radios. Sirens were everywhere, ambulances, fire trucks and police on their way to the scene. I clasped my hands and prayed, but I felt little comfort in that—-how could my weak prayers save those people the pain of fire?
And then the left-hand tower Tower simply collapsed, slowly at first, collapsed, compressed straight downward, as if a giant hand was pressing it down, recycling a can or bottle. The rumbling roar came to us up on that leafy green hill, and everyone moaned and or screamed or was silent.
I can think now about who was there: our Executive Director's Assistant, whom I had told I was stepping out; the receptionist, who would end up getting fired for coming to watch; the girl who had been crying since she got to work; others from another department; the mostly African-American strangers on the hillside. Although there is a large hospital nearby there was no one in scrubs.
The right-hand Tower stayed up, the one with the broadcasting antenna on top, still blazing and smoking. A huge mushroom of dark ash and smoke billowed, sinister black and gray like you see on TV when a volcano erupts. All those people, I thought. It all happened so fast. How could can they be getting out, how many people were on the fire stairs of that building evacuating when their building it collapsed? I felt almost nothing, just stood there praying because there wasn't anything else I wanted to do. Some other people from my office arrived. We stood and watched the remaining Tower burn, listened to the various radios, talked quietly, tried to reach loved ones on cell phones. The minutes dragged by as slowly as minutes sometimes do, when you are in misery.
I left before the second Tower collapsed, not wanting to know any more and feeling an obligation to my job. As I walked back through the park I saw things of normal life, a group of people in matching t-shirts under a tree, getting ready to perhaps play softball,. A woman and a child in the playground. The woman watched me eagerly as I approached down the hill, and I thought she might want me to tell her what I saw.
I said, "Don't you want your daughter to see?"
"We were up there watching," said the woman, gesturing at her little daughter, "but she just wanted to come swing on the swings."
I nodded, and then the woman said, "I am from Israel. We have this all the time. And now I feel for you Americans." She and I stared at each other, a long moment of deep communion, and I put my hands over my heart, and she nodded, and I left.
The vision of the collapsing Tower, and the billowing explosions of smoke replays silently in my mind. Too much to believe, too much to accept. I was willing to think I had hallucinated it, it was only a dream. I wanted it not to be real. Somehow a giant movie screen had been placed across the vision of all of us up on that hill; it was Hollywood, some strange brutal experiment in mass entertainment, not a real thing. New York is larger than life that way; I see things in daily life here that I’ve only ever seen on TV or in movies. I wanted to believe almost anything but that it was real.
When I got back into the office only a few people were still there. Almost everyone else, but only I among the senior staff had gone to the hill to see for themselves. The radio was still on, describing what I had just seen. I didn't want to hear and went up to my desk outside the executive director’s office. She was on the phone behind her closed, glass door. I tapped on the door to let her know I was back, and then sat down at my desk and put my head in my hands. I would have begun to cry then, except she came out shouting. "This is unbelievable of everybody, how unprofessional, how could you just leave and not tell anyone where you were going, what are you all, some kind of voyeurs? This is none of your business!" She went on and on, spewing at me. I nodded and nodded, said, "Yes, I understand. I understand. I did tell so-and-so that I was going, but then she came herself." I told myself that my boss's her behavior wasn't about me nor really directed at me, it was just her way of coping with the unimaginable. Maybe her sister is in that Tower, I told myself. Maybe she is in shock. Everyone has their own ways of dealing with trauma. Then the executive director went downstairs, still shouting, and had it out with the receptionist, who had also gone up to the hill. To the receptionist's credit, when I saw her on the hill I asked who was covering the front desk and she said So-and-So was. But that wasn't enough for our executive director. I guess the receptionist had been on probation for a while, and this was a last straw.
"Pack your bags!" shouted the executive director.
"Are you firing me?" screamed the receptionist.
"Yes, I guess I am," said the E.D. I just shut my ears and made like a worker bee. I guess our former receptionist will never forget this day for several reasons. The receptionist continued shouting at my boss the E.D., who came quietly back upstairs and went back into her office.
Things all around became very quiet except for the radio and the endless sirens outside. I tried again to work and found myself reading the same sentence over and over again. The other women trickled back in, the crying woman, too. They said they had watched the second Tower collapse. I knew that I and all of us were in shock and dealing with it in our various ways. I felt myself flickering from sensibility to irrationality. I wanted to go to sleep. I wanted to go back to the hill and watch. I wanted to blink and have it be a dream. I wanted to go home and cuddle my cat Naomi. I wanted to hold my husband.
John and I talked briefly--some of his staff was missing, perhaps stuck on the subway, perhaps caught in traffic, perhaps just outside watching. He was responsible for about 30 people, and his coping method was to keep everyone close in the office and let them watch TV. The news was saying you couldn't get out of or into Manhattan, and I was afraid that John couldn't come home that night and I would have to be alone. At the same time I felt so selfish because so many others would never see their dear ones again.
Very quickly I got a bunch of emails from people worried about us in NY, including one from my mom through one of her tenants. Mom was terrified that we were hurt. I replied that we were fine, if shocked and frightened. I got an email from my friend Trish in Maryland near Washington, DC saying what she'd heard about the Pentagon and possibly other places there being bombed. I called my downstairs neighbor who worked at a bookstore in the bottom of the World Trade Center, and he answered the phone, said it was his day off and he was fine, told me that tons of people were standing outside our building our apartment on Broadway watching the scene. I checked my voicemail at home and found a hysterical message from Mom, and I realized belatedly that it wasn't just me who was possibly affected from our family: my brother Tom lives in Virginia and works for the federal government in Washington. I called Mom and we spoke briefly—she was fine by then. I asked for Tom's office number, but I couldn't get through. I began to be afraid for him.
And then, like the Tower collapsing, I lost my ability to remain professional and dispassionate. I felt a black cloud of depression sinking over me, as if my vision was narrowing down to a tunnel and my entire being was drying up and shrinking. I just sat there at my desk, listened as the young women talked about what they had seen, nodded and smiled and tried to be professional, set a good example, but inside I was just dust. All I could think about was my brother Tom and those people in the World Trade Center. I forced myself to be calm and kept telling myself Tom was fine, of course he's fine; he didn't work at the Pentagon. But in those moments we didn't know anything for sure because it was all happening so fast. And Tom can be such a hothead--I wondered if he had perhaps seen the plane crash into the Pentagon as he was driving to work, and had jumped out of his car to go help, or worse.
The hours passed quickly, and soon it was after lunchtime. My boss, the executive director who had screamed reprimanded me and fired the receptionist as her first reaction to the tragedy, calmed down and began to tell people they could go home if they knew someone who might be in the World Trade Center. "I can't go home," said her assistant, "I live in lower Manhattan." Another woman whose cousin worked in the buildings said she didn't want to leave, she just wanted to work, but then she did leave. I tried to stay, but couldn't stop thinking of Tom, and at about one p.m. I told the E.D. I was going to depart leave. "I hope your brother's ok," she said gently.
I went out and waited for the bus under the BQE. Hundreds of people were walking up the normally pedestrian-free roadway. I later learned that people from Manhattan were evacuated and walked away from the disaster across the three bridges right there: the famous Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, and the Williamsburg Bridge, which is right outside John's and my apartment. All those solemn, exhausted-looking people pouring by as I stood waiting for my bus were survivors of the attack. Some of them had breathing masks on, but none were dusty. I thought about biological warfare, and my mind went blank again. The bus didn't come, and someone told me that all buses were being commandeered to take cops and emergency workers into Manhattan. So I walked home, not such a long walk. Everyone I saw was solemn and quiet. We looked in each other's faces, which is something New Yorkers do not usually do. It was surreal, the terrible pouring black smoke across the river and in the sky, and the stubbornly beautiful day so much bigger than even this calamity. Cops were directing traffic; people were scrambling, cars and trucks honking, people saying they had to get here or there. "I have to make a delivery," roared one truck driver to a policeman who wasn't letting him through to downtown Brooklyn. "This is an emergency, you're blocking traffic," replied the cop.
About an hour of fast, sweaty, crowded walking later I was almost home, from African-American Fort Greene to Hassidic/hipster Williamsburg. There were men with guns guarding the Navy yard, a huge complex on the water a few blocks from our house. When I finally got home to our beautiful, sunny loft, a fifth floor walk-up, I threw down my bag and went out onto to the fire escape. "Our bridge," as John and I think of it, was packed with people all walking in the same direction: out of Manhattan. If they were shouting on the bridge I couldn't hear. A very few vehicles roared in, a random-seeming assortment of fire trucks, ambulances, sedans, buses. Normally that bridge is a river of transportation.
I came inside, changed out of my work clothes, opened up a beer and watched TV for hours and hours. John called frequently to tell me he was ok, and I told him people were walking across the bridge so I knew he could get home. He arrived later and we hugged and kissed, grateful beyond belief for our lives. We stared together out the front windows at the great smoking mess of lower Manhattan where those beautiful gleaming Towers had stood until that morning.
Sunday, September 16, 2001
The week has gone by with us trying to adhere to our routines of work and errands and regular life. We watch TV obsessively, read every paper, and chat with friends and family on the phone. Friday President Bush declared a day of mourning, although it was not organized at least in my neighborhood. I went with two other women to the Presbyterian Church at Lafayette and something, which was silently open for prayer. We sat in the ear-ringing intensity among two dozen scattered strangers, all races, lots of whites and blacks together. I looked for a kneeler and braved dusty pants to kneel on the hardwood floor at our pew to pray.
My faith in God that has been rock steady through every tragedy of my life, even Dad's death, has been tested: that moment of the tower collapsing, my whole soul rising slower than the speed of light to will it not to be, through the power God is supposed to have. I have trouble believing that my prayers make any difference, yet some moist-eyed time passed while I kneeled in thought to God. When I was walking from the Presbyterian Church I went for Italian food, pasta puttanesca. For the rest of the day I felt so much lightened and refreshed. The good feeling lasted into the next day.
John and I and everyone we know are depressed. The city is not the same, although as I write this on Sunday, September 16, 2001, the third monthiversary of our marriage, there are children playing and shrieking outside, the train whooshes by on the bridge, and there are normal signs of life: traffic, the regular amount of sirens. Certain things have been notably different, like the stench of burning that wafted over us several times this week as the wind changed. I knew I was breathing people's dust and ashes. Today is the first clear day since it happened, the smoke finally under control. The skyline is different.
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
I am consumed with thoughts of death. I partly think I am or we are dying. We're both abusing and indulging ourselves. Anyone could have been in the WTC at those moments. Everybody knows of someone who is affected, who was there. There are layers of people's experience: mine is having seen in person from a distance both towers burning and one collapse. John saw both burning but neither collapse. Another person maybe first saw it in person after it fell down, a different trauma yet. Layers of witness to Armageddon. We're all depressed and sad.
Joe calls, drops off xtine & Don's long-promised hand-me-down microwave. I whine and ask him to carry it up, he snarks back, "What, can't you even walk down the stairs?" I quickly do, braless, distracted, but at least clean.
Today I closed a cookbook I opened on Monday, collected the candles I burned in the windows Tuesday night. Women shout outside. Could be more than 5,000 lives lost, more than 5,000 injured, tens of thousands of direct family & loved ones. I am living in a geography of grief. African-American funerals dot the mornings of my walk down Dekalb to work. Breathing my chain-smoking and the breath of death, ashes and chemicals and rotting human flesh, some burned. What is that shouting outside? I don't want to know. Every siren is heightened; every bang and screech makes my heart flutter and brings quick sweats. Every traffic-induced ripple of the floor and building has an added ominous-ness. I twitch with nervous energy.
This weekend is the first day of autumn. Next Tuesday is supposed to be Election Day in New York State. The mayoral race--who will back out between now and then? All campaigning has stopped. Margarita Lopez sent JLS a dear friend letter saying "...in light of recent tragic events..." The shouting people outside cheer and clap, must be playful noise, nothing to be anxious about.
I yearn for more great change. I've destroyed our two big comfy black cotton sheets in the process [and shrouded our fire escape in black]. Next could be packing up all the tchotchkes, letting the plants die. Seems like my beloved old cat Naomi's eating less; even she is reacting to the tragedy. A hysterical siren flails by, up Bedford toward the north side. Is it going onto the bridge? Several blocks of the neighborhood will know soon enough. I ache from smoking and not eating. There's incense to soothe and please my aural passages, fresh cool water. Another cigarette.
I have not been wallowing in memories as I did the past two years. I have had no flashbacks. It has receded. I've reread my journal from that time, a scattered and not-quite immediate remembering. I post some of it here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
September 11, 2001
Tuesday morning was a gorgeous a late-summer day in New York City. I got up, drank coffee, showered, dressed like the minor executive I am, and went outside to wait for the bus to my new job. The bus stop is in front of our apartment house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We live on Broadway, leading down to the East River.
Very often when I go outside I glance down to my right where the East River separates us in Brooklyn from the island of Manhattan, which is the place most non-New Yorkers think of when they say "New York." Ever since John and I moved here I have enjoyed the site of the twin Towers, so secure and strong, a symbol of being in New York. I have sketched them and remarked upon them in letters to friends and family. Those two Towers and other landmarks like our Williamsburg Bridge and the Empire State Building, and Brooklyn Bridge, even the Statue of Liberty visible ½ block away convince me every time I see them that yes, I do live in New York.
Tuesday morning I didn't take note of the Towers because I was interested in reading something in my New Yorker magazine, and the bus was rounding the corner. Soon I was on the bus and riding the few miles to my office. I missed my last chance to see the twin Towers as they were.
The neighborhood where I work is called Fort Greene. It is a residential neighborhood, brownstones and playgrounds and stores and restaurants. When I got to the office, early as usual, another early arriver said that there was a fire in the World Trade Center. I thought he was joking, and went outside to look. High in the sky there was a noticeable and strange plume of smoke floating past. There was a fast-rising urgency of people and sirens. I went back inside and called my husband John. He works in Manhattan at 6th Avenue and 27th Street, in a midtown neighborhood called Chelsea. He had not heard yet. We spoke briefly and hung up so he could go outside to see.
We had a radio in the our little Fort Greene office and everyone gathered around it to listen. The announcers didn't really know what was going on! A plane had hit the trade center—-unbelievable. I read later in the NYT that a local announcer joked about it being kamikaze pilot. Another plane has hit, oh God, and something has happened at the Pentagon in Washington, too—-it must be terrorists.
Usually outside at this time of day are young African-American youths playing basketball in the two City Park courts across the street. It's a big park, and I don't even know the name of it. Dekalb at Adelphi and Carlton. At my Venetian blind-shaded, sunlit desk I swallowed herb tea and tried to get some news online from CNN or the New York Times, sources I thought I could trust more than a nervous talk radio host. The websites were slow to come up from all the zillions of other people trying to access them, and when they did they showed photos of those two dear Towers smoking and blazing like in a disaster movie. I could hardly believe it. Then I tried to start my workday, but I really couldn't concentrate. A young woman arrived late to work, crying.
I called John again, and he told me what he saw standing at the corner of 6th, the flaming smoking Towers. I kept trying to believe that I could go about my regular day, but when I heard my husband's shocked voice I finally gave up. I told the Executive Director's young assistant I was leaving, left the office and walked down the block to Fort Greene Park, which has a big hill overlooking the city. And there were the enormous top thirds of the Towers, the wrecked and whole upper floors like the tines of a grey comb only three miles away, hazy with smoke on the otherwise gorgeous pristine sunny day, black smoke and orange-red fire, so large and close. Glittering things fell away from the burning, pieces of building or I don't like to think what else. Helicopters circled, a fighter jet zipped by far overhead. At first there were only a few people there on the hillside, but more and more came, and we all watched and crowded around those of us who had radios. Sirens were everywhere, ambulances, fire trucks and police on their way to the scene. I clasped my hands and prayed, but I felt little comfort in that—-how could my weak prayers save those people the pain of fire?
And then the left-hand tower Tower simply collapsed, slowly at first, collapsed, compressed straight downward, as if a giant hand was pressing it down, recycling a can or bottle. The rumbling roar came to us up on that leafy green hill, and everyone moaned and or screamed or was silent.
I can think now about who was there: our Executive Director's Assistant, whom I had told I was stepping out; the receptionist, who would end up getting fired for coming to watch; the girl who had been crying since she got to work; others from another department; the mostly African-American strangers on the hillside. Although there is a large hospital nearby there was no one in scrubs.
The right-hand Tower stayed up, the one with the broadcasting antenna on top, still blazing and smoking. A huge mushroom of dark ash and smoke billowed, sinister black and gray like you see on TV when a volcano erupts. All those people, I thought. It all happened so fast. How could can they be getting out, how many people were on the fire stairs of that building evacuating when their building it collapsed? I felt almost nothing, just stood there praying because there wasn't anything else I wanted to do. Some other people from my office arrived. We stood and watched the remaining Tower burn, listened to the various radios, talked quietly, tried to reach loved ones on cell phones. The minutes dragged by as slowly as minutes sometimes do, when you are in misery.
I left before the second Tower collapsed, not wanting to know any more and feeling an obligation to my job. As I walked back through the park I saw things of normal life, a group of people in matching t-shirts under a tree, getting ready to perhaps play softball,. A woman and a child in the playground. The woman watched me eagerly as I approached down the hill, and I thought she might want me to tell her what I saw.
I said, "Don't you want your daughter to see?"
"We were up there watching," said the woman, gesturing at her little daughter, "but she just wanted to come swing on the swings."
I nodded, and then the woman said, "I am from Israel. We have this all the time. And now I feel for you Americans." She and I stared at each other, a long moment of deep communion, and I put my hands over my heart, and she nodded, and I left.
The vision of the collapsing Tower, and the billowing explosions of smoke replays silently in my mind. Too much to believe, too much to accept. I was willing to think I had hallucinated it, it was only a dream. I wanted it not to be real. Somehow a giant movie screen had been placed across the vision of all of us up on that hill; it was Hollywood, some strange brutal experiment in mass entertainment, not a real thing. New York is larger than life that way; I see things in daily life here that I’ve only ever seen on TV or in movies. I wanted to believe almost anything but that it was real.
When I got back into the office only a few people were still there. Almost everyone else, but only I among the senior staff had gone to the hill to see for themselves. The radio was still on, describing what I had just seen. I didn't want to hear and went up to my desk outside the executive director’s office. She was on the phone behind her closed, glass door. I tapped on the door to let her know I was back, and then sat down at my desk and put my head in my hands. I would have begun to cry then, except she came out shouting. "This is unbelievable of everybody, how unprofessional, how could you just leave and not tell anyone where you were going, what are you all, some kind of voyeurs? This is none of your business!" She went on and on, spewing at me. I nodded and nodded, said, "Yes, I understand. I understand. I did tell so-and-so that I was going, but then she came herself." I told myself that my boss's her behavior wasn't about me nor really directed at me, it was just her way of coping with the unimaginable. Maybe her sister is in that Tower, I told myself. Maybe she is in shock. Everyone has their own ways of dealing with trauma. Then the executive director went downstairs, still shouting, and had it out with the receptionist, who had also gone up to the hill. To the receptionist's credit, when I saw her on the hill I asked who was covering the front desk and she said So-and-So was. But that wasn't enough for our executive director. I guess the receptionist had been on probation for a while, and this was a last straw.
"Pack your bags!" shouted the executive director.
"Are you firing me?" screamed the receptionist.
"Yes, I guess I am," said the E.D. I just shut my ears and made like a worker bee. I guess our former receptionist will never forget this day for several reasons. The receptionist continued shouting at my boss the E.D., who came quietly back upstairs and went back into her office.
Things all around became very quiet except for the radio and the endless sirens outside. I tried again to work and found myself reading the same sentence over and over again. The other women trickled back in, the crying woman, too. They said they had watched the second Tower collapse. I knew that I and all of us were in shock and dealing with it in our various ways. I felt myself flickering from sensibility to irrationality. I wanted to go to sleep. I wanted to go back to the hill and watch. I wanted to blink and have it be a dream. I wanted to go home and cuddle my cat Naomi. I wanted to hold my husband.
John and I talked briefly--some of his staff was missing, perhaps stuck on the subway, perhaps caught in traffic, perhaps just outside watching. He was responsible for about 30 people, and his coping method was to keep everyone close in the office and let them watch TV. The news was saying you couldn't get out of or into Manhattan, and I was afraid that John couldn't come home that night and I would have to be alone. At the same time I felt so selfish because so many others would never see their dear ones again.
Very quickly I got a bunch of emails from people worried about us in NY, including one from my mom through one of her tenants. Mom was terrified that we were hurt. I replied that we were fine, if shocked and frightened. I got an email from my friend Trish in Maryland near Washington, DC saying what she'd heard about the Pentagon and possibly other places there being bombed. I called my downstairs neighbor who worked at a bookstore in the bottom of the World Trade Center, and he answered the phone, said it was his day off and he was fine, told me that tons of people were standing outside our building our apartment on Broadway watching the scene. I checked my voicemail at home and found a hysterical message from Mom, and I realized belatedly that it wasn't just me who was possibly affected from our family: my brother Tom lives in Virginia and works for the federal government in Washington. I called Mom and we spoke briefly—she was fine by then. I asked for Tom's office number, but I couldn't get through. I began to be afraid for him.
And then, like the Tower collapsing, I lost my ability to remain professional and dispassionate. I felt a black cloud of depression sinking over me, as if my vision was narrowing down to a tunnel and my entire being was drying up and shrinking. I just sat there at my desk, listened as the young women talked about what they had seen, nodded and smiled and tried to be professional, set a good example, but inside I was just dust. All I could think about was my brother Tom and those people in the World Trade Center. I forced myself to be calm and kept telling myself Tom was fine, of course he's fine; he didn't work at the Pentagon. But in those moments we didn't know anything for sure because it was all happening so fast. And Tom can be such a hothead--I wondered if he had perhaps seen the plane crash into the Pentagon as he was driving to work, and had jumped out of his car to go help, or worse.
The hours passed quickly, and soon it was after lunchtime. My boss, the executive director who had screamed reprimanded me and fired the receptionist as her first reaction to the tragedy, calmed down and began to tell people they could go home if they knew someone who might be in the World Trade Center. "I can't go home," said her assistant, "I live in lower Manhattan." Another woman whose cousin worked in the buildings said she didn't want to leave, she just wanted to work, but then she did leave. I tried to stay, but couldn't stop thinking of Tom, and at about one p.m. I told the E.D. I was going to depart leave. "I hope your brother's ok," she said gently.
I went out and waited for the bus under the BQE. Hundreds of people were walking up the normally pedestrian-free roadway. I later learned that people from Manhattan were evacuated and walked away from the disaster across the three bridges right there: the famous Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, and the Williamsburg Bridge, which is right outside John's and my apartment. All those solemn, exhausted-looking people pouring by as I stood waiting for my bus were survivors of the attack. Some of them had breathing masks on, but none were dusty. I thought about biological warfare, and my mind went blank again. The bus didn't come, and someone told me that all buses were being commandeered to take cops and emergency workers into Manhattan. So I walked home, not such a long walk. Everyone I saw was solemn and quiet. We looked in each other's faces, which is something New Yorkers do not usually do. It was surreal, the terrible pouring black smoke across the river and in the sky, and the stubbornly beautiful day so much bigger than even this calamity. Cops were directing traffic; people were scrambling, cars and trucks honking, people saying they had to get here or there. "I have to make a delivery," roared one truck driver to a policeman who wasn't letting him through to downtown Brooklyn. "This is an emergency, you're blocking traffic," replied the cop.
About an hour of fast, sweaty, crowded walking later I was almost home, from African-American Fort Greene to Hassidic/hipster Williamsburg. There were men with guns guarding the Navy yard, a huge complex on the water a few blocks from our house. When I finally got home to our beautiful, sunny loft, a fifth floor walk-up, I threw down my bag and went out onto to the fire escape. "Our bridge," as John and I think of it, was packed with people all walking in the same direction: out of Manhattan. If they were shouting on the bridge I couldn't hear. A very few vehicles roared in, a random-seeming assortment of fire trucks, ambulances, sedans, buses. Normally that bridge is a river of transportation.
I came inside, changed out of my work clothes, opened up a beer and watched TV for hours and hours. John called frequently to tell me he was ok, and I told him people were walking across the bridge so I knew he could get home. He arrived later and we hugged and kissed, grateful beyond belief for our lives. We stared together out the front windows at the great smoking mess of lower Manhattan where those beautiful gleaming Towers had stood until that morning.
Sunday, September 16, 2001
The week has gone by with us trying to adhere to our routines of work and errands and regular life. We watch TV obsessively, read every paper, and chat with friends and family on the phone. Friday President Bush declared a day of mourning, although it was not organized at least in my neighborhood. I went with two other women to the Presbyterian Church at Lafayette and something, which was silently open for prayer. We sat in the ear-ringing intensity among two dozen scattered strangers, all races, lots of whites and blacks together. I looked for a kneeler and braved dusty pants to kneel on the hardwood floor at our pew to pray.
My faith in God that has been rock steady through every tragedy of my life, even Dad's death, has been tested: that moment of the tower collapsing, my whole soul rising slower than the speed of light to will it not to be, through the power God is supposed to have. I have trouble believing that my prayers make any difference, yet some moist-eyed time passed while I kneeled in thought to God. When I was walking from the Presbyterian Church I went for Italian food, pasta puttanesca. For the rest of the day I felt so much lightened and refreshed. The good feeling lasted into the next day.
John and I and everyone we know are depressed. The city is not the same, although as I write this on Sunday, September 16, 2001, the third monthiversary of our marriage, there are children playing and shrieking outside, the train whooshes by on the bridge, and there are normal signs of life: traffic, the regular amount of sirens. Certain things have been notably different, like the stench of burning that wafted over us several times this week as the wind changed. I knew I was breathing people's dust and ashes. Today is the first clear day since it happened, the smoke finally under control. The skyline is different.
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
I am consumed with thoughts of death. I partly think I am or we are dying. We're both abusing and indulging ourselves. Anyone could have been in the WTC at those moments. Everybody knows of someone who is affected, who was there. There are layers of people's experience: mine is having seen in person from a distance both towers burning and one collapse. John saw both burning but neither collapse. Another person maybe first saw it in person after it fell down, a different trauma yet. Layers of witness to Armageddon. We're all depressed and sad.
Joe calls, drops off xtine & Don's long-promised hand-me-down microwave. I whine and ask him to carry it up, he snarks back, "What, can't you even walk down the stairs?" I quickly do, braless, distracted, but at least clean.
Today I closed a cookbook I opened on Monday, collected the candles I burned in the windows Tuesday night. Women shout outside. Could be more than 5,000 lives lost, more than 5,000 injured, tens of thousands of direct family & loved ones. I am living in a geography of grief. African-American funerals dot the mornings of my walk down Dekalb to work. Breathing my chain-smoking and the breath of death, ashes and chemicals and rotting human flesh, some burned. What is that shouting outside? I don't want to know. Every siren is heightened; every bang and screech makes my heart flutter and brings quick sweats. Every traffic-induced ripple of the floor and building has an added ominous-ness. I twitch with nervous energy.
This weekend is the first day of autumn. Next Tuesday is supposed to be Election Day in New York State. The mayoral race--who will back out between now and then? All campaigning has stopped. Margarita Lopez sent JLS a dear friend letter saying "...in light of recent tragic events..." The shouting people outside cheer and clap, must be playful noise, nothing to be anxious about.
I yearn for more great change. I've destroyed our two big comfy black cotton sheets in the process [and shrouded our fire escape in black]. Next could be packing up all the tchotchkes, letting the plants die. Seems like my beloved old cat Naomi's eating less; even she is reacting to the tragedy. A hysterical siren flails by, up Bedford toward the north side. Is it going onto the bridge? Several blocks of the neighborhood will know soon enough. I ache from smoking and not eating. There's incense to soothe and please my aural passages, fresh cool water. Another cigarette.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
This week I thoroughly groomed a horse, including hoof-picking, for the first time in my life. It was intimate and sensual. The horse, Dandi, munched at her grain and let me stroke her all over with the two brushes. Her belly was particularly delightful, a warm furry gray globe I could have curled up in.
I've also set up my studio. THIS is a huge excitement for me. My own room just for "pwah-jex". Dozens of little cubicles labeled intriguingly: "things to fix," "papier-mâché," "wood," "decoupage," "IJ." IJ stands for Interesting Junque. Sally brought that word into my life when I was a wee girl and Sally would show up with grocery bags full of mathems--gifts of items that are new to you--and IJ.
It is good to settle in. My dreams have been about finding just the right light for the vast collection of houseplants I don't have. Winter approaches, and I have a nest, a den.
I've also set up my studio. THIS is a huge excitement for me. My own room just for "pwah-jex". Dozens of little cubicles labeled intriguingly: "things to fix," "papier-mâché," "wood," "decoupage," "IJ." IJ stands for Interesting Junque. Sally brought that word into my life when I was a wee girl and Sally would show up with grocery bags full of mathems--gifts of items that are new to you--and IJ.
It is good to settle in. My dreams have been about finding just the right light for the vast collection of houseplants I don't have. Winter approaches, and I have a nest, a den.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)