Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Remembering Sept. 11, 2001
What are your most prominient memories of Sept. 11, 2001? Where were you when you first heard the news and how did you and your co-workers get through the day? The Park Record will publish a special edition of remembrances from that day on Saturday, Sept. 9. Add your comments below, or contact a reporter at The Record to share your thoughts in this edition.
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3 comments:
After finishing a 4 month contract in NYC the Friday before 9/11, I found myself in AZ beginning my next contract. I was up early watching the news when I saw the report. I was stunned. At the same time I was grateful that I wasn't there, but felt panic fearing what my colleagues that I had just left must be going through. 2 years later I was back working in NYC and could witness the extent of the damage and the yellow spray paint marking where bodies were recovered. Reminders of those who chose to jump rather than be taken down with the building. Whatever the cause, it is the aftermath that stands out most for me.
I visited Midtown with my husband a couple months after 9/11; he was on business and I had freedom to roam for 5 days, visiting the WTC site, Battery Park, and later my favorite museums. I had always loved NYC and was feeling a raw freshness of what had occurred, while many New Yorkers were trying desperately to put on a brave face, many feigning that they had moved forward. Still, despite the randomness of any survivors being found, many makeshift memorials remained around the city. Some were shrines with flowers and random objects (such as at all the many firehouses I walked by), others were the hodpodge of pictured "Missing" posters. Hope for survivors remained, or the many papers were simply a reminder that this tremendous tragedy could not simply be tossed in the trash as though it had never happened. Only time would tell how pivotal that one-morning even would become.
I remember walking around Grand Central Station, wondering what this had done for the national consciousness, what it had done for the natives in NYC would had endured it personally, who, always such a proud people, were in a state of cohesion by such a broad sweep by terror. My investigative reporter side got the best of me, and I drummed-up the courage to casually ask a passerby, who slowed to peruse the pictures of the dead (still all yet to be "found") whether she had lost anyone in the fall of the Towers (it wasn't universally called 9/11 yet). She said that she had. Someone she worked with was "still missing." She took to me as though I was her paid therapist, and I knew that simply asking such a personal question had hit a nerve, and the wound was still bleeding. I tried again when a man stopped, dropped his bag, and settled in to just look at those men and women who "never came home" on September 11. I could see that he was in his own world, soaking in the magnitude of this, despite hundreds rushing and talking loudly in every direction through the station around him. This line of posters in the heart of the City was like a little oasis to stop and salve wounds, to face the increasing truth: thousands were already presumed dead and all might never return after the impacts and falls. Something had happened that wasn't biased, that hurt those of every color and religion and walk of life. This was a national affront, and I felt that hearts were stirring in discontent, but similarly coming together in against an assault that seemed unforgivable. I spent 3 hours approaching complete strangers, asking if they'd lost anyone in the Twin Towers, how they were doing, how they felt this had impacted us as a nation and them as New Yorkers. I received a plethora of responses (and absolutely no one turned me away, though some were much more reticent in their responses, obviously not in a healthy-enough place to verbalize where they were inside). I felt sorrow, hope, understanding, and kinship, with these people. A businessman who lost a friend from Cantor-Fitzgerald admitted that he'd daily read the "Faces ..." section in the New York Times, and in it found solace and a release for his tears. I was dumbfounded and incredulous that this strong and bold-appearing man in his expensive suit was crying in private - and had admitted it to me. Throughout the 5 days when I continued to pester (but none found it intrusive), I learned of fellow Americans who had had neighbors, friends of friends, a brother, a nephew, or a co-worker that that were lost, among many connections. I could not believe that there were less th 6 degrees of separation most everyone I met. This was truly a much-smaller town than I had imagined. Of course some of the 25 or so people I approached, standing there in GCS didn't have a direct connection, but that did not mean they didn't FEEL a connection. Here I was an American who lived nearly across the nation, and I felt such deep loss. I remembered crying and shaking on 9/11, unable to sit, after my husband called from the airport and I continued to speak to him while watching the TV. He had been unable to board his flight for Austin, and told me that I should watch what he was seeing at the airport: a Tower had been hit in which his father had once done business. The rest is history, and we all have our own sense of this day, one imprinted on our own individual and collective consciousness, one we will never forget. A day we pray may never occur again, but, in our hearts, and according to the "experts," may ...
Anger.
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