Life is weird: A Memory

My grandmother died on September 7th, 2001. She had been living in a suburb of Pittsburgh ever since her third husband, a retired steel worker, had died decades earlier.

Being next of kin it fell on my brother and me to get down there and take care of things. My mother, who happened to be in NY that weekend drove the very large family van with us in it. The funny thing is that this was my father's mother who had died. But my mother, never one to pass up a road trip with her sons. Besides, she had a big van and we were going to need it. It's a long drive from New York City to McKeesport, PA.

To say that my grandmother was not well would be an understatement. Always somewhat emotionally immature as well as an alcoholic, she had left behind a small apartment piled wall to wall and knee high in Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes mailings and chintzy "consolation prizes". So when we arrived at her place on the morning of September 9th. We had a lot of work ahead of us.

It took us two days to get all the garbage out. On the morning of the 11th, we turned on the news as we got ready to leave the hotel and head to the apartment. There was a small campus fire at UP Pittsburgh. A dorm kitchen apparently. We watched the coverage of that, grabbed our free hotel coffee and headed over. One there, we packed up all the "consolation prizes" to take to the Goodwill in the next town. Deciding we needed to stop by the hotel on the way to the Goodwill to use the bathroom, we headed into the lobby, van loaded with stuff.

In the lobby, guests and staff were all gathered, watching the television. All I saw on screen was smoke. I thought to myself "Wow, that campus fire is out of control". I turned to a guy standing next to me and asked him what was going on. He told me that planes had just crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I stared at him in disbelief, my face probably for an instant communicating "fuck you, what's really going on?" But I saw he meant it.

We had to keep moving though. There was just too much that had to be done at grandma's to pause. So, after our bathroom break, we got back into the van to head to the Goodwill. The "Kill All Towelheads" signs were already up on pick up trucks that we drove, listening to the Today Show on the radio. As we commented to eachother on how we were already blowing it, the first tower fell. How my mother managed to stay on the road at that point, I'll never know.

It's a very odd experience listening to someone narrate a terrible event as it is happening. Matt Lauer's voice will forever have that echo for me. In a way, I'm grateful that I wasn't among the millions watching. Weird as it was, I think it was easier to process emotionally for me than seeing it would have been.

We unpacked at the Goodwill which was for all intents and purposes abandoned, and went back to town. We had to stop at the town funeral home to arrange grandma's cremation. On the way, we listened to the second tower falling.

When my brother and I returned to the van from the funeral home, our mother who had stayed in it to listen to the radio told us that another plane had just crashed in Shanksville, about 70 miles from us.

It seemed like the end of the world in that moment. The Twin Towers were one thing, the Pentagon part of the same thing...but a field in rural Pennsylvania? "What the fuck?" just doesn't even cover it.

We took a few moments to pull our heads back together and get back to grandma's apartment. We were finally going to be able to deal with her actual possessions. And start to figure out what to do with everything.

Much of it, oddly, was still in boxes though she'd lived in that apartment for 20 years. (I guess she needed the room for all the used PCH mailings). Taking the box nearest where I sat, I opened it carefully. It felt like it would be mostly paperwork and that seemed like the best place to start anyway.

When I opened the box right there at the top, was a plastic framed 3D photograph taken of the World Trade Center to commemorate the opening of the Twin Towers. My grandmother had kept it from her visit that summer of 1970.

I gasped. All the time it took to get through the detritus she had left behind...the events of the day and the first actual possession of my grandmother's I uncover was this.

Life is weird.

Gateless

Picture from http://www.planetware.com/picture/new-york-city-new-york-statue-of-liberty-us-nyc005.htm

I’ve blogged on this subject before here and here. In fact I guess this is sort of an annual thing. Anyway, my readers won’t be surprised by what I have to say today regarding everything involving tomorrow’s anniversary.

What will shock my readers is that I’ve actually made a blog entry for the first time in four months. More on that another time.

As I’ve said before. I live here in New York City. I’ve lived here just about my entire life. I lived here before the Twin Towers were visible and lived with them as they dominated the city land and sky-scape.

Nine years later it is still strange to me to look out and not see them from various spots in the city. From West 4th Street and 6th Avenue, to the Smith and 9th street stop on the G and F train in Brooklyn, from the Staten Island Ferry to the Ditmars Blvd stop on the N train in Queens. Nine years later there is still something not there that ought to be there.

I remember my last visit to the Observation Deck at the World Trade Center with my then 10 year old daughter as we looked out at the Liberty Science Museum, Long Island, Upstate New York and of course Manhattan Island.

For those of us that live here, we are constantly reminded. The skyline itself is an empty echo of the thousands of lives contained in those steel marvels of engineering. The many more thousands of lives left behind in loss and pain.

As I’ve pointed out, I somehow escaped personal heartache on that day. No one I directly know was amongst the murdered. But many I do know have lost lovers, friends, husbands, fathers and children. Every moment I talk to them on the phone, or see them on Facebook or have a cup of coffee I am reminded. Every waking day, they are reminded.

My heartache is for the heartache of those I care about and of course for the scar on the city for which I have a love/hate relationship and with which an indelible part of my soul will always belong.

It’s also no secret that aesthetically, I hated those buildings. While marvels of engineering they seemed out of place at the time. And I still feel that way about them then.

But now…

Like them or not, they were unforgettable, powerful and a kind of gateway to the city. A gateway this city no longer has.

The Statue of Liberty no longer stands in the shadow of that gate. A gate that increasingly seems to remain closed to what America is. There was a kind of sense of the Statue of Liberty showing her light to the harbor as she stood at the feet of the Gate that was the Twin Towers. A Gate now closed.

Liberty still shines a light onto the harbor, her words of welcome still inscribed. But God forbid you want to build a community center aimed at healing that gaping wound. God Forbid you make a place that yes, is primarily a Muslim Cultural Center but that also will house places of prayer for every religious practice available. God Forbid that an act can be made to reach out, to bridge the divide.

Oh you’re welcome here, but only up to a point.

September 11th must be a day of reflection, prayer and thoughtfulness. However it is you observe for yourself and ponder the nature of humanity’s penchant for cruelty and violence to each other and what we can do to grow from it, to be greater than it. To be better than we have been.

No, instead we focus on whackjobs burning books of worship, we throw parties to make money and then retroactively decide to donate the proceeds somewhere and claim that the party date was a coincidence. We claim to be thinking of the families of the fallen when we display our astounding ignorance of every conceivable fact and meaning. We exploit and wring our hands, but God forbid we actually solve the issue and learn to live WITH each other.

Clearly I stand in support of the Cultural Center known as Park 51. But I will not be joining the demonstrations tomorrow. I do not believe that September 11th should be marching or demonstrating for anything. ANYthing.

Anything else dishonors the dead and dishonors the families of the dead, whether at the World Trade Center, The Pentagon or that open field in Shanksville.

We need reflection. We need to think. We need to pray and send light. We need to volunteer. We need to really help.


As always I say we don't need to be told to "Never Forget". That's a self aggrandizing phrase promoted by people who are trying to be part of something that frankly they.just.aren't.

What happened was yes, a national tragedy. But the wounds are felt HERE. Not in Wasilla, not in Florida....HERE.


Any idiot will tell you that if you keep scratching a wound it will get infected. We need to stop scratching at the wound.

Ground Zero

So...I'm re arranging my thoughts and am going to stop tipping in advance of what I'm going to write about because, well. I'd rather be able to change my mind. But I'm keeping the context of New York.

For the last few days and the next week I have been and will be working across the street from Ground Zero here.

I don't come down there much. I never really did before except when I had visitors or a temp job necessitated it. I've never really liked the area very much except for by the water where, if you have a view of the harbor it is quite beautiful. But since the attack I've been there twice. It's just too hard. Make that 4 times. I was down here a couple of times during the immediate aftermath. The stench of smoking steel, wood, asbestos and, well...human was intense, humbling and there are no words more for it.

This assignment has me here for the first time since 2002. I pass the construction site every day, twice a day. There are small monuments to our victimhood here which is just more incentive for me to never be down here.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the renaming of One WTC, from Freedom Tower to the current iteration. But as far as I'm concerned, what we call the building is totally fucking meaningless. That we are building again at all is the important part. The building is not something I'm crazy about, but I'm very pleased that the actual site of the old towers will be a park and waterfall markings of the tower footprints. I think its fitting and beautiful and frankly if any area needed some green space, its the Financial District.

Here's what gets me though. I do not need to see continual pictures of what happened. I don't need to see photographs on onlookers crying, holding eachother and otherwise appearing devastated and I suspect that those who traverse the streets and overpasses here, who have done for years before I have and for years afterwards don't have to either. We/They were there. We lived it, ate it and literally breathed it for a long time. We all here lost someone either 1st or 2nd person.

September 11, 2001 lives in us every day, ever hour and every minute we walk any street in this city, especially the streets below West 4th.

We do not need continual pick up truck reminders to 'never forget'. Fuck you asshole, I lived it, don't tell me what to remember and what not to remember. And we don't need to be scraping the wound open every morning we get off the Subway or PATH train to come to work here to see our faces plastered before us, tear-filled and horrified.

Some of us wake up in the middle of the night screaming still. Some of us still roll over in bed to the spot once occupied by a lover or spouse who was working that day, (be it in an office, a police car or a fire-suit) and try to caress them in the empty spot. Some of us see the flying bodies when we close our eyes for an afternoon nap.

Now admittedly that's not precisely my experience. My September 11th story is a somewhat twisted tale of a grandmother's death and being near one of the other sites and coming home to an immediate bomb scare. That's for another blog entry.

But the aftermath for me was clear. Though I lived on the opposite end of Manhattan then, the sky was still dark and the fear and anger and grief was still palpable. And I still live with friends whose losses were far deeper and more painful than my own.

We remember. For God's sake, We Remember.