Like Andrew, I remember all the particulars of that day. I was editing part time from home, and the Providence school system hadn’t called in my wife, five months pregnant with our first child, as a substitute teacher, so we were both home. I had just begun my morning workout on the machine in my office when she called from the living room that the World Trade Center was on fire.
“That can’t be an accident,” I told her when I glimpsed the plane’s outline through the smoke. I grew up almost literally in the shadow of the Twin Towers — they were visible from the New Jersey apartment in which I grew up — so I knew they’d be impossible not to see, especially with the hit center mass, like a bullet hole in a shooting victim’s heart. But there was no real news, yet, so I returned to the office, just for a few minutes… when the voice of shock came through the doorway.
“Another plane just hit.”
“What?”
“A plane hit the other tower.”
You saw it? Yes. What kind? An airliner. Just flew right into it? Yes.
And that’s when the word crystallized in my mind: “terrorists.” I started calling and emailing family and friends. For twenty-two minutes after the Pentagon strike, it was still possible to imagine a return to normal. Then the South Tower fell, and for twenty-nine more minutes it was possible to imagine how odd the North Tower would look, standing alone until its reflection had been rebuilt. Then a massive pillar of smoke drifted down the height of the tower and blew away, and there was nothing there. An unhealable hole.
For me, the Pentagon increased the scope of the attack, but it didn’t really change anything. It was hard to imagine being hit any closer to home than the Trade Center, and unless the attacks made the transition to WMD, the war had already moved on, hitting my countrymen closer to their homes.
As the most visible spires of New York City, the Twin Towers had been a constant reminder, during my childhood, of just how close The Economy and The World were. I could see them from my porch. 9/11 made that symbol manifest.
My brother-in-law, Mark, captains a tug boat, and being on assignment in the area, helped in the effort to ferry evacuees across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Among those crowds were Chris and Doug, two of my closest friends, who worked not far from the WTC. Doug had been an usher at my wedding, and when I talked to him after the attack, he told me about the officials calling out to those whom the boats dropped off, trying to gather information from anybody who’d been within a certain radius of the attack. The word “quarantine” had been in the air.
Childhood friend Brian had certainly been within that radius. He had run from collapsing debris and relived the moment in nightmares for years thereafter.
If two other graduates from my high school, Todd Ouida and Scott Rohner, saw the South Tower fall, they were never fortunate enough to have nightmares about it. Both worked two floors above the hole that Flight 11 had made in the North. One of Scott’s older brothers had been in my graduating class, and Todd and I shared a birthday, although he was a year younger.
At the very moment that alumni of my high school ran or watched a familiar symbol of advanced civilization return to dust, an alumnus of my childhood judo dojo, Jeremy Glick, was fighting for his own life and hundreds of others’ as one of the heroes of Flight 93.
The World and world events are never far.
Frankly, the extensive coverage of 9/11’s ten-year anniversary in which just about every media organization has engaged for a week or more has had an aftertaste of the gratuitous. Does the United States still feel the presence of that unhealable hole? Does “where were you” remain any more than a parlor game? Did the quick growing up of multiple generations of Americans take hold as a permanent maturation?
For many of us, the answer is undeniable, “yes.” Whether we are enough for the purposes of history, only time will tell.