Looking forward, looking back
It was a a warm September day. It was an ordinary Tuesday.
And then it wasn’t.
I was very lucky that day, 17 years ago. I’d spent most of my career working in lower Manhattan, but in 2001 I was employed by a law firm on Long Island, so I wasn’t in the city when the planes hit, didn’t see the devastation up close until days later. I didn’t come home covered in dust and debris. I didn’t lose a family member or a close friend.
It’s hard to believe that most of the students sitting in high school classrooms weren’t even born on 9/11. To them it’s just history.
To me ...
Drew and I visited the 9/11 Museum in 2014. It was an emotional experience, the first time I’d gone to a museum that memorialized a time in history that I’d lived through. What made me cry the most were the ordinary things — a fare card for the PATH train, a newspaper, a street sign. Things I had used every day. The people who died in the towers were no different from me ...
It occurs to me the other day, as I was walking near my office, that when I first started working in the city, the Twin Towers had always served as a navigational beacon. Midtown Manhattan is laid out as a grid, it’s easy to navigate. But the streets of lower Manhattan are a twisty, confusing maze. But I’d never be completely lost, so long as I could look up and see the towers.
The other day the NYC Subway celebrated another milestone. The Cortlandt Street Station, destroyed on 9/11, has finally reopened.
Yes, the rebuilding effort finally seems to be complete.
I leave you with a photo of the new One World Trade Center, as seen from New York Harbor...
It doesn't seem that long ago, does it?
ReplyDeleteYes and no. I remember every detail like it was yesterday. My daughters are adults now, but on 9/11 Jen was in 6th grade, just starting middle school. Becca was in 4th grade. Her social studies curriculum that year was "New York State" and the twin towers of the World Trade Center we're featured on the cover of her book
DeleteIt seems yesterday and a lifetime ago, all at the same time. Doesn't matter how much time has passed, hearing the stories of those who survived, and those who didn't still make me cry easily.
ReplyDeleteI want to go to the Museum and pay my respects. It will have to be on a trip without the other half - he can't cope with it. (Let's just say the civil war battles where we used to live didn't contain themselves to the battlefields, and he can point out most of them...)
It's a very intense experience. The curator has positioned boxes of Kleenex throughout the exhibit, as I recall.
DeleteI had bought a 2011 New York City travel guide, hoping to visit the City, and the Twin Towers were on the cover. I still have it. When I visited Ground Zero in August of 2002, not having been in the area since 1974 (I grew up in New York City, but left in 1974 for good), I still instinctively looked for the Towers to navigate when I came out of the subway.
ReplyDelete