As we age, the more frightening the size of the time spans of our life-history become. It's a little over fifty years since I left Kent State University, (yes....that Kent State and yes I WAS there on May 4, 1970). The little house my partner/husband and I call home was purchased over thirty years ago, when I was single. And this weekend we honor the tragedy of 9/11 twenty-five years ago. My personal history with The Twin Towers goes back to my early days in NYC, shortly after I moved to Manhattan in December of 1972.
The first lease my name appeared on was in Spring of 1973... 110 Sullivan Street in Soho-the West Village. My building was about twenty blocks north of the World Trade Towers, but due to their towering height, they appeared to be 'just down the street'. Every time I opened the door to my building there they stood, demanding I look at them in awe, reminding me I lived in NYC, much like Oz must have done to Dorothy.
I left NYC in 1984 and moved to Massachusetts. I worked for a small design company and after some years became sales manager. We all had terminals on our desks to access our work program and there was only one shared computer which connected us to the world. It was 2001, but I remember not everybody had a cell phone. (I certainly didn't.) A colleague got a phone call from his wife. She'd been watching the TODAY Show and they just reported a small plane had flown into The World Trade Center. A guy in the back office had a radio on his desk for the news. We flipped it on, and already we heard it was NOT a small plane at all. We went to CNN on the computer. They didn't live stream in those days. There was a photo of the Tower with billowing grey-black smoke. We had to keep refreshing the screen as slowly the pictures changed. And the story grew. And soon after the second tower was hit. We closed after about an hour of panic and fear engulfed us all.
I needed home and my big screen tv to make sense of it all. I remember fiddling with the lock on the door, as if seeing it live would make it any better, or less like the end of the world. I headed straight into the tv room and switched on the set. It didn't matter the channel, it was on almost every one of them. It couldn't have been more than ten minutes, before the first tower began to tumble to the ground, like some bad sci-fi movie from my childhood. At some point I began flipping channels, but no matter the channel, the horrid pictures were the same. I don't remember what we ate, but I know I fell asleep on the sofa after midnight, only to wake up every hour or so, hoping each time it was a dream. It wasn't. It was a nightmare.
The following day was confusing. I kept trying to phone my many friends who still lived in the city. It was impossible to even connect to any of their phones. Luckily I got an email from somebody that let me know everybody was fine......frightened, worried but okay. My birthday is in December, and enough time had elapsed that I felt it safe to visit my NYC. It was the first weekend in the month, and after meeting up with my many friends and cronies, we took a train to what was now known as Ground Zero. The surrounding buildings still standing were covered in a white, powdery coating. I would come to find out it was a combination of concrete dust, smoke and ash. There was still a heavy odor of smokey death. It was quietly eerie. Unsettling. It was as foreign a landscape as the moon would be. NYC was never the same for me. 9/11 took away my one-time home. This 25th anniversary is not a celebration.
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