Remembering 9-10 2001
On Monday, September 10, 2001 I reported to Grand Jury
selection on Centre Street in NYC. They were convening multiple Grand Juries,
mostly for morning sessions and two for afternoons. They mentioned to us that
there would be some days when we would get out early. Most of the people there
wanted to get on the morning sessions, so that they could go to work in the
afternoons. Along with a handful of others, I volunteered for the afternoon
session.
After selection was over I decided to walk home. I lived in
Chelsea at the time, so this meant walking across town and up Hudson Street,
which would eventually take me up Eighth Avenue. But first I went down to
J&R Music to have a look around. This put me directly across town from the
World Trade Center, so I decided to walk past it on my way home. On the way
home I paused beneath the great buildings and recalled the times I had been
inside.
The first visit I think happened during grade school. I have
vague memories of a chaperoned trip to Windows on the World. When I approached
college graduation my mother took me back there. The clouds were low in the sky
that day, obscuring our view of the city below. Around the same time I went to
a Borders Bookstore in the basement of the twin towers to interview for a job,
only to eventually get turned down. I was very disappointed.
During sophomore year of college I stayed in a dorm room
with a perfect picture window view of the twin towers. I spent countless hours
staring out at the buildings, remembering watching westerns on WPIX-TV during
weekends at my father’s house. Station identifications would show the towers,
and then superimpose the number eleven over the towers, alongside with the
station logo. That year in my college dorm room I felt like I was in my father’s
living room, but looking at the towers live. I watch the blinking lights on the
roof as if they were sheep, waiting for them to blink in unison. Then every
morning when I woke up I would watch them again.
When I turned seventeen my father told me that I was a man,
and that I didn’t need him around anymore. He moved out to the Midwest to look
after his ailing parents. But pretty soon our contact became sporadic. For a
period of two and a half years, while I was in college, I didn’t even know how
to contact him. I remember thinking then how foolish it seemed. This was the
age when I needed him most. I wanted his advice but had only his memory. The
towers carried me through some of those lonely nights when I struggled with the
responsibility of becoming my own man without my father’s guidance.
My father did eventually find his way back into my life
during in the late-mid 1990’s. My mother was throwing a summer party at her house
on Long island. My girlfriend and I headed out there together. When I turned
the corner into the backyard my father was standing there.
By the summer of 2001, my mother was ready to sell her house
and move to the city full-time. My father came out from Ohio to help her close
out the place, and pick up a few of his things which he had been storing in her
basement. I was single then, and happy to hang out with my mother and a father with
whom I seldom spent enough time. As we drove out to dinner on one of those nights,
WCBS radio disclosed CIA reports of chatter regarding an attack on New York
City. We talked about it briefly, before turning our attention back to the more
pressing issue of closing up the house. We also discussed my impending jury
service in just a few weeks.
Eleven years ago today, standing in the shadow of the twin
towers, I considered going up to the observation deck to look out on my city.
But it had been a long day. I was tired, and I had a nervous feeling that I had
to go home. I looked up at the north tower and told myself that I had a whole
month of grand jury duty ahead of me, and there would be plenty of time to go up to
the observation deck later.
Of course, I was wrong…
