I am desperately hoping for rain tomorrow.
Ten years ago was one of those perfect fall days in a city that comes into its own after Labor Day. If I could have tocked a spoon against the sky, I would have rung out crystalline hallelujahs. I jaunted to the subway wearing a favorite skirt and cantaloup-colored silk jacket -- and the most comfortable sandals I've ever worn. The air was sweet from great thunder storms the night before. My boss and I were going to meet a famous choreographer later that morning and I was thinking about a guy I wondered if I liked and, more importantly, whether he liked me.
Hindsight is ironic. When we were ordered to detrain at Cortlandt Street, the sky was eight colors of desperate, the crystal had broken and fallen to the streets, the air was full of the bits of paper of capitolism gone wrong and my brain was jarred from the preoccupation of impressing other people to.....what? Repetitions of the Our Father that turned to the Hail Mary when I saw bodies falling, fleeting worries about being late for work, viral rumors on the street that I don't remember anyone actually voicing, the stampede after the South Tower was hit, and hiding behind one of the iron gates in City Hall Park which, after the tide of people passed through, was restored to its almost Parisian grace of fountains and birds singing to what was left of the blue sky.
God, make it rain tomorrow. Oh, and God? Thanks for making the tenth anniversary a weekend day.
I'm back from spending two weeks with my family in Montana and 9/11 naturally came up. "The country pulled together for that," someone said and I began to laugh. "It was the first time the United States recognized New York as American," I answered.
I wanted to add that the country may have pulled together in sentiment but that in Washington, D.C., aboard United Flight 93, and in New York, people pulled together as an army. We may not have been ready to fight in the hedgerows but we did what we had to do. That included wearing high heels on my first day back at work. It was like a soldier shining his belt buckle before going into combat.
The New Yorkers I know pulled together as New Yorkers, not as Americans. When we were able to make contact with the outside world, we told family and friends we were OK or not OK but the solidarity of those weeks was with whoever stood next to us at traffic lights or on elevators.
A few years ago, 9/11 started with parachutists jumping out over lower Manhattan. I nearly threw up.
When there are fireworks, people in my neighborhood head toward the Promenade. When we learn that noise is spectacle, a lot of us go home without bothering to catch the show.
The sound of helicopters unnerves me. Silence on the streets unnerve me. The smell of candle wax is Proustian.
I judge myself unscathed. I have friends who crawl into a closet at the sound of fireworks, and I have friends who take masses of drugs after ruining their immune systems from working in the toxins of the World Trade Center junk heap. No one I knew died that day.
It's more real and more awful ten years later. By the evening of that Tuesday, I knew the country would be at war. Three thousand people from seventy countries died that day. Another 900 responders have died since. As of 2009, 113,732 soldiers, civillians and other personnel have died in Iraq. We're working hard to reach the 25,000 fatality mark in Afghanistan. As many Afghani civillians have died as have Afghani soldiers. The top leaders of Al-Qaeda direct their soldiers from Pakistan, a country we are at tentative peace with but which is among the 35 or so countries the Department of State lists as dangerous to visit. Islam predominates in 23 of those countries. The allies of the United States mostly chose not to join our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda continues its guerilla war on U.S.-friendly Middle Eastern pockets and with attacks in the U.K., Turkey, Spain, Philippines, Bali and Denmark -- our allies -- that have killed another 628 civillians.
It probably won't come down to allied governments deciding the U.S. is not a hazard worth befriending, but Americans are treated with curiosity in the rest of the world. We are a political Elephant Man until, traveller by traveller, we deal with the myth of murder and misdirection each in our own way.
Gasoline in Montana is nearly a dollar more than it was a year ago.
A friend who is the mother of a New York City fireman is sending flowers to the local firehouses but feels the solemnity of the anniversary should prohibit the habit of dropping off cookies and casseroles. I beg to differ. It's tradition to fill Pyrex and Baggies with sympathy for wakes.
I hope it rains tomorrow. We have so much crying left to do.
