My fiancée, her daughter and I moved into our new home in Providence in April, when I relocated from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I had lived for seven years. The first time I had full care of my stepdaughter-to-be was in July, when my fiancée spent several days in New Jersey attending a professional training seminar. For four days I juggled laundry, cooking, writing newspaper stories on deadline, and caring for a child who inevitably became ill with fever and a revolting stomach while her mother was away.
When my fiancée got home late on a Thursday night I said, “I can’t believe you did this for eight years all by yourself.” She said, in essence, “until you’ve done it, you don’t have a clue what it’s all about. You can throw away the books. Experience is everything.”
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Now I sit to write some personal reflections on the one-year anniversary of Sept.11, but I find myself thinking instead about my new life with my fiancée and her daughter – a wonderful, intelligent, sensitive, resilient, willful and talented eight-year-old child, who has the most enchanting green eyes I will ever gaze into. Sometimes she unexpectedly jumps into my arms like a monkey. Other times she angrily and tearfully demands to know just who I think I am, telling her to turn off the TV and get ready for bed.
Truth told, getting this child to welcome me into her life is my main concern right now. All that I saw and felt in New York City one year ago seems like another life, another me.
I drove down to New York City the night of the terrorist attack, because my editor at the newspaper I worked for in Cambridge asked me to cover the event as a native New Yorker. All roads into downtown New York were closed to traffic, and I slipped across the Whitestone Bridge (through the back door) into Queens behind a fleet of New York Times delivery trucks at 2:30 in the morning of Sept. 12.
After a couple of nights spent roaming near Ground Zero, watching the silhouettes of construction workers and firefighters submerge and emerge from the blinding klieg lights that lit the spot where the World Trade Center once stood, I started to truly, simply believe the terrorist attack had heralded the onset of great suffering on the planet, and that nuclear holocaust was a possibility.
Undoubtedly I was in shock – it was impossible to witness Ground Zero in those first few days and not have your reality altered in some way. I remember that as I watched the smoke billow as if from the center of the earth, my mind reeled with the impossible calculus of the tragedy – thousands of people ground to bits by a torrent of steel and concrete in a matter of seconds. Gone, poof, incinerated. The math was unfathomable.
For two days I walked around sick to my stomach and in mourning for the future. I ached. Surely, the people who flew those jets into the Twin Towers were not born with that death wish and death ability. Something went wrong for them, so that they succumbed to anger and fear so completely that they could conceive of and carry out such a life-crushing act on innocent people.
In its most symbolic form, I see the Sept. 11 attack as an insanely angry punch through the steel wall that girds modern Western culture against the environmental ruin and economic disparity that exists in so much of the rest of the world. That does not allow me to excuse the people who did this; it only helps me to understand them.
I don’t think the world is ending anymore. But I still believe there may be a time of cataclysmic change coming in this generation and the next, as the world gets smaller and cultures and classes collide.
Sept. 11 was the most traumatic, tragic event most people in America have ever experienced. Now, we owe it to those who died, to ourselves and to our children to learn from the event and start addressing the issues that caused this to happen. We can’t allow ourselves to become numb to the hurts and dangers that we now know exist out there in the world. You can throw away the books. Experience is everything.
My life has changed dramatically since Sept. 11. It feels cheap to say that one was responsible for the other – that Sept. 11 begat my falling madly in love. But in writing those words, I know that it’s not untrue.
We first met at a dinner party at a mutual friend’s house in March 2001. I remember noticing her quiet, graceful way, her quick laugh and the way her silver bracelet rested on her wrist the moment she walked into the room. I was aware that I felt very strongly for her immediately, but I didn’t do anything about it.
And then Sept. 11 happened, and I went to New York and spent days walking in the gray, sour-smelling haze near Ground Zero, talking to people, witnessing. I was among the thousands of New Yorkers who converged on Union Square for that first candlelight vigil, and I can tell you that thousands of people really were as close as a family for one hour. I spent one night drinking in a bar at the lip of the destruction, talking to folks who saw it happen, who lost friends in the disaster, who miraculously walked out of the destruction covered in a film of ash.
I drank beers with a construction worker and painter who had spent the prior 65 hours digging for bodies. His eyes were far off, and when he broke down he cursed himself for ‘crying like a little baby’ in between his sobs.
I spent 10 days in New York, wrote three stories that I believe paid honest witness to one of the crucial moments in history, and I got in my car and drove home. I knew the first person I wanted to call.
I asked her to marry me two and a half months later, on the rocks at Scarboro Beach. Without telling her why, I got her out of the house and into the car on a dreary day in December after the rain relented to a clear evening sky and the wind picked up. We got to the beach at sunset and climbed the rocks to a high peak overlooking the ocean. We wrapped ourselves in a blanket and held each other as the sun went down and the wind blew on us from the unending water – listening to the sounds of the waves crashing on the rocks, watching the shapes of the sea-scoured boulders receding into the shadows. The first stars showed dimly against the cobalt, cloud-swept sky as I reached into the inside pocket of my coat and pulled out a little box which held a ring, and I put it in her hand.
You may think, ‘that was pretty fast.’ I agree, wholeheartedly.
