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collective
experience story#: 2 author: lori waxman occupation: writer residence: brooklyn, ny year of story: 2001 e-mail: N/A |
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Months
ago I promised the founder of this site that I would fish through my memories
and select an appropriately meaningful one to share. The task though it
grew in impossibility the longer I put it off simply by the nature of the
law which renders all tasks more daunting in direct relation to the length
of time in which they remain uncompleted truly did dwarf my selection
mechanism: how to pick from my infinite memory bank the one tale which was
not only most worth telling but most worth reading? This past Tuesday, September
11, 2001, solved that problem in an hour or so . Though you have no doubt hear as many stories as I have on the television and the radio, and read them in the pages of the newspaper, those of us who witnessed the events of that day have not stopped recounting them and probably will not for a very long time. If we normally roll our eyes when people repeat stories over and over again, or tell us one we have already heard, for these stories we make an exception. So, even though I have spoken it, told it, and emailed it to countless friends, family and colleagues, I am still thinking it incessantly, and I will write my own small story again, here. My alarm went off at 8 in Brooklyn that morning, and it was so clear and crisp out that I put on my rollerblades and my Walkman, and skated off to Prospect Park. About halfway around the park, which is ringed by a four-mile paved road, the NPR broadcast that I was listening to was interrupted by a bizarre report. A man from the station¹s underwriting department told how he had been in the middle of a breakfast meeting when he saw a plane fly past the conference room window, much larger and closer than it could possibly have been. Shortly thereafter he heard a deafening boom, and he ran up to the roof, followed by some of his colleagues. From their vantage point, just a few buildings away from the World Trade Center, they watched as the North Tower burned. The man had obviously never been on the radio before, but knew a thing or two about vocabulary. His florid speech was Dickensian, and the regular Morning Edition newscasters kept asking him pointed questions in an attempt to get straight facts. By this time I was out of the park and on my way home, and I could see a plume of smoke in the sky ahead, which I would otherwise have thought was a lone, long cloud. Skating down my street, I remember hoping that my roommate was home so I would have someone to tell immediately about this crazy accident. He probably wouldn¹t have heard, because he doesn¹t listen to the radio in the morning. He was in the shower, and didn't believe me when I barged into the bathroom to tell him that an airplane had crashed into the top of the World Trade Center and set it on fire. A few minutes later he came into my bedroom, which used to have a breathtaking view of lower of Manhattan, and stared out in disbelief. Then he went and got his camera. After taking a few pictures, he went back to the business of getting ready to go to work. I kept watching, and was watching while a second plane dove into the middle of the South Tower. Then we turned on the news. We spent the next hour going back and forth between the television and the Manhattan-facing windows, listening for information and then quickly going to witness it, often in that order. We saw the towers start to fall on television, and we saw them land through the window. We spent the afternoon at the top of hilly Fort Greene Park, just up the street, watching with our neighbors and their dogs as the smoke billowed over Lower Manhattan. The rest is mostly a numb, quietly terrifying blur. Everyone I know turned up safe and sound. We played Scrabble to distract ourselves, ate cold pizza, paced, moped, tried the phone lines over and over again, did our laundry, tried to read, stayed glued to the television, stayed glued to one another, puzzled over what to do with ourselves. This is one of the ways I have found to keep myself busy. |
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tragedy world event loss terror confusion shock
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