5 Years

Five years ago today my wife and I were living with our twenty-two month old son in San Francisco. I was getting dressed to go downtown to work when my sister-in-law phoned from midtown Manhattan to tell us to turn on the television.

Stacy and I met in Manhattan. I grew up in Albany, three hours north of New York City, and after college I moved there for nine years. I already knew the people of New York were superb and resilient and able to help one another in a time of crisis. If I think back to that day and the weeks to follow, if I can forget how our Federal leadership and their party has colonized the feelings I had, that we all had that day, I feel proud of how we Americans responded to the terrible the tragedy, the horror, the brutality, the destruction. I can feel the appropriate anger at those who killed so many civilians from so many different countries, who attacked our nation directly and caused so much destruction on our soil.

A week ago I wrote about seeing Oliver Stone's World Trade Center movie which gave me an opportunity to express some of my 9/11 feelings, most of all how badly the worldwide capital we earned through that heinous experience has been squandered like A Rake's Progress. Aside from what I wrote in that post, I just want readers to know that as an patriot I take what happened that day seriously, I always supported getting the fuckers where they lived in Afghanistan (had been reading about the evil Taliban for a couple years in advance), and just wish we had had President Gore back then. I believe there is a good chance 9/11 would never have happened, since the Clinton White House was actually focused on anti-terrorism, while Bush screwed the pooch and anyone who was National Security Adviser -- in this case Bush crony Condoleezza Rice -- should have been fired from allowing it to happen on their watch, with the warnings right in front of their very eyes. But if it had happened, President Gore would have finished the job in Afghanistan, increased rather than erased our nation's moral authority in the world, and generally made us all safer to this day. And responded like a leader to Katrina.

A guy can dream, can't he?

Back when I lived in New York, the World Trade Center was how you oriented yourself. Every day. I had been up in Windows on the World three times, top floor, a place where so many restaurant workers were killed when the plane hit. Once with some friends, where we were lucky not to be wearing jeans, as the ground floor elevator guard told us he hadn't allowed Warren Beatty up just the previous weeks because of the no jeans rule. Once I went during the day, the night view being spectacular but the day view just being such a huge opportunity to see so much of the city, clearly, from about. The third time was late one Saturday night, Stacy and me scouting out a potential wedding band. (We went for the other one.)

When I went back for Thanksgiving two months after the attack, I set aside a morning to go down to the site. You couldn't get right up to it, but you saw the hole, the holes actually, the enormous gap Bin Laden had created in the city, the effect on the other buildings around still standing. You saw the one metal building side jutting up out of the ground, the last erect portion of the two overwhelmingly large towers.

On the drive in over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Newark Airport a few nights earlier we had gotten our first taste of "it's just not there". No way to orient as usual. Disorienting.

I remember the intense feeling building as I worked my way closer and closer to the site. How the streets had pedestrian detours and so much of them were torn up, all kinds of pipe re-routing going on. How everyone knowing they were in a different space, maybe holy, maybe vespertine, but hushed and rarified. In an almost counterintuitive way, it made you feel good to be alive. To walk those sidewalks for the dead.

But the emotion was strongest, the image still so strong in my mind, of all the missing persons flyers with photos of the lost, posted by grief-stricken loved ones on all the walls and wrought iron fences in those last blocks before the ruins.

My heart goes out to anyone who lost a spouse, a family member, a lover or a friend in all of the attacks that day. Here's to a brighter future for America. With God's grace, let's get out of the mess we're in.