9/11, Twenty Years Later: Remembering That Day

Today marks twenty years. It's the day when everyone old enough to do so recalls where they were, and what they were doing when they heard or saw the news. It's my generation's Kennedy assassination. Or Pearl Harbor Day. 

 Only worse. 

 Nearly 3,000 people's lives were snuffed out that morning. An iconic building, erected during my lifetime, gone. 

 Sean -- a young man now in his late 30's, I suppose, and who I still see on Facebook -- will forever be linked in my memory with the tragedy. He was the first one to make me aware of it when he arrived to my 8:30 "A Slot" class just over 15 minutes late. This was not unusual for Sean; in fact, it was a running joke, and he would often arrive with fantastical, ridiculous stores about zombie crackheads, or freak, pop-up tornadoes that delayed his subway ride from Brooklyn. (Sometimes, unbeknownst to him, if his story was creative enough, I'd mark him "present" rather than "tardy.")

This morning, however, Sean's expression was very different as he stepped through the classroom door. We all saw it, my students and I. 

 "You okay?" I asked him. 

 "I think I just saw a plane fly into the Twin Towers." 

He looked baffled, like he wasn't sure if he was awake or still asleep, in a strange dream, in which he happened to glimpse down Sixth Avenue at the exact moment the world changed forever. 

 I don't recall exactly how I learned what was actually happening. The school office had tuned to the news coverage, and when I came to realize that the magnitude of the "plane crash" was much worse that what I'd pictured -- a Cessna or some other small craft bouncing off one of the towers -- my impulse was to be calm, to model calm for my students, so that they themselves could feel calm (and safe), as well. I had them form a line (this was in the days before everyone had a cell phone) so that they could use my classroom phone to call their families to let them know they were okay. 

We had moved our school up to West 30th Street only a year or two earlier. Our former location, at 51 Chambers Street, a few short blocks northeast of the towers, now looked like an eerie moonscape, covered with a coat of ash. We surely would have been evacuated to who-knows-where. 

 We eventually had an early dismissal, and, as I walked up to the Herald Square F-Train station, I was struck by the silence that filled this normally cacophonous part of town. Other than the occasional emergency vehicle, no motor traffic was allowed, so the usual groan and hiss of engines revving and braking, not to mention the ubiquitous honking of impatient horns, was surreally absent. People, too, were silent, as if we'd had the collective wind knocked out of us. I walked, slow-footed, to the train, which was re-routed to the D-Train tracks, taking us across the Manhattan Bridge. 

When we emerged from the tunnel, we all craned for a glimpse of the enormous plume of black smoke that billowed up from the space where the World Trade Center had stood for nearly 30 years. 

 "It's true," I heard a young woman say, fighting back her tears. "They really did it." 

 The smell of death and burning materials of all types hung in the air for days afterward. Thankfully, I did not lose anyone close to me on that day, although I certainly know many people who did. First responders spent days in unending double-shifts, desperately searching, first for survivors, then remains. I can only imagine what that experience did to them. 

 A week or so after the attacks, my now-wife, then-girlfriend and I sat on a bench on the Brooklyn Heights promenade, silently looking across the harbor, at the smoke that still hung over the site. The skyline was forever changed. I thought it looked as if someone had punched New York square in the face, knocking out its two front teeth. 

I didn't share that thought with Jeanette, because it was too sad to fathom. Instead, we just sat there in the silence, trying to imagine what our future, as a couple, as a country, as a planet, held in store for us.

Falling Shoes

I don't often think about 9/11. It's not that I've blocked it out, or anything as dramatic as that. It's been nearly ten years, and in the spirit of survival and not giving in, I have moved on. It's my strong belief that the collective souls of those thousands of innocents whose lives were so recklessly taken on that day would not wish us to dwell on the devastation, but, rather they'd want us to forge ahead and continue on, and in the process, we avenge their deaths by living our lives.

Occasionally, however, I do remember. I remember the way my student, Sean Lawrence, came into my classroom on the third floor of Satellite Academy on West 30th Street and said in a curious monotone, "I'm not sure, but I think I just saw a plane crash into the World Trade Center." He had caught a glimpse of that first impact, just as he was crossing Sixth Avenue, heading to school.

I recall the silence of a New York City with no cars driving past, and no planes flying overhead. It was eerie, and we, the inhabitants making our way to our homes that day, walked past each other like shadows, strangely making eye contact (not our usual way), as if to wordlessly reassure one another.

I remember the way we all shifted to the north-facing windows of the F-train, as we emerged in Brooklyn, and seeing, for the first time, the giant plume of smoke that would linger and stink for days. A teenage boy saying, "Oh my God, it's true. It's really true."

Weeks later, as we healed, I was in a bar with some friends, who introduced me to a woman I'd never met. "I was there," she said. I didn't have to ask her where. Or when. I just knew by the look in her eyes.

"There's one thing I'll never forget," she said. "The shoes."

"Shoes?"

"They just kept falling. Shoes. Women's shoes, men's boots, children's sneakers. They were raining down from the burning building."

She told me she'd heard from a scientist friend that the physics behind the falling shoes was similar to when a pedestrian is hit by a speeding car and one sees a pair of shoes standing in the exact spot where the victim once stood. Imagine that impact, times a hundred. Times a thousand.

The woman passed this image on to me, and although I'm thankful for not having been there that day, it's this second-hand image that occasionally wakes me up at night, as I consider what it must have been like to have been in those shoes on that sunny fall morning nearly ten years ago. There are other, more violent images I've seen associated with 9/11; the footage of people choosing to jump from 100 stories, rather than be burned to death, a photograph taken by my brother-in-law, one of the first responders, of something that had once been a human being -- but it's these falling shoes that I'll never forget and that will forever remind me of horrific tragedy and a loss that changed our world forever.