Work in Progress #24: What Ever Happened to September 10th and 12th?

September 11th has, over the last two decades, become a day of mourning and reflection for the country.  It was the day we lost our air of invulnerability, and through that, our naïveté and innocence.  Everyday Americans were confronted with the fact that the world is big and scary and doesn’t regard us as some kind of morally superior and unquestionably enviable super society, and the last 23 years have been spent grappling with that fallout of that.

If we were to liken it to stages of grief, we are at the tail end of anger and about to get into bargaining.  Or maybe it’s depression.

Anyway, once a year, we turn our eyes toward New York, my hometown, and solemnly bow our heads as we promise to never forget.  As a transplanted New Yorker, that notion is both touching and condescending at the same time.  Of course we’re never going to forget.  This is an event of great historical significance   It’s taught in history classes.  But every time we’re asked not to forget, it’s to the bell gong that precedes a name read from the list of the dead, or it’s to the image of a sunny Tuesday morning going to shit in a hurry.  We spend so much time making sure we remember being attacked that no one thinks about what happened in the days before.  Or a couple of days later.

There was a time before the TSA.  There was a time before Ground Zero.  There was a time when New York was just a city.  A big, diverse, messy city with an aging transit system and lots of stuff to do.  There was a time when the worry was less about being attacked by some foreign entity, and more about keeping your eyes forward as you passed a homeless guy or deciding whether you wanted to chance the empty subway car in the middle of the summer on the D Train.  Summer of ’01?  We were wondering if the Yankees would four-peat and if there would be a Subway Series rematch in October, or if we could get one more run out of a rudderless Knicks core.  We wondered if Vinny Testaverde could take the Jets to the promised land.

Spoiler Alert: the answer for all of those was a resounding “no.”

I remember my city* as this vibrant, energetic place.  It was electric and oh, so alive.  And that summer, as it wound down, had so much promise.  That September still got early summer temperatures, and I remember that made me happy.  I always felt like we appreciated those summers that were unexpectedly long, because the switch to jackets and long sleeves would happen any day or any week.  My city in that late summer felt comforting, because my family had been going through some stuff that I won’t recount here.  And even though the stuff that we had gone through led directly to my departure from a job as a concierge that I didn’t love, I felt that there was just a little more juice to squeeze out of that summer.

And then, two hours after I left that job…

Anyway, in the days and weeks that followed, I saw my city perform acts of comfort and kindness that one would never attribute to us.  Neighbors checked in on neighbors, people craved togetherness.  Something I talk about a lot when I recall 9/11 is the posting of missing posters.  All over Lower Manhattan, on every lamppost, building, and scaffold, posters inquiring about missing loved ones popped up.  In the early days after the disaster, there was a hope-beyond-hope that someone would be pulled out of the rubble, clinging to life, and people just wanted to hear from them.  But as the search-and-rescue became search-and-recovery, people were waiting to hear that the ground team found a body.  And in that moment, those posters became a living tribute to the lives lost in the Towers.  I found it to be the most beautiful thing about a horrific circumstance**, those posters, and the people who openly supported everyone who had the grim task of putting one up.

I think that the normalcy of life before and the kindness of people after the attacks to be far more interesting stories than the buildings that fell.  So, when the story of 9/11 in New York is centered solely around the planes, the terrorists, and the Twin Towers, it feels like the Hollywood blockbuster version of what happened.  It feels reductive.

The novel that I’m editing is called Empire Towers, and for the reasons I just listed above, it’s set in the week leading up to 9/11.  It follows a night-shift concierge and a cross-section of well-to-do residents in a luxury high rise in the Battery Park City neighborhood, steps away from the Twin Towers.  He has work drama, falls in love, and stands up for himself against the backdrop of a clock that no one knows is ticking.  It’s a throwback to the before-times in my city, one where I do my best to avoid feeding the obsession with the tragedy.

Because we’re not going to forget the attacks.  Thy skyline of my home city is forever changed, the attitudes of the country I live in has been (seemingly) forever changed.  Off course we won’t forget.  I ask, as former New York Daily News columnist Lenore Skenazy asked in 2006, for everyone to stop reminding us every chance they get.

Couple of things…

**When I say that the missing posters were beautiful, I am not trying to revel in the tragedy.  I’m talking solely about how kind we were to our neighbors in a moment of vulnerability.

*When I call it my city, I realize that I haven’t lived there in 15 years.  I was born and raised in New York, however, and the lessons I learned there about how to comport myself as a person are so ingrained in me, it affects everything I do.  So yeah, it’s my city.