Ric Burns' epic series New York: A Documentary Film, weighing in at fourteen and a half hours, is perhaps one of my all-time favorite television events. Whenever I am flipping channels and stumble across a rebroadcast, I'm immediately sucked in and engrossed for hours. Knowing the brilliance of Mr. Burns' work, done with taste, sensitivity and passion, I was looking forward to the final installment of the series. Entitled The Center of the World, this new three-hour film chronicles the history of the World Trade Center from the creation of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1942 to the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, and the process to begin rebuilding in the aftermath.
I am not going to give a blow-by-blow account of the film. Needless to say, I was riveted to the television through most of it. The fact that there were no graphic images of the destruction of September 11, no plane crashes or collapses or jumpers, until nearly two hours into the film (not even during the opening credits) was a blessing. It gave me time to absorb the history of the city and appreciate what had come to transpire over the fifty-year period in Lower Manhattan. When the time came to focus on the attacks, I couldn't move. All I could do was watch and live the day all over again.
I will never be able to accurately convey what it is I feel about September 11 and all things related. It sits in an emotional core somewhere so deep in my body that, even two years later, I have a hard time accessing it myself. What I can say, however, is that my feelings have very little to do with terrorism, Islamic Extremism, United States nationalism, politics and war. No, the paradox is that the complexity of my emotions is actually because they are so simple in nature. To be perfectly blunt and honest, I don't give a rat's ass about the international consequences of that day. Something happened to me, something happened here, to people I know. In my world. And that is all that matters to me.
On that day, two years ago, a company that I worked for disintegrated into billions of particles. A company with which I was offered a permanent position after temping for them for three months, and, had things happened differently, a place where I would have been that fateful morning. Two people that I used to work with died. One of them was my favorite broker, a gentleman so kind and funny and sarcastic that you had no choice but to appreciate him. He would be interviewed on Good Morning America while he was trapped in the burning towers, describing the horror going on around him. An article describing his last phone conversations with his best friend and family would appear in the Washington Post less than a week after the attacks. In the May 2002 HBO documentary In Memoriam: New York City his final answering machine message, saying goodbye to his wife and daughter, would be aired. Ironically or not, September 11, 2001 was supposed to be his final day with the brokerage firm. His wife was pregnant with their second child, a girl who would be born the following March and named after her father.
The other person who died was a woman who I wasn't able to get to know all that well, as my initial time as a temp in the brokerage firm was spent as a replacement for her during her maternity leave. The few times that I did meet her revealed her to be a kind and gentle person, fond of coordinating catalog orders for Halloween and Christmas decorations with the other secretaries in the firm. Once she returned to the company after her maternity leave, she only worked three days a week, leaving me to fill in for her on Thursday and Fridays. We shared a desk. We left smiley face notes for each other. She's gone now, too.
These are faces that I knew. This was a place I could have been that day. This was a company that was willing to take a chance on a young actor, providing him with a good day job but promising flexibility and support for his career in the arts. When I would get a callback for a show, the president of the company would call me into his office and ask how it went, possibly more enthusiastic than I could ever have been. As much as I loved working for them, I turned down the offer for a permanent position, hoping instead that the "Big Break" was just around the corner, and not wanting to have to leave the firm in a pinch if something in the arts came my way.
That decision could have saved my life. It may seem foolish to an outsider, to those of you who don't have direct access to my heart and soul and know what I am feeling deep down...but that haunts me, every single day.
There are other things behind my sensitivity and obsession with September 11. The attacks came less than two weeks after my grandmother passed away, and only four days before my sister's wedding. I didn't have time to process a viable emotional reaction to anything for months; there was just too much coming at me. On the day of the attacks I was unable to locate my boyfriend at the time, who worked across the street from the Twin Towers. For the first few hours, I had no idea whether he was alive or dead. I couldn't get through to my best friend (Wife), whose brother is a firefighter. It took a full day to find out that he was alive and well and spending every minute that he could at the scene of destruction, trying to save lives. And I thought of my own brother and soon-to-be brother-in-law, both of whom are firefighters, thinking that if they lived here in New York, they and all of their friends could easily have met the same fate as the other 343 of New York's Bravest.
I've gone on long enough now, and have lost a little cohesion of my thoughts, so I'll wind this post down. It was more a post for me than for my readers, anyway. Since I've started a little international war in the comments of the some posts below, I'm going to ask my readers to please not comment on this post. I'm happy to provide a place for open and heated discussion, and frankly a little proud to be stirring such fervor among you.
But I need this particular post to be sacred for a little while. I'm going to ask you to take that time instead and use it for yourself. Reflect on the people you love and the things you have in life, and be grateful for them. Reflect on the fact that you are alive. Think of the things that make you happy and the things that you value the most, and appreciate them, if even for a second.
Posted by mak at September 9, 2003 12:13 PM