Nine Years Later

I was already working at my desk when our son called to say something terrible had happened in Lower Manhattan. I ran to the TV, then quick called David, also at work by then. He knew only about the towers and not the other catastrophes. “Really?” he kept saying in disbelief. “Really?”But disbelief had vanished when I called back an hour later to ask how his people were doing.“Well, we’re chasing our guys still,” he said. “Three flew out of Logan this morning.” Then he hesitated. “So far we’ve heard from everyone but Bobby,” and in his use of this fond nickname I recognized in my spouse of many years that certain lightness of manner he uses to mask extreme worry. “We’re not sure yet about Bob.”Within the hour we were all sure:  Bob had been on Flight 175 when it suddenly veered and hit its mark.His wife was shattered, as were their two daughters and their son, who, the press noted in one account, wept unashamedly throughout his interview with them. He wept again when he called and asked David to deliver the eulogy at that funeral-with-no-body, where weeping was general.David simply stood and told a few stories: about a man everyone loved, who could get up antic games of Frisbee in any old parking lot, pinch-hit at golf, though he didn’t really play golf, and convince five grown guys what a good time it would be to drive 300 miles in February and stay in the world’s tiniest motel to watch his daughter play basketball. “And we all agreed afterward,” said David. “It was a really good time.”He told about the dozens of people who had called the company to offer condolences, many sobbing as they spoke. He told about the one who said what everyone knew to be true: that he was the nicest person he had ever known.Most of us say that when our time comes we want to go quick. Bob did that, as we pray most did who died on this date nine years ago. I myself like to think of them of them not as they died but as their families last saw them, when, on that blue cloudless day, they rose from their beds and stepped lightly into the morning.

The Sound of Their Falling

On September 11th of last year I posted a piece based on the image of people jumping from another tall building. I wrote it in 2002 with the memory fresh in my mind of that footage  by those French brothers who were hoping to make a documentary about the firehouse right there in Lower Manhattan. Of course they too ended up racing to Ground Zero and the images they captured show how dazed and helpless the firefighters look as they stand in the lobby of Tower One trying to assess the situation. Then the bodies start dropping and the elderly chaplain begins looking disoriented as well as dazed and the next thing you know he’s being carried out, dead of heart failure. I found a little of this footage on YouTube and I’ll post it below.

It was the sound of their falling that I couldn't forget - until I read that Robert Pinsky poem about the people almost a hundred years ago who also jumped to avoid the flames. That was the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire of 1911 and the dead, young women mostly, had been locked in at their machines, company policy.

Strangely enough, it comforts you to read the poem. I keep my piece about it at the top of my home page here. It used to be what I thought of whenever I thought of this awful day. Now I also think of the two people David and I knew who died there and how almost a full year later they found a credit card belonging to one and a little finger belonging to another. And I also think for all we might do wrong here in America, what other country would spend more than a year moving 16 acres of ash and rubble, then sifting, sifting, sifting and doing the careful DNA work too, all so that the families of the victims  might someday have some peace?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg8FQiJ-Rcw&feature=related]