A Tuesday Morning

A New Yorker remembers September 11 not as history, but as something lived.

For most people it’s just a blur, like an old film or story you’ve been told. But for me and those who were here – in New York on 9/11 2001 – it has become part of us.

How could it not?

I can only compare it to hearing your parents talk about WWII, or a soldier who served in Vietnam.

So many memories. Too many.

First: Being told by the owner of the Nectar Coffee Shop that a plane went down near the World Trade Center, and assuming it was a small private one.

After learning what really happened, the stories followed.

The guy from Cantor Fitzgerald who finally got an appointment with his allergist, a co-worker covering for him. While he sat in the waiting room reading the New Yorker, his co-worker would be no more.

The Latino kid working in the jewelry store in the mall beneath the Trade Center, telling his two bosses they all had to go, now! The men said if he didn’t help put all the jewels back into the safe he’d be fired.

The kid got out. His bosses didn’t.

Or the subway train operator told to bypass Cortlandt Street, the World Trade Center stop, but when he saw the crowd on the platform, he stopped anyway. He got them aboard and out before the towers fell.

Later, on that beautiful Tuesday September night, I was standing on East 81st Street across from my apartment with a funeral director from the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel.

“Nothing so far,” Dominick had said. “We’re just waiting.”

Then a hearse pulled up with the first official fatality.

Victim 0001: Father Mychal Judge, the Franciscan friar and FDNY chaplain who had rushed downtown to be with his men, killed by debris when the South Tower collapsed.

We both stepped aside as they wheeled him in, me wondering, Catholic that I still was, if St. Francis was there to take him home.

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Susannah Bianchi has written for The New York Times, More Magazine, On The Avenue, and Shewrites. Follow her adventures at athingirl.com. She lives in New York City. Best known for her humor, she has written previously for Certain Age, including Last Year's Model and Charity for All.

Susannah waived her honorarium for this piece, and Certain Age has donated that amount to 9/11 Environmental Action, which supports people still living with the health effects of the World Trade Center disaster.

Image:

Holland Tunnel entrance by Jean Shields Fleming