9/11 Plus Five

I was on the phone with my friend Polly when the first plane hit. She had her TV on, and like most, we speculated that it was a small private plane which had inadvertently wandered into the wrong air space, although how one could fail to notice the World Trade Center does stretch credulity a bit. Then the second plane hit.

After experiencing the universal gamut of emotions... horror, confusion, disbelief... perhaps the thing that sticks most with me is my memory of having been to Windows on the World. It was a clear February day in the early 1990s, and everything shined. The rivers reflected the sunshine, and the Statue of Liberty was the centerpiece. You felt you could reach out and touch it. The feeling was one of stepping into a glorious work of art... the colors, the mood, the tranquillity. Truly, this was a place like no other. And I mourned for the lost beauty, and for the people privileged to work there, in the presence of this almost holy beauty every day. For some it was probably just a job, but for most, it had to represent a literal pinnacle.

But in the end, those people had the farthest to fall. They were above the fire line, on the floors no one expected to reach, to provide help. And the beauty melted into smoke and nightmare. So in the end, sadness was the overriding emotion of the day.