A letter to Boston, on the occasion of surviving a terrorist attack, from a 9/11 survivor

Dear Boston,

It’s all over but the shouting. One suspect is dead and another captured. There’s a sense of closure, maybe even victory, and things are returning to normal. Except for some of you, they're not. You just can’t seem to shake a sense of unease, maybe depression, anxiety, or unusual bad mood. For those of you who feel good, I share your joy. This is for the rest of you.

I’m a 9/11 survivor, so I get it. I lived 600 feet away from the towers, watched Tower #2 fall towards me, and was in that dust cloud. I couldn’t go home for many weeks and ten months later, while dining at an outdoor café with friends, I dove under the table and started to cry when I heard a thunderclap. This isn’t my story, except to say that I have some idea what abject terror feels like.

It doesn’t really matter if you were running in the race, watching from the sidewalk, a mile or two away or safe at home. Your city has looked in the face of pure evil, of unspeakable, unfathomable and capricious destruction, at the very moment of your greatest joy and triumph. You cannot confront such a monstrous act and remain untouched.

If putting on a Freddie Krueger mask and leaping out of the bushes could bring a city to its knees, terrorists would do it, but it’s lethal force that’s effective. Terrorists seek to terrorize, as many people as possible, and to reduce those people to as much of a fearful state as possible. Bombs and guns and sometimes, planes, are their weapons of destruction, and media coverage and body count their tools for spreading that fear. So terrorists shoot up movie theaters and blow up government buildings and bomb public events, and people are paralyzed with fear. That’s the goal. You can make yourself crazy wondering about “motive” or “cause.” Don’t.

This didn’t happen to you, to your city, because the bombers had a political agenda. Lots of people have political agendas, myself included. It didn’t happen because they were of a particular religion. Most people think that their religion is the true way. It didn’t even happen because people wearing baseball caps are inherently scary. This happened, to you, to your city, because these two brothers, like all mass murderers, were psychotic, violent, inhuman fucktards.

Let me repeat myself: people who commit acts of terror are not representative members of a religious, ethnic or social group. They represent the groups of psychotic and evil.

Pain isn’t a contest, and there is no prize for the most grief. In the future, people may ask you why you aren’t “over it.” Still others may impose a hierarchy of grief; those who lost a loved one, a limb, were there, or were not. Some will take the opportunity to tell you about genocide or drone attacks or IEDs. You feel what you feel and don’t ever let anyone make you feel guilty about it. Grief is always personal, and your own grief needs no justification; witnessing wholesale and violent death is its own reason. There’s enough pain to go around, and no need to fight over it.

The 2005 London bus bombings were followed with the “We’re not afraid” campaign, and I thought it was off, way off. Fear is a normal reaction to watching things and people blow up, to having your sense of security shattered, both literally and figurative. You feel fear, unless your veins run with ice water. Which is not normal. You experienced pure, unbridled terror, and what you do with it is what’s important. What we did with it in New York, what you will do with it in Boston, is to come through the other side.

You are all survivors, not victims, and it’s important to remember that. When the time is right, tell your own story.  Bear witness to the day, to your own experience, but more importantly, bear witness to life.

Tell your story on a blog or on Facebook. E-mail it to friends and family. Organize an anthology or an oral round table. Or just print it out and put it in an envelope. Look at it in a year or ten, or a week. But tell it, because when you give words to your fear, you own it. Own it because it’s part of who you are now. Own it because your feelings and experience are unlike any other and because they’re now part of the story of you.

Keep moving forward, step-by-step, and I promise that it does get better.

Wishing you all healing, in body and in spirit,

El

PS: My own story is below the fold, as it were. In case anyone finds it useful to read.

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THE DAY THE TOWERS FELL: 

the story of a 9/11 survivor

Betsy saw the second plane hit from her homeroom. Betsy is my daughter and was 12 at the time. Her school was on West Street, at Chambers, three blocks north of the World Trade Center. Her younger sister had a tummy ache and was spending the day at the apartment of a friend, also home with the same complaint. Their father wasn’t home that morning, but I was, alone, 600 feet from where the towers stood. This is my story.

There is no greater luxury, no more secure feeling, than stealing a few extra minutes in bed, surrounded by sleeping cats. That’s what I was doing when I heard the sound. Like thunder, only louder. I was confused when I looked out the window because it was a gloriously sunny day. And then, from the courtyard below, someone shouted: “Look up at the World Trade Center!” So I looked.

And I saw cinders and fire, raining down from the sky, into the tree-lined courtyard and debris falling on the flowers and walkways. And then I saw the fiery hole in the side of one of the towers.

I pulled on clothes, put on a pot of coffee, and turned on the radio; we didn’t have a television at the time, easier than too many rules for the kids. The voice from the speaker said that a plane flew into the World Trade Center, which didn’t seem right. I grabbed my coffee and went down to talk to Angel, the doorman; doormen know everything.

And then the second plane hit.

At that moment, you, with your television, probably knew more than I.  What I did know was that two planes, big ones, flying into the towers, could not be an accident. I knew we were being attacked, and that it was happening in my front yard.

Europeans, who grew up during WWII, a generation or so before my own, may have known what to do under the circumstances. I did not. I went back to my apartment, grabbed my purse and a sweater, and called my partner, who said he would come get me. And then I put my coffee cup on the table, gave the cats some food, locked up and went downstairs. I did not turn off the radio or shut down the computer, expecting to be back in a few hours, once New York’s Bravest and New York’s Finest had things under control.

When I got back to the lobby, I saw that our courtyard was suddenly filled with a procession of people. Black uniforms, white caps, nametags; it seemed like the entire staff of the Marriot, located directly between the two towers, was being evacuated into the courtyard. Chambermaids and bus boys, waiters and waitresses, reception and reservation people were all running through on their way to the esplanade along the river, all screaming and crying. I had a sense of being trapped in a bad disaster movie and I wanted my money back, then and there. Still do.

And I waited and watched. I watched for my partner to arrive. I watched my neighbors, mostly looking more scared than I felt, leaving the building with overnight bags, dogs, and small children. I watched people desperately try to get a signal on their cell phones. I watched debris fall down from the sky and smoke rise up. And I watched as people on fire plummeted to their deaths from the high floors of the World Trade Center.

I waited and wondered if I couldn’t just go back to my sunny apartment, then waited more on the esplanade, where Angel-the-doorman said we’d be safer. It was a stunningly gorgeous day, warm, with bright sunshine and utterly cloudless. From the esplanade, the apartments blocked the view of the burning towers, and I couldn’t see what was happening, couldn’t imagine how anything could go more wrong on such a perfect day.

And then people started running, south along the esplanade. And someone said the sky was falling. Actually, they said that the towers were falling, but that didn’t make sense, didn’t seem right. And the police came and said that the sky was falling, that we had to go south.

All of the images that you’ve ever seen show the two towers falling in a silent and stately manner. But it wasn’t like that. We heard a sound, and in an instant, it became deafening; it felt like we were being crushed by the noise. It wasn’t clear if another plane was landing right on top of us, or bombs were being dropped, or if the apartment building we were standing next was about to collapse. I suppose I was scared; my gut had turned to ice. In retrospect, I wasn’t really frightened until later. In retrospect, I simply couldn’t feel it until later.

So I went south with the crowd, and just past my apartment building, in an area with open sky, I saw the towers falling in my general direction, the sky falling, and then the world went blank.

Nothing could be seen from inside that debris cloud, except for thick, blinding white. That cloud just kept raining down, without stop, for what I now know was minutes but felt like hours. I wrapped my sweater around my nose and mouth, grateful that I had it with me, thinking that I was breathing concrete and marble and asbestos and dead people.

I kept going, south with the crowd, past the Holocaust memorial, aware of the irony of cremated remains falling down on a place honoring my dead, cremated relations.  Debris kept raining down as we stumbled blind, further south and into Battery Park itself.

A man shuffled by, wearing pajama bottoms, flannel robe and slippers, and I wondered if he had his wallet, if he would be able to get some clothes. Everyone was covered in a layer of white dust, some more thickly than others. I thought of Pompeii, of tables set for meals that no one would ever eat and was glad that my coffee maker had an automatic shut-off.

The Marriot employees, the ones who had fled through the courtyard, were huddled together in a thick knot. Their nametags told where they were from: countries in Africa and Asia, members of the European Union, people from Utah and Montana and Maryland, all no doubt eager for the prestigious New York placement, all having traveled far to be a part of history.

At Castle Clinton, the fort that protected the New York harbor since its earliest days, I stopped and I leaned up against the wall; the fort had stood for centuries, would probably protect me for a little while longer. That’s when I saw one of my friends from the building and when we both saw the Staten Island Ferry; we later found out that it was the last ferry to leave Manhattan that day.

We got on that ferry and went to Staten Island. Later, I was able to get to Brooklyn, where I was reunited with my family, and after a few more days, we were able to go home for long enough to pack one suitcase per person, and to rescue the cats. It was months before we got to go home and live. When we got home, we found a place with no subway within a mile, no supermarket, a weird grey mud covering all the streets, and a National Guard checkpoint to enter the neighborhood. The neighborhood bar, liquor store and dry cleaner were all doing a booming business.

My city was hurt and three of the four members of my family were within blocks of the falling towers, close enough to see it all happen. It’s taken a long time to heal, longer for some of us than others. But we’re OK. None of us were hurt, and we were fortunate enough to be helped by friends, sometimes by strangers, along the way.

We’ve all come through it to the other side.

Here’s the thing: my family and I are survivors, not victims. And so is my beautiful city, filled with people who are and always have been generous, proud and brave.

On the 100th anniversary of Grand Central Terminal

Some memories and random facts.

It’s called Grand Central Terminal because it’s a terminus for commuter rail lines. However, it was preceded by a train depot, in the same location, that was referred to as “Station.”

To clarify, the building referred to as Grand Central is a terminal. The subways that stop underneath that building are stopping at a station.

In 1913, when Grand Central Terminal opened, elevated lines and trolleys were more prevalent than the network of underground transportation we are familiar with today.

The famed astronomical ceiling in the main concourse is backwards. It is unclear, to me, at least, if that’s because it was intended to show the heavens, as they would appear to God, looking down from above, or if that was the justification for a workmen’s accident.

Grand Central would have gone the way of the Old Pennsylvania Station if not for the tireless efforts of a coalition of New Yorkers, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Ed Koch.

Grand Central was designed with enormous windows that allowed sunlight to stream into both the waiting room and the main concourse, as in this famous picture. For years, during its decline and before  its reprieve, added walkways and corridors blocked the expansive light.

Sometime in the 1980s, I worked for the architectural firm responsible for the restoration of Grand Central to its former glory. Sadly, I saw more specs related to public restrooms than anything, although I remember being excited when I read about how some areas would be opened up to the grand windows, for the first time in my lifetime.

Later, during restoration, workers would leave the doors open to the catwalks, which are located between the internal and external glass in the windows flanking the main concourse. I loved to go up there and just watch the people below; once, I even had  . . . a romantic experience. A few years later, but before the heightened security of the post 9/11 world, I wanted to take an old friend and his kids to visit the catwalk. The door was locked, but yielded easily to the application of a penknife. You couldn’t do that now.

Another thing renovated during the restoration was the Campbell Apartment. Originally a pied a terre, it had passed to the city and was being  used by the NYPD before reverting to its former glory. It's now a bar, and you can go and order a Manhattan. I should warn you that there's a dress code; one one evening, a sneaker-wearing friend was turned away (she changed back into her heels) but my hat, which had little leopard ears, was deemed acceptable.

After my mother died, I inherited all of her old watches and took them to a tiny little storefront in Grand Central, where they were all cleaned and repaired.

After my mother died, I’d go and sit on the steps leading down to the main concourse. Despite the crowds, I found it very peaceful.

I have eaten at some of the best restaurants in the city, but nothing gives me more pleasure than the Oyster Bar on the lower level at Grand Central. Among my favorites are oyster pan roast, and when in season, shad with shad roe, and bluefish. Oh, oysters, of course. I’ve eaten more than two dozen at a single sitting.

Much has been written about Grand Central, both fact and fiction, but for me, nothing beats “The Third Level,” a short story by Jack Finney. You can read it here.

Sometimes, it’s easy to miss visiting famous places. If you’re a sophisticated traveler, you might assume that such places are crowded and over-hyped. If you’re from a place, you might assume that such places are crowded, over-hyped and under-hip. Nothing could be further from the truth about Grand Central Terminal. Go. Visit. It’s worth the schlep.

On the birthday of JRR Tolkein

Fantasy writers and readers, linguists, world-builders and people who just enjoy Peter Jackson movies all have cause for celebration: it’s the 121st anniversary of the birth of JRR Tolkien. The 1937 publication of The Hobbit forever changed popular culture and vocabulary of fantasy fiction. My life was forever changed hen I received The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as a ninth birthday present, scary stuff for a kid. The paperback volumes were the 1960s Ballantine editions, with covers by Barbara Remington.

On crisp day this past autumn, I was taking photographs on the beach and in the decades-derelict military buildings at Fort Tilden, a decommissioned military base, now national parkland.  In an old ammunitions bunker, with a crumbling roof and mud floors,  with still-visible tracks, the few intact walls were covered with graffiti, which I expected. What I didn’t expect was graffiti in elvish writing; someone with a spray can and fairly obscure knowledge had gone to the bother of sneaking in after park closing and leaving a message few could read.

The Internet is brilliant for this sort of thing. Is there anyone who could translate this? If you know anyone who might be able to, please pass it on. It seems a fitting to decipher the message on Mr. Tolkien’s birthday.