9/11...25 Years Later

 

I took this picture in July 1998.

            My girlfriend (now my wife of twenty-two years) and I were on our way over to Liberty Island to do the whole tourist thing of seeing the Statue of Liberty.

My wife’s family lived about an hour north of the city and we visited them for the week. This wasn’t my first time in New York. That would’ve been the day before when we got lost in The Village, and ended up at some chain restaurant in Times Square. The standard, garden-variety tourist experience. I should remember that more whenever I get short-tempered with tourists, which happens more than it should. I’d seen the Manhattan Skyline before. From the Jersey Turnpike on the way up north. From Route 17 in Jersey. From Hoboken, where the PATH train took us over to The City.

But there was something about seeing the Manhattan skyline from the water.

The way those two buildings rose like giants.

I don’t profess to have any greater emotional understanding of 9/11. I wasn’t living in NYC at the time. My fiancé and I moved there in March 2003, a year and a half after the attacks. My first images of Ground Zero came after midnight, later that year. We’d just taken my brother, his wife, and our family friend to their hotel in Jersey City. We took the PATH back to the city. The train went right around that big gaping hole in the earth. I couldn’t tell you if they were still doing recovery or beginning construction for the new World Trade Center. I just remember that image feeling ghostly in my head. And it stayed with me for twenty-three years.

My memories of 9/11 are of living in Pittsburgh. How beautiful that morning was. I took my usual walk to work through Schenley Park. I was listening to U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Kris was the first one who told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Then my girlfriend emailed. The internet not being as video heavy as it is now, I thought a commuter plane had hit. I thought I saw images of the destruction on YouTube. But YouTube wasn’t a thing in 2001. Most likely it was video from CNN’s web site. I know for certain that I watched images after the Trade Centers collapsed on a film-screen in a concert hall at the Carnegie with my co-workers Kevin and Mark. They sent us home early. The flags at the golf course in Schenley Park were already at ½ mast. There was an actual newsboy on Murray Avenue holding up copies of the Post-Gazette with fresh images of the day on it. I met my girlfriend at her job. We went home numb like everyone else.

We put the TV on.

Witnessed the world change forever.

I took this picture of the Manhattan skyline on July 4, 2026, on the 250^th birthday of our nation.

What to make of these last twenty-five years. The War of Terror? The Iraq War? The way the nation seems to get more divided by the year. I think most people my age feel like there was an American before 9/11, and an America after 9/11. I know that on September 10^th, 2001, I was a 27-year-old man living in a massive apartment complex on Shady Avenue in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. I was living with my girlfriend and our two cats, June and Belle. I was in Library school for the second time. I’d drop out a mere two weeks after 9/11, declaring it pretty useless, even though I’ve now been a public librarian for almost twenty years. There was a dog that barked into our bedroom at all hours, and I wanted to murder the beast. And every single day of the work week I went up to the 3rd floor of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and handwrote my first novel, Out the Angels Come.

A simpler time perhaps.

Or maybe I'm just being naive.

Anyway....