Tag Archives: WTC

twenty-four years … 9/11

The Twin Towers in July 1983, with New Yorkers taking in the sun on the beach created by the WTC landfill. Photo by Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

This picture always gives me hope.

One finds beauty where one can. Creates a world of wonder where one can. Insists on the good in the world where one can.

New Yorkers have been engaged in that for 24 years.

We move forward – some of us still not able to walk the hallowed grounds. Some of us mourning deaths as recent as this year that are directly attributable. Experiencing grief and its attendant feelings of loss, especially when thinking about a loved one who breathed in the dust working the pile day after day … now suffering, or having transitioned on.

It’s what we can’t bring ourselves to think about that really hurts. The losses upon losses both personal and in the world at large.

We pray for peace and the grace of peace. And pray some more and more again. Until next year … when we again feel the stab and pang of how senseless it all has been.

Think to ourselves, may the memory of those who perished be for a blessing.

19 Years ago today

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19 years on …

The World Trade Center was my point of reference from the first time I spied the towers in the fog looking south on Sullivan at the corner of Bleecker in Greenwich Village. I was with my father, with whom I used to roam the City on our occasional Sunday’s together. The towers had been on our radar all through its construction. We’d pass by the towers first as a hole in the ground and then as partially constructed buildings as we peered up from under the old West Side Highway on one of our jaunts through the docks on our way to Battery Park.

That night, with the windows illuminated in shrouded light felt magical and has been a point in time I have always treasured.

When I gaze on the City now, I feel the holes in the sky as a huge ache in my heart.

It happens whether I am looking across from the vantage point of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade or most recently from the vantage point of the Rockaway Ferry looking across towards Manhattan just past the Marine Park Bridge.

Our nation, our citizenry, our sense of who we are as a people have undergone many, many transformations since the ill-fated morning of September 11, 2001. Some have been for the good, but much, as now, has been fraught with conflict, fear, dislocation, and the kind of damage that can take generations, if ever, to heal.

I can only offer my fervent hope that we will persevere to better days.

18 Years On

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18 Years on …

I find that extraordinary.

My daughter went from having her first week of Pre-school to being a junior in College.

And our world

So much meaner

With boots on the ground and lives shattered and destroyed

For what?

I can’t remember why

Just the pain of the hole in the sky.

The hole in the sky

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Seventeen years today…

I chose to remember joy, even though my heart aches for the losses.

For the hole in the sky.

For the people I mourn.

For an America that was less fractured by revenge, less intent on unraveling progress, less mean in its pursuit of something tangible that has seemingly been lost.