by Yocheved Friedman
Today is Tuesday, September 11th, and it’s the first day of nursery for Aron. We’re going to walk him in, maybe stay for a bit of the morning to acclimate him. Unless the teacher says not to, probably better if we leave him cold turkey and let him manage on his own. I can’t believe my little boy is so big…
Tonight is my last night in New York City. Hell, in this whole country!!! Wednesday I’ll be flying out to England for that journalism program and then a whole new life. I just can’t get over leaving this city. I’ve been here most of my life, a little in Philadelphia….but it’s a good change, something I’ve been needing for a long time. I have to call mom about my apartment lease…I can’t believe I’m actually doing this….
Tuesday, September 11th 2001, marks the fourth year without him. I miss his everything. I’ll go to the cemetery today with my grandmother and we’ll stand there in silence and try to pitch his French-Hungarian accent in our heads while we remember him. Stones on the grave to mark our visits to him and how crazy time is letting these years without my grandfather in the world pass by. I hate today, a death memorial.
I’ll never forget today, September 11th, when you finally said yes, on the way to my folks like we were going for a July 4th Barbeque. Yes, just like that, like I had asked you if you liked the shirt I’d worn that day, yes like I had asked if you wanted to get a coffee at Sam’s House. Yes, that you’d marry me, and I’m the luckiest guy on earth. September 11th is my greatest memory.
Today is the morning of my first time. I feel like I need to say it out loud to believe it. Hi, my name is Tammy and I am 52 years old and I have cancer. Today is my first treatment session. I have heard the haunted folklore of chemo. Today is a sort of end and I know I’m in for a big one. We found out so fast, it was like going to 7/11 for milk and coming home with cancer. Routine physical, a “pretty mild” bump, and then I’m here on my first day of a long long ride that I don’t want. It seems like just yesterday I was okay…
I’ll call you later, in a meeting. Just signed divorce papers, Tuesday, September 11th, 2001.
You won’t believe what Henry just said, yes! First word today, the 11th. I’m calling mom and your mom, I’m calling the whole neighborhood! I can’t believe he’s talking.
Today is September 11, 2001. My father will not come home tonight from work. He will be one of the hundreds that jumped from the burning windows of hell from 9/11. He will have been trapped this morning between a city caught on fire and a death jump and he will, in this day, choose to jump and die at the ash of the World Trade Center. He will be one of the thousands of victims of this day and this day in years and years to come. He will not make it out of New York City tonight to come home for dinner like it’s just another Tuesday in Jersey. He is one of the falling men of September 11th.
Today, my mother will stop being a married woman. She will lose her job in a matter of months and that will change her. She will never be the same person and neither will I, the daughter of the falling man, the man of September 11th. My father will become famous today, the one in the New York Time’s pictures of 9/11, the trademark of a fallen world, of the people plunging from the windows, my father will head the memorial archive of the fallen. He will today, become the face of disaster.
Tuesday September 11TH, my birthday, 2001. Dad says it took three hours to cross traffic on the BQE that day when he tells me the story of my birthday. That everything was backed up like crazy. He tells me it was impossible to make it to St. Luke’s Roosevelt and that he drove to Beth Israel Hospital in Brooklyn. Nothing was running on my birthday, no trains, no available ambulances, no medical personal. The whole world, he says, had gone insane on my birthday. I was born on the afternoon of a nightmare.
September 11th, first day sober for a long, long time. I miss my wife, my job and the guys after work. I want to try again. I’m really gonna do it this time Jennie, I am. I really, really am.
I was painting in my studio when I heard it on the radio. I don’t have a TV, so I knocked on my neighbor’s door and watched the towers fall in her apartment. All I wanted to do was go to the dry cleaners on Lefferts Avenue and drop off three shirts. I just needed to do something normal. Because we all thought the world was going to end.
5 am September 11th, Dad finally came home from Japan. 15 months abroad is a long time and I missed him. It was the happiest morning of my life and I didn’t care how early it was.
Heading to Manhattan for the interview. My god Evan, I just can’t believe I’m going to be working in NYC! Remember how we always said we’d move here from Buffalo and get jobs and be rich? Remember that? Well, here I am, finally going. I just wish you were here with me…
***
Today is nursery orientation…
My last night home…
My grandfather’s fourth memorial day…
The day you said yes. I love you every day.
The day I started cancer treatment. The first day of the end of my life. The worst day, the hope. I can’t wait till it’s all over…
The morning we ended it. Divorce is a final ditch in the road Meg. But I want you to know, when I married you eight years ago, it was the happiest day of my life…
The day my son learned how to talk. Happiest moments as a mom…
My father. The man who fell out of the tallest tower of America. Sometimes, I try really hard to imagine what he was thinking right before the end, when he was caught by the fire and the drop. It took me years, years to think of him without crying. Dad, I can’t live a day without walking past my office in the city, and remembering you on floor 81 getting your first cup of coffee when the plane hit. I look up at ground zero now from my window on Water Street and at the new towers and I pretend you’re still in your office and that you’re working late and that you’ll be down any minute and we’ll take the subway home past rush hour.
Mom has never watched the 9/11 memorial ceremony on T.V. She just can’t, Dad. She misses you so much…
The afternoon my son was born. Happiest day ever. I became a Dad. I waited over five years to become a Dad.
First day I stopped, just put down my foot and said enough! I became sober that morning and I haven’t picked up a drink since. The first day of my journey and today, I’m a happy man.
The day I thought the world was going to end. All of a sudden, watching NYC going mad on T.V, I missed yesterday and I wondered if I’d ever walk to the dry cleaners and scan the city’s skyline without the towers and feel the same way.
The morning I hugged my dad in over a year. My sergeant of America. He never went overseas again after that morning.
The morning I got the job in Lehman Brothers. I thought my life would never get better. I wanted to throw a party in Central Park till tomorrow and forget Buffalo and start a whole new life here like I’d been raised in this city my whole life. And then, when the towers fell and the city burned and people fled from these streets over the bridges to safety, I had a sinking feeling that maybe my dream had been wrong. I didn’t know if I wanted this city anymore…
***
We headed over the Brooklyn bridge and we didn’t know that if we looked back, our whole city would be exploding. We thought New York was ending, that the world as we knew it was gone. On the bridge, at 10:58 am Tuesday, 9/11, nobody looked behind them because they knew they were the lucky ones, walking across Manhattan to Queens and to Brooklyn to see their families. We were black and dust was settled in our hair and pockets like pieces of the city that dragged us back, that reminded us of our mortality and that were our lives. And we didn’t look back because behind us, people were falling out of towers and men that were braver than us were rushing towards them, to the burning city to save the people that would not cross the bridge this morning. We didn’t want to see the next tragedy that would come behind us on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Walking home like exiles in a skylight of smoke, covered in ashes from the billowing of other people’s lives that wouldn’t ever leave Manhattan, I met Jackie, a fellow refugee on the bridge. She worked two blocks away from the towers and she was heading to Flushing to hug her daughter. She cried the whole way home and I just walked beside her wiping the dust from my shirt and trying to contemplate a normal world again. I thought maybe, we could just imagine that for someone else, today was their kid’s first day of school or the first day of something amazing. Maybe, for someone else, but not for us New Yorkers running from our city, today was the happiest day of their lives…
