Everything is Different Now (part I: NYC)

What follows is exactly as I wrote it on September 12, 2001

Compared to others’ stories, mine is nothing. But people have been asking me where I was, and I wanting more details when I said I was in NY, and on a plane, and I realized I wanted to write it all down.

I’d actually been planning to write it down from the start. This was supposed to be an “airline-flight-from-hell” kind of story. But before it was over, it had become a hell of another sort altogether. A very real one. And deep tragedy had overtaken my light farce like those clouds of dust rolling down Manhattan streets.

It starts – well, it starts in Iceland, I guess. I was there for a bit over a week. A short trip by my standards, but it’s not a big place. And I padded it out with a few days in NY on either end – mostly because I got a great deal by flying through NY. So I returned from Iceland on the 8th. I spent Sunday in Central Park, and had dinner down in lower Manhattan at the Pakistan Tea Shop, on Church near Reade. This is just a hole in the wall but it always has half a dozen cabs parked outside, because it serves excellent and cheap Halal food all night. [It is also, incidentally, now inside the Police cordons around Ground Zero]

Monday, I went to lower Midtown to check out B&H Cameras (an amazing place – it’s like Santa’s Workshop for cameras, with Hassidim standing in for the elves). I was down there with all my camera gear [and had I been there 24 hours later, I would’ve been watching the WTC towers collapse].

My United Airlines flight departed out of JFK at 5:00pm. Generally leaving at 3:15 from Midtown barely gets me there in time, and this time I had a bag to check. So I decided to try to leave extra early. Unfortunately, as I dragged my bags to the curb at 2:50, thunder boomed. Way out in the Atlantic, a tropical storm was headed north towards the Maritimes. It was casting off thunderstorms in its wake. In the torrential rain, suddenly every cab was occupied. I huddled under an awning, hoping to flag someone down. I had my goretex jacket with me (necessary gear for Iceland) but it was so hot I couldn’t keep it done up. Fortunately, the shower was brief, if intense. But by the time I finally flagged down a cab, I was running late.

The trip out to JFK was the usual slow slog. There was more rain, and traffic slowed even more. It was almost five as we circled the airport drive, on our way to terminal 7. The cab driver sat up suddenly and looked out his window, looking back. “We have a flat tire!” he announced. What? I looked around. He was busy peering back at his tire. We missed the turn to terminal 7. “Pull over!” I yelled at him. There wasn’t really any place to do that – there’s little shoulder there at the best of times, and hoardings and equipment from random construction was occupying it. We rolled to a halt, more or less in the main traffic lanes. It would take forever to fix the flat, forever to go around the airport again to Terminal 7, and there was no other way to drive. I threw the money at him, climbed out and grabbed my bags. Facing two lanes of hurtling cabs and irate limo drivers, I started to jog back towards the terminal. On the positive side, my gear was in a pack and a couple of shoulder bags, so carrying it wasn’t difficult. On the negative side, the gear was heavy, the air was hot and humid, and I was out of time. And traffic was trying to kill me.

Into the terminal and up to the United counter, where there seemed to be two agents actually dealing with passengers and four agents doing, well, it wasn’t clear exactly. But they weren’t dealing with customers. I was in the business class line (because I have “premier” status on United, not because I had a business ticket) but it was moving even slower than the economy line.

Finally I got to the counter. My only hope was that perhaps the thunderstorms had delayed flights. I told the agent I was on the flight to Seattle. “Well, you missed that,” he replied. I started to tell him about the flat tire in the cab, but quickly gave up to think about my options. United has only one direct flight from NY to Seattle: the one I had just missed. Perhaps I could just ask to be rebooked on the one at 5pm on Tuesday, the 11th. I was weighing another day in NY against another $80 in cab fare to get back into Manhattan and out to JFK again. Meanwhile the agent was prodding his computer terminal. “I can get you on a flight to the west coast with a connection to Seattle, but you’ll have to move quick. It leaves at 5:20” My thoughts of flying out the evening of the 11th evaporated.
[Had I stayed, I would still be stuck in NY]

I thanked him, grabbed my bags, and went through security. The flight to San Francisco I was now on left out of Terminal 6, but there was a shuttle bus that ran between the terminals. Fortunately this left almost as soon as I arrived, and I got to the gate with minutes to spare.

I walked onto a packed 767. My seat was literally the last open seat in the aircraft. But at least this was a wide-body 767, and not the narrow-body 757 that does the Seattle route. [Only now, in retrospect, do those simple plane models that I’ve flown so often seem darkly ominous.] I would have an aisle seat, with just one neighbor in my row at the window. As I settled into the seat, he asked me if I had been on the 4:30 flight. I summarized my situation, and he explained that half the people on this airplane had been on a 4:30 flight to SF that had been cancelled. Hence what would’ve been a half-full flight was now packed to the gills.

There was a delay before we pushed back from the gate. We taxied for a while, then stopped. Another short move, and we stopped again. We waited. And waited.

Puzzled, I put on the headphones and tuned into channel 9. United flights typically put the pilot chatter through on this frequency. The pilots can turn it off if they want, but usually they leave it on so you can hear exactly what they hear and say over whatever frequency they are using. It quickly became apparent things weren’t looking good. Air Traffic Control was using the runways for arrivals only. Thunderstorms were expected to shut down the airport at any minute. They were scrambling to fit airplanes everywhere they could. All the gates were full, but they needed to open some up for arriving flights. Departing flights, and idle aircraft, were getting stuffed onto taxi ways nose to tail, parked on inactive runways, slipped in anywhere there was room. Realizing they were in for a long wait, pilots were calling up and asking for permission to shut down their engines to conserve fuel. Our flight did the same. Our pilot came on the intercom and explained the situation. We were going to wait.

And wait. And wait. The thunderstorms passed, and a few flights took off. Many more landed. More thunderstorms moved in. [You wonder: if the storms had come 12 hours later – as unlikely as morning thunderstorms are – would the hijackers have had difficulty finding New York? Would their flights have been delayed? Would the flight out of Newark that hit the Pentagon never have left? The imponderables mount.] On board our flight, people were walking their kids around, talking on cell phones, going back to the lavatories. Many of the people had been in NY to watch the New York Open Tennis match, so there was a lot of tennis talk in the aisle. The flight attendants distributed snacks. They started playing the movie.

Meanwhile, on Channel 9, more aircraft were calling in. Some couldn’t get to their gates. The ATC guy was sounding more and more harried. Now planes were calling in to report their crews were going to run over the maximum work hours before they would be arriving at their destination, so once the aircraft started moving again they were going to have to get out of line and go back to their gate for a fresh crew. I was really wishing I had made it onto my Seattle flight. Then I heard them call in: they were still on the ground too, up near the front of the line. But they now had a problem: because they had been close to takeoff, they had been running their engines longer than most. They no longer had enough fuel to get to Seattle. When they line started moving, they were going to have to get out, go back to the gate to refuel, and then get in line again. Wow: things could be worse.

Finally, the engines started. The passengers cheered. We took off. The passengers cheered again (and when we landed in SF they cheered a third time). We were in the air…at 9:20, four full hours after the flight was supposed to leave, and six and a half hours after I had first tried to hail a cab in Manhattan. Ahead of me: five and a half hours in the air, and then I would be in SF, not Seattle. Obviously I had missed my connecting flight. Well, I would deal with that later. I tried to get some sleep.

Next: SFO

Everything is Different Now (part II: SFO)

We arrived in SF a bit before1:00am Pacific Time, 4am NY time and – well, even earlier, or later, Iceland time. There was hardly anyone around. I found my way down to the United lost luggage counter, which also deals with lost people who have missed the last flight of the day. They explained that they wouldn’t put me up since I had missed my flight for weather reasons (and actually I had missed my real flight for reasons unconnected to United altogether). They could give me a list of hotels near the airport, or I was welcome to take a little hospitality kit and borrow a pillow and blanket to sack out at the airport.

I debated my options. The first flight to Seattle was at 6am. There was no way I was paying for a hotel just to turn around and come back to the airport for a flight 5 hours later. If I was going to stay at a hotel, I might as well rebook on, say, a noon flight. I was seriously considering this. I asked them about my checked bag – I didn’t need anything in it, but I wanted to know where it was. They explained that it was secure “in the back” and that since it was checked through to Seattle it would be on the first flight out in the morning. That settled the question: I didn’t want my bag sitting in SeaTac while I snoozed in SF. I asked to be put on the first flight in the morning, took my hospitality kit, and hiked back up to the gate.

I had spent a lot of time in SFO in the 90s. Most of the seats in the gates at SFO have arms on either side, but there are a few where a span of three seats goes unbroken by armrests. And then I found the prize: four seats together, with nary an arm between them. My bed for the night. Well, it wouldn’t be the first night I spent in an airport, though SFO had none of the diversions found in Dubai duty-free. Still, it was pretty quiet, and I had my eye shades and ear plugs and a pillow. I actually managed to get a couple of hours sleep.

I got up a little before 5am, brushed my teeth, and was first in line to get a boarding pass when they opened the counter. I called my friend Sheri in NY. “Guess where I am?” It was one of those funny, I-can’t-believe-I’m-not-home-yet stories. Then, since my cell phone batteries were getting low (I had not packed a recharger with me) and I was going to be boarding a flight soon anyway, I turned my phone off. First flight of the day, and the weather was good, so there were no delays. We boarded sometime around 5:45.
[A continent away, the first aircraft – United Flight 11 – was striking the World Trade Center]

Our airplane was one of the emptiest I’ve seen in a long time – perhaps half full. I was the only person in my row on the right of the plane; there was one guy in the row across the aisle. Pushing away from the gate, I once again tuned the headphones to channel 9 to listen to the pilots and ATC. There was some chatter, but it was still early and the flights were leaving without delay. We took off on schedule at 6am. [The second aircraft was striking the south tower. Sheri, watching the news and at that moment suddenly cognizant that hijacked airliners were being used as weapons, desperately tried to call me back – but of course she got no answer.] Bored, I put the headphones in the seat pocket and picked up my book.

We took off normally and reached cruising altitude for a few minutes. Then the plane suddenly began to descend. I looked up from my book, mildly puzzled: we were not yet close to Seattle. I picked up the headphones to listen. Music. That was odd; sometimes the pilots put music on the channel 9 the entire flight, but why would they switch to it in the middle? I started to feel uneasy. The pilot came on the intercom: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Air Traffic Control has asked to land as a precautionary measure. There is nothing wrong with our aircraft. We will be landing in Eugene Oregon in a few minutes. This would be a good time to put away anything in the overhead bins or use the bathroom. We will be turning the seatbelts sign on shortly.” He paused briefly, then said “We will give you more information later.”

A “precautionary measure,” dictated by ATC. That was good news, at least as far as we were concerned. We were making a rapid descent but nothing as extreme as some I’ve experienced in normal airline travel. There certainly didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the aircraft. And if there had been, it wouldn’t have been ATC asking us to land; it would’ve been the other way around. But there had been something strange in the pilot’s voice. The way he had said “precautionary measure” had sounded odd, strained. Whatever it was, something bad had happened. I regretted I hadn’t kept the headphones on: I would’ve heard the initial call from ATC, before the pilots switched Channel 9 to music. I ran through every scenario I could think of. The one that seemed most likely, though I didn’t like it very much, was that there had been a crash at SeaTac. That would’ve required closing the airport, and rather than have planes stack up overhead they would divert them to other airports. I briefly considered a bomb threat, but it seemed unlikely that would shut down the entire airport. The only other thing I could think of – and you can thank Iceland for putting the idea into my head – was that one of the volcanoes had erupted. Hood, Adams, Rainier, St Helens again, even Shasta or Baker; any of them could belch a bunch of ash that would divert every flight in the northwest. But that seemed even more unlikely, since volcanoes generally gave plenty of warning. But the warnings came as earthquakes, and the February 28 quake in Seattle had closed SeaTac. Could there have been another one?

I looked around the cabin. No one seemed particularly concerned, though there were a few exasperated expressions. No doubt morning meetings would be missed. I was tempted to blurt out, “This is my fault. You’re all victims of my travel karma.” But of course I didn’t. I was starting to wonder if I was ever going to get to Seattle. Like some kind of bad dream, the further I went the longer it seemed to take. Like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, running as fast as she could to stay in one place.

The descent and landing were uneventful. I peered out the window at Eugene: an airport I never would’ve had any reason to visit. It looked small, and empty. We pulled up to the gate, the seatbelt signs went off, and the pilot spoke on the intercom. “Ladies and Gentlemen, please take all your carry-on baggage with you. Your checked luggage will remain secured in the aircraft.” There was a pause, a longer one. “The information we have is that an aircraft, is that two…and we’re finding this very hard to believe – “ An aircraft. Two. In that instant, running scenarios in my head, I expected him to tell us there had been a mid-air at SeaTac. Two aircraft. “But ATC tells us that two aircraft have hit the World Trade Center in New York.”

A mutter ran through the cabin. Confused conversation. Seated near the front, I walked off past quiet flight attendants and a grim looking cockpit crew. None of the usual “Thank you, have a nice day” routine. I was still confused. How could two aircraft hit the world trade center? I was thinking light planes, or commuter flights, helicopters maybe. I was thinking it had happened simultaneously, both in the same tower, and still in terms of a mid-air collision. One seemed possible, but how could two hit? And why would that have any effect on flights on the west coast?

In the gate area there were the usual televisions, tuned to CNN. As we got off the plane we clustered around, craning our necks to see. The sound was off but the closed captioning was turned on. I found myself reading an interview between a reporter and some witnesses on the scene

“You were in the tower?”
“Yes, Tower 1. We just got out. We were afraid it was going to tumble.”
“The other tower did tumble.”

I couldn’t make any sense of it. “Tumble”? What the hell were they talking about? Big buildings like that don’t just "tumble."

One of the gate agents called out to us, suggesting that a larger TV with sound could be found further towards the center of the terminal, in a café. As a group, we picked up and trouped down there. We found seats and tried to make sense of what we saw on TV. At first it was hard to separate what was live breaking reports and what was tapes of earlier events. They kept showing a shot of one of the towers standing next to a cloud of smoke. I kept trying to parse the scene, looking for the other tower through the smoke. Gradually, as the cold horror settled upon me, I began to understand what the voices on the TV were saying: that tower was gone. Then, as we watched, the other tower collapsed. I’m not sure of all of what I said, but I did gasp “I was just in New York yesterday.”

“I live in New York,” replied the man beside me. I looked over at him. Young, trim, good looking, wearing an expensive suit. Classic Wall St. type.

“In Manhattan?” I asked.

“Yeah. My apartment has a view of the World Trade Center.” We both looked back at the screen.

“Not anymore,” I said. Writing this now, it sounds like a line from a comedy of the blackest sort. But neither of us saw it that way at the time; it was a grim expression of truth, trying to make sense of a new reality by putting it into words. He nodded.

The man seemed remarkably calm. He tried his cell phone, gave up, and pulled out his Blackberry two-way pager. I didn’t want to interrupt him, and the news pulled me back. All around us, people were sitting watching, silent, their heads in their hands like their brains couldn’t take the weight of the sights their eyes took in. I tried my cell phone, running through everyone I knew in NY. Nothing but busy signals. More flights arrived, more people joined us, asking questions. Without taking our eyes away from the screen, we updated them with what we knew. Two planes, no three. One at the Pentagon. A bomb at the State Department, maybe. A fourth plane, unaccounted for. People falling, or jumping, from buildings. Fires. Smoke. Collapse. Death.

One guy, an arrival off another flight, demanded to know why the airliners hadn’t been shot down. I started arguing with him that you don’t just shoot down airliners, even if they had been hijacked. But privately I wondered why the pentagon, with more time to prepare, hadn’t had any apparent defenses. The TV drew us back, and our argument evaporated as we lost its thread, sucked down into the maelstrom on TV.

Somewhere in there, I found myself saying: “Everything is different now.”

Next: Oregon

Everything is Different Now (part III: Oregon)

Police appeared, and asked us to move into the main part of the terminal. All the diverted flights had landed, and they were shutting down the airport. As we walked out through the security gates, we were confronted by half a dozen video crews. The Eugene media, desperately trying to find a local angle, was clustering around the passengers. I tried to look as un-interviewable as possible and walked over to the bar where people had already gathered around the TVs. The Wall St guy sat down at a table and continued typing on his pager. I felt oddly protective of him, and hoped the media people didn’t find him. They were interviewing people at the back of the pack clustered around the TV. One of the reporters was asking “Collapsed? What do you mean?” People stared at him. “I haven’t seen any news, I don’t know what’s happening,” he clarified. Passengers started explaining to him. He stood, open-mouthed, the microphone forgotten in his hand. Behind him a radio guy was holding his microphone up towards the loudspeakers in the ceiling, trying to catch the announcements that the airport was closed. Our luggage would be coming off the planes.

I couldn’t take it anymore: I wanted to get out, to get away. I walked down to the rental car counters. Strangely, there were only a couple of people in line. National said their cars had all been rented, but Avis said they had some still available. Beside me, a guy was asking what kind of cars they had because he didn’t want to be “stuck in some subcompact all the way up to Seattle.” I rolled my eyes. I simply asked for a car, and didn’t even discuss it, not even the rate. All I wanted to know was if I could return it in Seattle. When I left the guy was still insisting he didn’t want a subcompact.

I went and got my bag. I had last seen it in New York while checking in for the direct flight to Seattle that I didn’t get on. Amazingly, despite missing a flight, taking another flight from a different gate, and missing a connection in San Francisco, my bag had arrived in Eugene with me. As I carried it back past the rental car desks the folks at Avis were taking down their Cars Available sign. A guy was asking them if there was any chance they could find him a car. I stopped and said I was going to Seattle. He was going back to San Francisco. I wished him luck.

I asked the guy in the rental lot for directions to a mall, and he told me there was one right on my way. I pulled in and immediately saw what I was looking for: an AT&T store. I went in and bought an in-car recharger for my cell phone. Next door was a Barnes and Noble with a Starbucks. I bought a large Frappicino, with extra shots, and a sandwich. It took less than 15 minutes, and I had exactly everything I needed. This is what I love about America: Give me convenience or give me death. The people working in the mall seemed strangely normal, undisturbed. I wondered if they’d even heard the news. I felt pregnant with evil information. Beware the stranger, for he bears grim portents. Lack of sleep, undigested horror, the incongruity of small town Oregon: it was all starting to pile up. I wondered if I had had some insane nightmare, or was still in one. I turned on the radio and confirmed the truth: it was an insane nightmare, and we were all still in it, together.

Driving north the hot late-summer Oregon sunshine seemed weirdly at odds with the dark news coming out of the radio. I couldn’t help but listen though there were times when it seemed particularly hard to bear. Then I found myself singing the words to Amazing Grace as a lone bagpipe played it on the radio, and I had to pull over. It was impossible to see the road.

Looking for some respite, I tried other stations. I found the local rock station just as it began playing U2’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday.

“I can’t believe the news today
I just want to close my eyes and make it go away…”

Suddenly I remembered the last time I had heard this played in circumstances like these. Over ten years ago, waking on a groggy early summer weekend, I had turned on the radio just in time to hear the DJ say, “We don’t do dedications, but I’m doing one anyway. This is for all the brothers and sisters in Tianamen.” And he played that song. Hearing it again was strangely comforting. I remembered worrying about my friend Flea, who had quit Microsoft to teach English in China, and who had gotten swept up in the events. We didn’t hear from her for days. She had emerged unharmed, but suddenly I was consumed with worry about her cousin Russ. He had moved from Seattle to NY last year. I was pretty certain he had no reason to be anywhere near the World Trade Center, and he was one of the NYC people on the list I had run over mentally in the moments after the initial shock had worn off. I had tried to call him earlier, but the circuits were busy. Now, despite the pleas on the radio to keep the phone lines clear, I tried again. To my surprise I got his voicemail and left a message. [Later he sent out email saying he was ok.]

I wasn’t the least bit sleepy, but suddenly I was very, very tired. I didn’t want to deal with Portland, with Seattle, with five hours of driving and nothing but bad news on the radio. I called Brendan and Eva in The Dalles. Not exactly on my route, but only a couple of hours away.

Being there, with kids to take to preschool and drop off with friends and all the usual errands that occupy a family household, brought a measure of sanity back into my world. We couldn’t turn the news on because we didn’t want the kids to see it, and because I hadn’t seen them in months we had plenty to talk about other than current events. It was exactly the kind of vacation I needed.

But the kids went to bed, and we watched the news. Then Brendan and Eva turned in, and it was just me. Sitting alone in the dark in the horror. I crawled to bed.

I woke again at 5:30, and knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. I don’t know if I was still on Iceland time, or New York time, or just held awake by the horror, but sleep was no longer an option. I got up and watched the day’s first light catch the top of Mt Adams. In the cool of the Oregon dawn it was hard to believe that anything ugly, anything horrible, could be happening anywhere. And then I went back inside and turned on the TV.

A little after noon, I got in the car again. I was headed to Seattle, but not home. Home was gone now. Home was a place in a country and in a time where the Twin Towers still stood. I couldn't return to the place I'd left. I was driving in a new world, into a new future. This trip started out seeming like it would never end. And now it never will.

Driving north again, everywhere I looked there were American flags. In windows, on signs, in yards. And on flagpoles, at half mast. I stopped for gas at an AM-PM in some Podunk truck stop in rural southern Washington. As I was puzzling over the pump (the credit card reader was at a central location on the island, rather than at each pump), a local guy leaned out of his window to help. Driving a ratty, rusted pickup held together as much by duct tape and bumper stickers as welds, dressed in jeans of a color indeterminate beyond “dirt,” and sporting weird tufts of facial hair and teeth unfamiliar with modern dental science, he was the kind of guy who would normally inspire you to keep your distance. He asked where I was headed.

“Seattle”

He nodded. “You be careful, now,” he said. And drove off. The American flag in his rear window no longer screamed “redneck.” Instead, on this day and in this time, it looked, just a little, like a prayer.

Next: Requiem

Everything is Different Now (part IIII: Requiem)

I have had the good fortune to visit New York City several times in the past few years. I always found it a warm, welcoming place (at least compared to a cold, socially repressed city like Seattle). Riding the subways, afraid to be taken for a tourist (which of course I was), I discovered even native New Yorkers checked the maps when they were on an unfamiliar line. To my amusement, several times I was asked by other subway riders if the train went to or stopped at a certain station; and to my astonishment, in each case I happened to know the answer. Everybody is an immigrant in New York, even if his or her family has lived there for generations. And despite their reputation the people were generally friendly. The legendary chutzpah meant that everyone spoke their minds, and the legacy of wisecracking cynicism meant they usually did so amusingly. As a result I found the city drew you in, engaged you. In the subway it was the people; on the street it was the bustle; and above the street it was the buildings. As much as you wanted to act not the tourist, those buildings drew your eyes up, demanded your attention.

Ironically, the twin towers of the World Trade Center never made much of an impression on me. They were too big, too bland, too boring. Brutal, even. Boxy, scaleless, graceless, they defined the skyline without enhancing it. For me the iconic skyscrapers were always the Empire State Building and, to a lesser extent, the Chrysler building. When emerging from the subway it was the Empire State Building I looked to orient by. When I was downtown I sometimes noticed the tops of the Trade Center looming over the surrounding buildings, but they were more like some ugly pair of mountains than anything else: distant, dark, impassive. Although I had visited Battery Park I never went in the buildings; never saw the view from the roof or dined at Windows on the World. I was never across the Hudson, so that famous WTC-punctuated skyline was never a cherished memory. And yet, I could see them in my mind’s eye, from across that river, from the air, from angles I had never seen, from places I'd never been. Thanks to television and movies, those towers were part of my memory, part of all of our collective consciousness. America has always been as much an ideal and a vision as a real country, a place alive in myth and yearning, in the imagination of all those who live there and all those all over the world who ever wish to. And New York was always the capitol of that imaginary America: its streets populated with golden-hearted Irish cops and tough-talking Mafiosi, with smart-alec paper boys and quarter-tossing pinstriped bankers, with sharp-eyed reporters and wise-assed construction workers, with baggy-pants rappers and watch-capped graffiti artists and black-hatted Hassidim and the kids from “Rent” and “Fame” and every person with a book in their heads or a song in their hearts or a dance step in their feet and a dream of opening on Broadway. The New York of these dreams, the streets that held up those aspirations, had a skyline; and in the center of it was the World Trade Center. In the dream Lady Liberty might open her arms to all of us; but her eyes were on that skyline, on those towers. And she directed our eyes there too: from “Barney Miller” to “Sex in the City,” from “Wall Street” to “Working Girl” to “The Sopranos,” we saw them and knew them and all they represented. Whether we’d been to the real New York or not, whether we aspired to live there or visit or even to stay away from all it represented, the city was always a place that occupied substantive psychic real estate: footed by the subways, girdled by Central Park, and crowned by those skyscrapers. It might be “Next year, in Jerusalem” but it was always “Someday in New York.” Yes: it was always Someday in New York. And whether that Someday ever came for us, whether we ever really got to that city or not, it was enough to know that it existed.

And now a very big part of it doesn’t. September 11 was a Someday that came, and left, and took so much with it.

I fear in the coming decades we will look back at the 90s in much the way we have always looked back at the 20s: a fin de siecle golden age of giddy good fortune, of naïve parties and celebrated trivia, of unbounded enthusiasm and irrational speculation. We have moved into a new, more sober time. The dimensions of this time are not clear, and won’t be for years. But already we know the tone is darker, more serious. Hope is not gone, but hype is surely no longer appropriate. And whatever comes in the future, what is certainly appropriate now, at this moment, is mourning. Mourning for the lost people, certainly: that awful number magnified by lives lived and all the loved ones left behind: all the siblings and parents, friends and partners, children now fatherless or never to be. But mourning too, by all of us, for that city in our heads forever scarred, forever changed.  The city we are losing.

While traveling in the Middle East last summer I took along a couple of books of poetry. One by Rumi, the Sufi mystic; and one by Constantine Cavafy. Greek, Orthodox Christian, and gay, Cavafy lived in Ottoman Turkish Alexandria before World War One, at a time when that city was one of the most cosmopolitan in all the world. Not a financial powerhouse like New York, it was nevertheless similar: a rivermouth port city that welcomed and celebrated art and society. Its cultural diversity was such that Cavafy, triply a minority, felt at home there; and its creative energy propelled his best work. In Cavafy’s time it was a magnetic light shining across the eastern Mediterranean, even if its signature tower had long since fallen into the sea. But that time is now long gone, swept away by war and by the very forces of evil and intolerance that perhaps plotted against New York. Cavafy was very much aware of those forces, and the fragile nature of the tolerant city in which he lived — not least because Alexandria had occupied this position before, in the time of the Caesars, and had been destroyed. So he wrote both about a city that once had been, and a city, a place, a time, that — even as he inhabited it — he feared would soon be gone forever. And, like any great poet, he wrote about all such cities, and all such times; times such as these.

The God Abandons Antony
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don't mourn your luck that's failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive - don't mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final delectation - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, the Alexandria you are losing.
 -- Constantine P. Cavafy

My deepest sympathies to all who have lost. And my greatest respect and most sincere salute to all the rescuers, the people of New York, and most especially to the city’s firemen. You make me proud to live in America, to have visited New York, and to be a human being.

-- September 12, 2001