Ken,
Your personal disclaimers, early in this message, are needless because for
at least one of your readers (me), what followed was a flow of intimate
recognitions, soul-splitting ironies, confronted horrors, and healed
personal pain.
All of this you offered us, as well as an advance from our muted efforts to
honor those whose lives were sacrificed and whose loved ones continue to
sacrifice in their own lives.
My seldom attendance in group rituals to life-and-death landmarks often
leaves me bereft. You have helped me join you and other POETRYETC
groupmembers to become aware of our hearts' conflicts, feel them more deeply
in the larger embrace, and then reframe them for our growth.
Peace and Power in Love,
Judy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kenneth Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2005 1:15 PM
Subject: Four years later
>I feel condemned to retell this tale. It runs far too long. Famous
>Reporter, Ralph Wessman's publication in Tasmania, already printed some of
>it. But my Ancient Mariner routine gets real old. So does "For I only am
>escaped to tell thee," because a lot more people got out than didn't.
>
> I am sitting this morning at breakfast reading the Newark Star-Ledger, and
> some items strike my attention:
>
> 1. The FBI and local police are increasingly interested in what we borrow
> from public libraries--this provision of the Patriot Act is supposed to go
> away unless it's renewed. I don't think it's going away.
> 2. Americans, at least New Jerseyans, feel less secure now that they did
> four years ago today. Surely this is wrapped in the Katrina disaster on
> top of a disaster, but they feel the government is incapable of protecting
> the citizenry or helping them recover.
> 3. Oh yeah, and Texas beat Ohio State.
>
> Where was I?
>
> At the time, September 2001, I was living at the Jersey Shore. I arose at
> 5 AM each morning and took the 6:46 express from Long Branch to Hoboken.
> At Hoboken I transferred to the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) train
> and got off at Christopher Street, the first stop in Manhattan. This as
> the so-called West Village. I walked behind the exquisite Episcopal
> church St. Luke in the Fields and crossed one block to Washington Street.
> My building, 570 Washington, was at the foot of W. Houston Street. It
> once housed a commuter rail station, and supposedly train tracks were
> still buried in the floors.
>
> Much of New York is a palimpsest.
>
> I was a technical writer, employed on contract. I was working in the
> investment bank back-office of a firm (not to use its name) founded by
> James Merrill's father, among others. I worked there from December 19,
> 2000 until November 30, 2001. I was hired to gather information and to
> write disaster recovery procedures for mainframe-based applications.
>
> The job paid fabulously but was brain-damaging. I shopped online, read,
> noodled on mailing lists, applied to a training program to learn to do
> psychoanalysis and almost got in (proving they were almost crazy but not
> quite), and occasionally got real work to do. I left at 4:30, took the
> 5:09 train to Long Branch, listened to music and read, or slept. In June
> 2001 I had a cancer scare. 'Nothing to get hung about."
>
> I spent the latter part of the summer fighting my annual near-nervous
> breakdown, complete with rapid-cycling that even Lance Armstrong would
> envy, but by early September was feeling much better. I'd started smoking
> again. This was actually fortunate.
>
> On Tuesday September 11 I took the train to work as usual. The day was
> like today: cool morning, gorgeous sunshine. Because the train ran late
> and I had no control over the signals in Newark, I didn't get off the PATH
> train until late and I didn't get to the doors of my firm until 8:45, 15
> minutes late. I looked up as I always did (no dramatic effect here) and
> the North Tower of the World Trade Center was shining in the sunlight, as
> ever. We were about 1/2 mile due north of the buildings.
>
> Sidelight time: until the 1960s, the WTC site had been in part the
> Washington Market on Washington Street, of course. If you read a
> wonderful novel of the Civil War by Peter Quinn, Banished Children of Eve,
> you will see what the old Washington Market was like: greengrocers,
> butchers, other tradesmen. By the time my father took me there in the
> early 1950s it had moved under a huge roof but still was the Washington
> Market. It reeked of fish, dead animals, veggies. When I saw the the
> outdoor butcher shop in Girl With A Pearl Earring, I had a sensory recall.
> Dead stuff. Pigs' heads. Tongues. Blood. Nasty stuff.
>
> The market was torn down, plowed under, and the Trade Center went up where
> it stood. A place of vigorous commerce and of death. And now I am
> straining for effects I didn't need, except to say again that New York is
> a kind of palimpsest.
>
> Probably while I was going up the one floor to my desk, the first plane
> hit the North Tower. Someone who had on either the radio or CNN said
> "Holy shit, someone just flew a plane into the Trade Center." I figured
> some jerk too drunk or coked-up to drive mishandled his Cessna. A
> localized tragedy that would be a big deal on the evening news, but
> nothing more.
>
> A little after 9 AM the same guy said "Someone just flew a plane into the
> other tower, it was a 767." Deductive reasoning, hey, Sherlock...if the
> second plane was a 767, what was the first?
>
> I went outside. I was not alone. A crowd watched Tower No. 1 on fire.
> It had what had to be a 40-story gash in its side and flames and smoke
> were pouring out. People were crying. Some were crossing themselves
> and/or praying aloud. It didn't seem quite believable. The company
> employee who worked with me on the disaster recovery stuff said "Maybe
> they'll need us inside." We went in.
>
> Nobody called.
>
> The phones were a mess. I managed to get through to my girlfriend, who
> worked in Long Branch. Someone had seen it on a news service she she
> knew. I told her I was okay but probably would get stuck in Manhattan
> because I assumed They would close access to the island.
>
> I called my older son, who was in a broadcasting Master's program in
> Boston. He hadn't heard. I laughed: 'Hey newshound, put your TV on." He
> did, and a few seconds later said '"Oh my God, what the hell is this??" I
> whispered "It's the start of World War III, that's my guess." I'm gonna
> try your brother. If you talk to your mother [my ex], let her know not to
> expect any insurance money yet."
>
> I got an email message from said younger son "Dad I just turned on the TV.
> Are you okay? What the fuck is going on?" Miraculously I got an outside
> line on the first try. Ben was in his dorm room at Goucher. I told him
> what was going on, what I understood, that I'd probably be marooned
> overnight but I'd be okay. The odd part is I actually believed that.
>
> Now, I had hurt this kid. I moved out on his mother--and on him--while he
> was still in high school, 2 days after he turned 16. He had been surly
> and pissed at me for years. The rebuilding process had been painstaking
> and slow. Just as I was about to say goodbye, he said "Daddy, I love
> you." I gasped. "I love you too" I said. I hung up, put my head down,
> and began to sob. All the anger in me was gone. I didn't know where I
> was sleeping that night and I felt I'd been given the greatest gift in the
> world.
>
> I head the Towers were gone. Outside there was smoke and fire. I was
> numb. It reminded me of what I'd read about Sodom. Only there were no
> massed sinners here unless you buy into Pat Robertson's crap or Rev. Fred
> Phelps' vile comments about this being the judgment of God on us for
> tolerating a "fag" nation.
>
> At 11:45 the police ordered us out. Walk north, they said. North only.
> I landed on Hudson Street and started walking like an automaton up Hudson
> into 8th Avenue. I noticed almost nothing. I wasn't hungry or thirsty, I
> just wanted to go home. And if that wasn't going to work out, it was
> still a warm night to sleep in the park, there were churches with benches,
> there were shelters. I was oddly at peace.
>
> When I got to Penn Station at 32nd Street the only trains leaving were
> going to Long Island on a very limited schedule. I found a church
> belonging to the Capuchin Franciscan monks. What was in my face? I said
> "Hello, Father" and the priest outside said "You've seen something." I
> told him what I'd seen I told him I could not assemble my thoughts and
> was probably in mild shock. He asked me "Is there anything you can take
> away from what you saw?" Part of me wanted to say "Kill the towelhead
> bastards who did this, rape and murder their wives, torture and kill their
> children, cats, and dogs, and sow their land with salt." That was how I'd
> felt earlier. It was gone, replaced by gratitude for my children and if
> not by forgiveness then a sense of all this as beyond my comprehension. I
> said to the priest "All the things we make for ourselves can be taken away
> in a split second, the people matter but the 'stuff' doesn't matter." I
> thought I was bullshitting the guy but sometime later I realized I'd been
> digging into myself for a cool answer to give a Catholic priest and was
> finding my own truth instead.
>
> I sat through the remainder of the Mass inside, went out and across the
> street, and discovered that the gates to Penn Station were just being
> rolled up. The first train out would be the 2:52 local to Long Branch. I
> got on it, and then was annoyed because it ran late and slow. Amazing.
> Forty minutes late, I stepped onto the platform in Long Branch and a man
> rushed past me into the arms of a woman waiting for him. He spoke the
> most important two words I've ever heard: "I'm alive!" I drove about a
> mile to my girlfriend's business and got my own share of hugs and tears.
>
> I was okay Wednesday but Thursday morning I woke up crying. I don't
> remember what I'd dreamed of but it surely was horrible.
>
> There was no disaster recovery plan ever written out. It lived in
> people's heads. I knew right then I was dead. The Monday after
> Thanksgiving I was told I was through on Friday. The 9/11 hit to the
> firm's investments and clients, plus the overall hideous economy, finished
> off a lot of people.
>
> For several months thereafter every trip to the city brought panic attacks
> and faux heart problems. They gradually faded. I would work in New York
> again if I could. I doubt I can.
>
> Poetry saved my head in the days following the attacks. There are four
> poems on my website about 9/11 and the aftermath. This one is my
> favorite:
>
> DAYS OF AWE (SEPTEMBER 25, 2001)
>
> The legends of resilience
> that have clung forever to the City
> have something to them after all.
> On Hudson Street, on Christopher and Bleecker,
> the Primary Day poll-watchers sit bored,
> eat pizza, while residents ignore them,
> get on with life, tunnel through private ruins
> to find pockets of air amidst the smolder.
>
> Every day brings new rumors:
> asbestos in the air, anthrax in the water,
> smallpox martyrs afoot in Penn Station.
> They'll turn Newark into 18th century London.
> I shrug, am crestfallen.
> The no-fee ATM is still out of order,
> the woman I fantasize over on Bedford Street
> has a girlfriend. Count my blessings:
> there is still a paycheck.
>
> Two weeks ago the Mayor at last ascended
> his mountain. At the Opera House on Saturday,
> a crowd that used to howl him down now cheered
> this new St. Paul, servant of the times,
> with his Epistle to the New Yorkers,
> his proclamation of The Risen City.
> We sat in that same crowd, and
> despite memories of his unbending style,
> tears welled when he spoke of sacrifice and courage.
>
> But Dylan had rung in my head: "Don't follow leaders,
> watch your parking meters," so we'd left the car
> in Jersey, took the train up from the Shore.
>
> My longings are not immortal. They are for an end
> to this film noir where the Hero is a swine
> who's klutzed his way into the truffle patch.
>
> Tragedy is neater. Opera restores the normal
> through the hypernormal.
> It levels the world again.
>
> Domingo, tormented Moor of Venice, witnesses for us
> the collapse of worlds, locks himself with us
> in a grief beyond a grief, stands for one night
> on the seesaw of the world and helps us tilt back
> what seemed to be unholy broken.
>
> KTW/10-5-01
>
> (The Days of Awe, or Yamim Noraim, are the ten days between
> Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the Jewish calendar. They are
> a time for prayer and repentance.)
>
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