Louder than words

A friend whose family took refuge in our city home on September 11, 2001, was sitting on our stoop as I went out to walk the dog, on the fifth anniversary of that day. She had been walking by our building and could not pass without thinking of us. As she dialed our phone number, I stepped out onto the street. This day was much like that one—with blue skies and a clarity of air that speaks of autumn.

It was my first day in the city since June and I didn’t much want to be there. I would have rather been in Narrowsburg, planting daffodils or painting the flood-ravaged basement walls.

Anything but facing the relative calm of this unofficial day of mourning in the same neighborhood where steel office buildings had turned into a smoldering ruin of ash and death within hours.

My friend and I greeted each other with a silent hug, then walked west together, toward the river, and on down past the Trade Center site. It is a ‘site’ still, not yet buildings, or a center even. “Things fall apart,” Yeats said, commemorating another, older, disaster, “the center cannot hold.”

As we neared the site, a wind gathered. It was a strange wind, sudden and forceful and oddly silent. It stopped us and we turned east as if to see its source. Then I remembered that same wind, on the first anniversary. “The souls,” I said, “I’ve felt this before.”

It was an odd thing to say, I knew. But she didn’t laugh, or question me with a jaded New Yorker glance.

I am no mystic (unlike Yeats) but when nature speaks, I listen. When the river ran through our home, I wondered what was being said. My journal tells me I thought of Yeats then, too.

But I want the center to hold. And things don’t always just fall apart—sometimes they are rent by force. The Trade Center is a reminder of that. Maybe the wind was, too.

Walking through Lower Manhattan on September 11 involves passing by people whose memory of that day is a mystery on a face. A uniformed fire department captain with dressed-up children—are they his or a fallen brother’s? An elderly couple from middle America—tourists or mourners? A businesswoman in heels—where was she five years ago—in a burning staircase or a classroom at Wharton?

Schoolchildren in the yard at recess—was their classroom one that faced south on the spectacle of destruction?

I try to read their stories, silently displayed on their faces, as they walk or stand or run playing.

My friend and I remember small things best, we discover. She remembers the toxic white soot being tracked in by her husband and a fellow evacuee, and me saying ”Oh, never mind,” about the pre-disaster rule we had for taking off shoes at the door.

I remember shooing the children away from the TV room, where adults had gathered to watch the first tower fall in a cloud of gray soot. As I assembled crayons and paper for diversion, I turned to see the youngest child standing at the window, watching it fall in real time.

My friend remembers bargaining with cops to get back across Canal Street after finding dinner in SoHo. I remember ordering a cheeseburger, consciously appraising my odds of dying from heart disease versus a random act of terrorism. The odds favored terrorism that day.

I’ve ordered many unhealthy things in the ensuing years, and gained many pounds as a result. I don’t worry about heart disease much anymore.

My friend tells me that her mother worries about her getting breast cancer so much that it makes it hard to have a normal conversation, without the subject intruding, like an errant plane veering off-course.

I tell her it sounds to me like fear. Fear of the random, silent, unknown. My friend still lives in the (now metaphorical) “shadow” of the site, but that is not what her mother worries about. At least that’s not what she says. Sometimes our silence says more than our words.