It does not seem like twenty-five years ago that I went to vote before heading to work at 1WTC. I had returned home the day before without one of my pearl earrings and mentally retracing my steps, had figured that it must have dropped out in my office as I held that corded phone to my ear. The best laid plans of mice and men!
Outside the school where I voted, I encountered a friend whom I had not seen for ages, and so I stood a while to chat. Got to the local subway station, not the express stop I usually use, fretting as I saw a couple express trains flit by. Upon hearing the announcement that the train will bypass my usual WTC stop, I got off at the stop before. As I exited Rector Street station, thousands of bits of paper falling like confetti greeted me, however, not with joyous news. I walked with heavy feet towards the complex.
To make a long story short, I went from walking towards the WTC complex to listening to a priest in Trinity Church where I was sitting in contemplation, relay the news of an explosion at the Pentagon, to heading down Wall Street when the first building fell. I thought the city was being bombed. After taking refuge in the Wall Street Regent hotel, I plodded up the Ari Halberstram Memorial Ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge to two MTA buses to get home. So many phone calls to field; so much love and trepidation in the air. Imagine my utter joy at seeing then Chief Operating Officer Ernest Butcher speaking on television that evening.
The next day I joined a coworker to travel to a New Jersey PA facility; our only thoughts: -How can we help? - Assigned to answer a phone set up for Port Authority workers to check in, I could tell from the calls that the missing worked primarily above a particular floor. I fielded an inquiry about a missing lawyer with whom I worked closely for years. His funeral service was one of the several I attended. I recollect at the annual memorial service at St. Peter’s church, Ernesto Butcher reading the names of those who perished that fateful day, then, in later years, I would listen to his disembodied voice continuing the tradition.
The experience sucked energy out of the atmosphere mutating the nature of life. Tears and thoughts would come unbidden, though less gut-wrenchingly so, as the years rolled by. Returning to the rebuilt WTC complex as a workplace some fifteen years or so later, seemed like stepping into a new era, the mundane good, bad and indifferent times of everydayness now peculiarly tinged with an undoubtable sterility, a diminished vibrancy, a veneer of stability.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. We are the authors of our own destiny.
Peace, love and light.
