 |
| The Garden of Reflection Park (photo by Sean Rogers) |
Where was I when the planes hit the towers?
In a classroom at the community college where I teach journalism. I had a
news website projected onto the wall, with a live shot of the north
tower belching smoke. When it became clear that this was no accident, I
told my students to grab their reporter's notebooks, fan out across the campus
and start interviewing anyone and everyone they could. We'd need stories for
the student newspaper.
They filed out, and I sat there alone for a moment, watching the image on
the screen. Somehow, the sight of a skyscraper sliced through by a jet wasn't
what was most frightening, probably because the idea of it was still so beyond
comprehension.
No, what was most disturbing, what brought home the magnitude of what had
happened at that point was the fact that the federal government had ordered
every jet in the nation's skies grounded. Every jet.
I called my wife, who works in Philadelphia.
"Stay away from any federal buildings," I told her. "And
Independence Hall. And the Liberty Bell.
Come home."
A few weeks after the attacks I organized a marathon reading of obituaries
of those killed, taken from the pages of The New York Times and the Philadelphia
Inquirer. On a warm, sunny day much like 9/11 itself, dozens of students lined
up at a podium in the college's quad to take part. Many wept as they read, not
just out of a sense of shared grief but because they knew someone who had been
killed. After all, 18 of the victims came from Bucks
County, our county. Nine were from
our little town.
I concluded the event by reading not an obit but a column by Inquirer
sportswriter Bill Lyon, penned just days after the attacks. In it, Bill ruminated on how the
term "hero" is so loosely applied to pro athletes:
I don't mean that we should not have a proper appreciation of our
athletes and of their astonishing skills.
Only that hero is a word to be bestowed with extra care.
These last few days, the rubble has been filled with them.
In their memory, we go on.
It was the single most moving piece I've read about 9/11.
The following spring my students and I organized a forum on news coverage of
the attacks. The panelists included journalists from The New York Times and the
Daily News, NBC News and Fox. Steve Capus, then the executive producer of the
"NBC Nightly News," told the audience how producers had to censor
much of the footage from that day because camera operators kept inadvertently
capturing footage of people jumping to their deaths from the towers. News
reports estimated that as many as 200 people jumped, rather than die from the
smoke and flames.
Such footage could never be aired, Capus said.
Charlie LeDuff of The Times was asked what he did when he first arrived at
the scene of destruction that came to be known as Ground Zero.
"I put down my notebook and picked up a shovel," he said.
I didn't personally know anyone killed in the attacks, and I can only
imagine the pain of those who lost loved ones. But like everyone else I was
changed by that day. For a time I tacked to the right politically, and was
bullish on nearly anything our government could do to bring the terrorists to
justice. When a friend from New Zealand
visited we argued about the war in
Iraq. I was trying to explain to him what 9/11 was like, what it meant to
be attacked that way, and suddenly I heard myself saying:
"We thought the world was coming to an end."
But the world hadn't ended. It went on, and so did we. Months passed, then
years. As my kids got older we tried to explain 9/11 to them, in bits and
pieces, when they asked. We tried to make sense of something that made no
sense, then or now.
And like, I suspect, many others, we were always torn between needing to
remember and wanting to forget. For months I made an evening ritual of reading
The Times' "Portraits of Grief," the paper's attempt to eulogize
every soul lost that day. Somehow I felt I owed it to those people to know
their stories.
Then one day I simply stopped. I just couldn't do it any more.
Likewise, my wife and I watched any number of 9/11 documentaries the first
few years after the attacks. But more recently the DVD
of "United
93," the film about the flight where passengers literally fought the
hijackers to the death, has gathered dust on a shelf. We bought it, every year
or so we think about watching it, and every time we decide on something else.
These days, when I think about 9/11, I take a walk. There's a park a stone's
throw from our house with footpaths, benches and a grove of young oak trees. At
the center of the park there's a fountain with twin jets of water representing
the two towers, and around the fountain, etched in rounded glass panels, are
the names of those from our county who died, including Victor Saracini, pilot
of United flight
175, which slammed into the south tower. The park is called the Garden of Reflection,
and it is a memorial.
The park probably won't be the grandest tribute to those lost on 9/11; that
distinction will almost certainly go to the memorial
at Ground Zero. But what's wonderful and perfect about it is this: It is
full of life. Walkers crisscross the footpaths, kids play pick-up games of
basketball and volleyball, and in summer there's a vigorous community garden
where locals grow tomatoes and lettuce.
So it's there that I go for my walks, a middle-aged man trying to shed some
pounds. Most times I follow the paths but every once in awhile I stop at the
fountain, and look at the twin jets of water, and ponder the names etched in
glass.
And then, full of memories, I go on.