9/11 and the Kindness of Strangers
What follows is personal, with digressions and possible morals to the story, but nothing conclusive.
I lived in New York during 9/11, but I have never written about it.
The Beauty of that September morning was memorable. The brightness of the world in the early fall when everything has the glow of summer’s warmth and colors till upon it, fading only a shade or too that only deepens the brightness the beauty by the slight change, electric with possibilities.
September for me was always like the overture in a musical, that moment when the house lights dim and everything who has been talking realizes that it’s time for the show to begin and mostly fall silent, that moment like a silent in breath as the curtain raises and the music that accompanies this story begins to play. It is a breath taking moment and if it could be distilled over a few. Days or perhaps the first month in the season leading us from summer to winter, the time that by name has it’s out season: Indian summer.
I couldn’t think of the name for a moment and then when I did, I wondered, for the first time, what the origin of the name was and if it’s origin was racist ( and I feared it would be)
Here’s that the Farmer’s Almanac on line had to tell me:
“Weather Historian William R Deedler, of the National Weather Service, describes it as “any spell of warm, quiet, hazy weather that may occur in October or even early November”.
“An Indian summer is typically caused by a sharp shift in the jet stream from the south to the north. The warm weather may last anywhere from a few days to over a week and may happen multiple times before winter arrives for good.”
Origins of name:
“No one really knows how the term “Indian summer” came to describe such periods. One theory suggests that early American settlers mistook the sight of sun rays through the hazy autumn air for Native American campfires, resulting in the name “Indian summer.” Others speculate that Native Americans recognized this weather pattern and used the opportunity to gather additional food for the winter.”
Other names for this season
“Indian summer is a common occurrence not only in North America but also throughout temperate European countries, where it is most commonly called “St. Martin’s Summer.” The name is a reference to St. Martin’s Day, which falls on November 11. Many countries, including England, Italy, Portugal, and Sweden, have traditional outdoor festivals in the week leading up to St. Martin’s Day.
Other popular variations include “Second Summer,” “St. Luke’s Summer,” in reference to St. Luke’s Day on October 18, “All-Hallown Summer,” in reference to All Saints Day on November 1, and the more popularly celebrated “All Hallow’s Eve,” or Halloween.”
On this September morning I was 36 and living in New York, and I was not living a glamorous life but I was living in New York and in a way that made everything that was ordinary and hard, also glamorous.
I had no idea how I’d made to this movie set, and moreover inside of it, or near to those inside, for I had seen countless movies set in places I now walked past to and from work at Baruch College and the Fashion Institute of Technology, in the heart of the garment district.
There was something I particularly loved about walking around the garment district, this industrial center of clothing industry — the makers, the sewers, the factories that make clothing and around it, the fashionistas who wore clothes and for whom clothes mattered. I did not know it then, but now I do. I am one of those people. I love style. It is one of the things that wakes my spirit up, makes me both perk up and dream — I love shows where people where interesting outfits. I recently saw the law according Lidia Poet, and she wore fabulous outfits — the hats and hair ornaments. I thought I had seen turn of the century fashion but this is what has started to happen — costume designers for movies are quoting old fashions and remaking them and so what you see is a kind of current haut couture fashions who are hip enough to create trends in the retelling/revisioning the past.
But I digress.
September 11, 2011, anyone who was there in New York will tell that the beginning of that morning was marked by beauty.
I remember being in Cafe Santiago in Washington Heights, a small cafe at the top of the stairs and across the street from the 181st subway stop on 181st and Broadway. This is where I went to write and gossip with Jenny who was a graphic designer and her friend Tamara, who was from Mexico and studying Sexuality ( with a much sexier name) at the New School and ShiChi, a writer, who lived right next to the park with her husband whom I never met. Every day an old man, came in and filled an empty coffee cup full of cream and was chased away by Jesus, the flaming barista who, after putting on his serious face, watching the guy as he left, would then burst into laugher at the man’s persistence. It was a comedy routine that unfolded in exactly the same slapstick routine three days out of five.
Cafe Santiago was the closet thing in New York I had to friends. I worked 6 jobs, in the afternoon and evening. Morning was my time to write at the cafe. There was television over the bar that I tried to ignore while I wrote, and for the most part did by turning away from it.
A ripple passed through the cafe, everyone suddenly talking about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. The owner of the cafe rolled his eyes and we all did at a pilot who did not notice he were getting too close to a building in the middle of New York City.
We started to gather around the TV — I actually got up from my seat to stand closer and we all gazed up at the screen.And then we saw the planes, one and then the second one and suddenly, it became very serious. It was not a joke. It was deliberate, an attack. And then the towers fell.
You could feel reality changing, breaking, the strongest unconscious assumption suddenly falling away, as the strongest of steel beams holding one of the tallest building in the world crumbled in less than five minutes to dust.
And people’s first instinct, was to help one another.
The firemen who ran into the burning towers who never came out.
The strangers who offered water, and housing and comfort.
I was due to teach that evening at Baruch and so I called and Toby the secretary who said classes were canceled, in a hurried fashion. She was trying, everyone was trying to make their way home. In mid morning, everyone suddenly was turning around and trying to get home. Home being the place of safety.
That’s when I felt the second or third ripple in reality: the college only closed for a weather or a natural disaster : A bag snowstorm or a black out. This was like that only the storm that was coming was political — what was going to be the response — what story was being told about why this had happened and who was responsible?
I remember getting in my car to drive back to my apartment, and on the way, I pulled my car to the curb and asked if anyone needed a ride north. Perhaps the third wave of reality changing — Everyone was trying to get home — I had a car, it was the least I could do to help.
And so I took some guy who jumped to the edge of the Bronx where where was going to try to catch a bus to get home. I debated about whether to drive him but I was afraid if I didn’t find a parking spot soon, I would not be able to park anywhere in Manhattan and I would have to find some place to leave the car.
(Its amazing and absurd that I had a car in Manhattan, one that would randomly keen with it’s horn for it’s old owner but that’s another story.)
So I hurried back to my apartment on Park Terrace west at the very tip of Manhattan, where I lived on a fourth floor, pre war walk up along with hundreds of people, next to Inwood Park. On the tip of Manhattan, it was a place where the circle line turned, making its circle or half circle up the Hudson River of around Manhattan along Harlem River and back to the harbor.
This is where I began to talk walks in a woods older than the founding of New York City where wild turkeys still roamed.Also where Law and Order often filmed the scene where a body is found in the woods.
I remember being in my apartment with a little black and white TV, seeing the endless replays of the planes, over and over and over and over again — it was hypnotizing — a horror you couldn’t bring yourself to look away from.
The photo of the woman in a business suit covered in white dust, a ghost emerging from the wreckage.
All the people inside who’d died. Whole floors of people.
The people deciding to jump. The people who witnessed. The piece of a hand or foot discovered on the street a few blocks away. The debate about the photo on the cover of the New York post about the man, one leg bent, diving nose first to his death.
At Baruch, many of the students were studying business and I knew one that worked the overnight shift as security at the Twin Towers. He was a brilliant political scientist from Nigeria, who was studying accounting and putting himself through school by working as a security guard.
I remember how I dreaded going back to class and taking attendance and finding out one of my students had been in one of the towers.
On student who did come back said that she was late that day and everyone in her department where she worked, died. She was the lone survivor.
For a few weeks after the towers fell, I walked past the Armory which was covered with posters of faces of people that were missing, with number to call in case they were found.
At home, if there was any report on the new about someone being found, or the sign of someone I would get near to be sure to hear but very quickly, the story would not be about a survivor found but by the opposite — no one at all was found in the rubble. Just parts of their bodies — if at all, too few and far between to make up a whole body found.
I remember the priest at the Riverside Church who I had become friends with who went down to 9/11 every day to help the firemen who were digging through the rubble.
I remember George W. Bushes completely dazed, zombie like walk as he was given the news and stood up from the chair in the kindergarten where he had been when the planes hit, and then him walking to the podium with cameras flashing, to pronounce the name of Osama Bin Laden and Al Quaeda and this world of terrorists that were out to get us.
And then I remember the sadness I felt as heard about people who “looked” Arabic being attacked, beaten up on the streets. Sikhs with their white turbans, who had nothing to do anything with were attacked, their turbans ripped away, a man and a woman beaten.
The bodegas at the corner next to the A subway stop was owned by two brothers from Yemen with a revolving set of cousins who worked there for a few months at a time. They put a big American flag in the window and several signs declaring their support and begging looters not to loot and destroy their business. I worried one day they might disappear. Their bodega survived, because they had a metal grate that went over the front window. But many little businesses did not.
I heard the stories about ordinary people who were picked up for questioning and no one knew where they were. Later, when I lived in Argentina, I heard stories about the Ford Falcons that would come to pick up a young person who had written something for a school editorial, who was taken to the police for questioning and no one could tell the mothers where they had been taken or what their crime was. They were simply “disappeared” — never heard from again.
It seemed at the time that the mood of the country turned from universal solidarity and an outpouring of understanding we were one, to a mood of vengeance and looking for the enemy to destroy for the pain they’d caused, the sense of vulnerability that had awakened in people who before may have felt vulnerable, but also felt largely protected by being an American. As if being American came with some guarantee of safety that was not available on many parts of the world, but was part of being the “greatest” country in the world because it was the land of opportunity and safety from the misfortunes of war and terrorism and political unrest. Up until then, many Americans saw them selves as a part of a stable democracy, never mind its contradictions: Gun violence, gang warfare, and a prison system that had all but imprisoned an entire generation of young men of color, the decimation of unions and with it the stable working class jobs, an ongoing campaign to scapegoat immigrants.
I remember how when people returned to their jobs there was a certain zombie like quality — everyone going through the motions but at the same time aware that life was not going back to normal, ever. There was a clear before and after. It didn’t help we were told about orange and red alerts and to be careful though never exactly what we could do.
And now having lived through another major, unprecedented historical event — that of the pandemic, I can say that there were marked similarties about both.
In the earliest days of both there was an outpouring solidarity — as everyone realizing this was a moment to do something, rose to the occasion in whatever way they could. Not everyone wants to be a hero, but many, most in their way, want to do something to help, and did.
And in both cases, when people felt vulnerable, they could choose helping or they could choose blaming and many chose to find an enemy they could hate/ blame/ feel superior to. And so factions were quickly formed: The “sheople” and the anti-vaxers. Trump, Bill Gates, Fauci, Governor Brown, all either deliberately manipulative, greedy politically corrupt villans or misunderstood saint/martyrs who one day would be recognized as the heroes they were. There was no middle ground and it was notable that one person’s villan was the other’s hero.
During 9/11 this division fell along lines of nationality: American vs terrorist for whom everyone who was Arabic in any fashion was suspect and many who were not as well.
During the Pandemic the divisions of us them crossed into and through family lines, as everyone had someone in their family they could not talk to and perhaps never would talk to again.
And I remember thinking at the time, watching the towers fall for the 100th time, that the message that was being drummed into us, with forceful repetition, the trauma that we were all collectively living through was being used, as it had been countless wars before, to justify the war that was coming, that was being organized and orchestrated — that this horror and pain and grief and vulnerability was the raw material used to mobilize support for the next war, which it was.
And how Colin Powell didn’t need to prove anything — just show a blurry picture and insinuate bad intentions and Congress approved it because to not approve this war, this revenge mission to regain American’s lost honor, would be downright unAmerican and guarantee they would not get reelected.
I remember the missing photos were replace by little altars with multiple candles burning, photos and flowers of someone who had died in the towers and how everyone stopped to look at the face of the person who died. How ordinary and varied they were: like New York City itself. Here was the best of the American dream, a city here immigrants did really live side by side, and subways contained a cross section of ages, and professions and nationalities and someone how everyone managed to sit and stand side by side, and at some point, slept and daydreamed next to someone they would not otherwise every sit next to or know, had they not come to live in New York City.
I remember how as in October and November as it turned colder, I wore a black scarf wrapped around my neck and head to keep warm. I saw people stealing furtive glances at me, wondering if I was the terrorist in disguise.
I remember the formation of the Homeland Security Department and them being given a rule of law unto themselves, as we were busy to give up all rights in order to feel safe. How fighting terrorism, justified any extrajudicial means necessary, including torture. Before people generally agreed that torture was morally wrong. Now I had students giving persuasive speeches in defense of waterboarding, using the same ends justifies the means reasoning given to us by the U.S. government as the pretext for bombing Iraq.
I remember thinking how the war on terror had been won, not by the planes which had the opposite effect of drawing us together, and making us understand how connected we all were. The terrorists won afterwards, when the naming and blaming and searching for enemies began and suddenly, even in New York City where everyone lived day in and out next to, rubbing elbows, breathing in each others the scents and sweats, that there was a definite chill, a pulling in, a looking around and over your shoulder, a sense of fear wondering if this day, there would be another attack, if the person next to you, was in fact a terrorist. That’s when the terrorist won. The succeeded in making people afraid and mistrustful of one another.
It was as if there was a war and it had been won, by a thousand small silent time bombs sent to every part of the country and world where the story about the twin towers and 9/11 played. It was a story about who the good guys and the bad guys were and that the world was a dangerous place, made up of people you could not trust who one day would secretly attack you. It was a world where security became the prime and only value that mattered, freedom running a distant second or third next to safety and righteous anger and a desire to avenge the pain of that day and those lives lost in the twin towers, and most of all the loss of American’s sense of invulnerability.
How most people accepted the explanations given by the New York Post, the same Post that published huge photos of target with Bin Laden’s face in center and no one protested. Or, if they did, their voices were ridiculed and derided as “unAmerican.”
Having now lived through at least two of these unprecedented, before and after historical moments, I wonder what we learned from having survived them. If we survived.
Certainly in both there is a clearly marked before and after.
In both, reality and our assumptions changed and there is no going back to the time before.
In both we chose safety as the supreme value, and many times this turned out to lead to a loss of freedom as a result.
Are we safer?
We are certainly more distrustful ,more watchful and anxious, waiting for the other shoe to drop,
Has this made anyone safe?
The world has become unsafer in every way, it seems. Perhaps we need to envision something new, a different set of values to aim our lives toward as we face the future that was never ever certain, now that we know, how vulnerable we all are, and how much, all of our lives depend on kindness, including and especially, the kindness of strangers.
