In Tribute -- September 11, 2001

Dedicated to the Finest, the Bravest, and the countless innocents, all those still searching, and the inspiration their lives will provide us...

And our servicemen, their families and our government.

Born and bred, if not raised. Horribly extracted, as I like to say, at the poor age of six years, nine months and 11 days to the suburban hell that is Connecticut. They taught me how to pronounce R's and fully form those L's, but I'll be damned if they'll make me do it all the time.

Please consider supporting The Twin Towers Fund. It's run by the City of New York to benefit the families of the City and Port Authority rescue workers who died trying to save others.

So I guess I'm a New Yawkuh.

From the Bronx specifically, if you gotta know, the Van Nest section of the Boogie Down, and no, to bust any possible stereotypical balloons, I'm not a drug dealer, I'm not on drugs, and my old house isn't a burned-out apartment building. Thank you for asking. And if you really gotta know, the birth certificate I presented the Orange Little League 15-odd years ago is not only accurate, it's the only one I've got.

I wear the borough of my birth as a little badge of honor. I talk up the pizza, the pastry, the ballpark (though not the ballclub), the history with appropriate reverence. All right, far more than appropriate reverence. OK, melodrama. I overstate it. Of course I do. It's New York. It's home.

I went home to go to college. I go back home as often as I can. For all its flaws, there is no place like it. People give it a bad rap, say the people are mean and nasty and patronizing and provincial and impersonal and filchers and jerks and cheats and crooks and just plain rude. They're jealous, but we leave it alone. We have the greatest city in the world, with its most distinctive skyline. We don't need anyone to pat us on the back.

Late in August, my family went on a cruise, and my brother and I woke up early the last morning, and flipped on the closed-circuit TV in our cabin, which showed us where we were. All that was clearly visible were the two mounds of terminal moraine ("glacier shit," as my brother lovingly describes Brooklyn and Staten Island) and two towers stretching up to the sky, guiding our way home. We went up to the top deck and went all the way forward, standing as close to the bow as we could get, waiting and watching as we went up the lower harbor, through the Narrows, under the misspelled Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, into the upper harbor, and there before us was the beautiful skyline of our hometown. Standing above it all, naturally, as we headed up the Hudson were the twin towers of the World Trade Center. I idly wondered how, in 100 or 200 years, civil engineers would gingerly bring those then-aged monsters down...

Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, up at our house in Connecticut, my father knocked on my bedroom door at 10:30 to wake me up from a weird nightmare about missing families. He threw me into another. It took him a couple of seconds to form the sentence. "I don't know if you want to watch this..." He made me wait through another unnerving pause, then added, "but the World Trade Center towers are gone."

I was groggy. I tried to figure out what he meant. I knew they were built on landfill, and all I could see in my half-asleep state was the western half of lower Manhattan breaking away, Adriaen Block's Tyger bobbing up to the surface, and the towers slipping out into the Hudson and sailing out to sea, the reverse of my trip a couple of weeks earlier. I said the only thing I could think of. "What?"

He repeated himself, said something about the Pentagon, hijacked airliners, planes unaccounted for, some other stuff...

I turned on the television, saw a huge cloud of black smoke sitting over a somewhat -- but not quite -- familiar landscape. Something was missing. Something was awfully missing.

Ever had those dreams? You're doing something mundane, like sleeping maybe, and then all of a sudden, something completely incongruous happens, like both towers of the World Trade Center collapsing on themselves during morning rush hour after planes hit them. You get that weird instant of terror and anger and fear and utter sadness, and then you either move on to some other nonsensical activity, or you wake up and fall out of bed.

I slapped myself across the cheek when I didn't wake up that Tuesday morning. Did it again through the tears. I couldn't do anything else for a couple of minutes.

I'm a New Yorker. And it frightens and angers me that the world looks at my city as a target. The words for this have come slowly to me, over three days, and as I finish it Thursday night, I get angry at myself for my emotions. I've felt guilty for being here instead of there. I feel particularly guilty about being here and trying desperately to go on with my life while my hometown struggles to save lives. I've felt guilty about getting annoyed at the blight on my skyline, which feels to me like a slight on the thousands of people who didn't come home Tuesday night. I've felt surprised at the reactions of the country to this horror; they gouge gas prices and call this an "Attack on America." They hated us a couple of days ago.

But they've seen what I've seen. On that morning, at that moment, I could not believe what I saw. I saw my home under siege, bombed, battered, leveled.

But then, through the carnage and the rubble, the Finest and the Bravest rushed to the scene to do all they could.

People lined up around the block to give blood.

Doctors appeared out of nowhere, begging for a chance to help.

More volunteers than could ever be needed went downtown.

Hell came to earth, and New York told it to get the hell out of its way, 'cause it had some work to do.

As someone tore our home apart, its residents came together in unprecedented ways. On a day that was the most appalling of any of our lives, we showed the world who we are. You can try to bomb us back to the Ice Age. You can scare us, give us horrific nightmares, turn us into shivering little kids when we sit alone and look at the images.

But you'll never break us. You can't.

I'm a New Yorker.

And I've never been prouder to say that.

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Anchored the Boring Homepage, 9/14/01-11/6/01.

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