It feels so near. It feels so far.
I saw the hole in the sky legitimately for the first time just about a year after I last saw it filled, from nearly the same spot, the middle of the Hudson River. I felt exactly what my brother described last winter. If I hadn't had a rail in front of me, I would have fallen over.
How has that hole changed me? Well, in darker ways than I want to admit publicly. That tirade is written, but you ain't gonna see it. It scares me more than the attacks scare me.
The only thing we have to fear, said another wartime president, is fear itself. In a way, that's where I am. Mostly, it's a different kind of fear than ever before. Not of death; hell, let the partial-vacuumers-of-male-genitalia just try to bring that on. More the other side, of something happening to my hometown and having to feel that helplessness again. It's nice to offer up blood and moral and financial support, but that's a small comfort in the wake of what happened a year ago.
Already? Only?
I had never lived a day in my life without those buildings standing where they were. They stood a couple of years before I did. The closest I come to remembering the construction of the World Trade Center is a vague recollection of turning on the television one day when I was still a kid (mid-1980, as it appears to turn out) and finding a slightly off picture. A little adjustment of the antenna made it right, because the transmitter sending out the signal had moved almost three miles south, from the Empire State Building to the top of 1 World Trade Center.
Every time the Empire State Building comes into view, now, it's painful. People kept cutting footage of the Twin Towers out of movies, television shows, pictures. Seeing the Empire State Building now is far more gutwrenching, its presence a reminder of an absence.
When it moved its transmitter back to the Empire State Building after a stop in Alpine, N.J., earlier this year, Channel 4 began running bumpers promoting the fact, with a gorgeous helicopter shot of the red-white-and-blue-bathed top of the building. Every time the spot ran, I wanted to bawl. Why are you broadcasting from Empire? Because you can't broadcast from 1 WTC anymore, that's why.
Been on the Jersey Turnpike? Empire looks so lonesome from there.
The buildings still stand in my memory, as I pray the people live in their families' hearts. One of the beauties of staying up to watch Sports Night reruns on Comedy Central is that they still stand in the scene bumpers, uncut and majestic, a quarter-mile over the tip of Manhattan. While the television media argues over how often to show the buildings burning and falling, their whole, peaceful appearance continues too often to be shunned. It's like tearing up pictures of a loved one at a party while hanging poster-sized shots of his hospital bed.
For some reason, I've been feeling the same about "Ground Zero." It is, was and ever shall be "the site of the World Trade Center." Or just "the Trade Center," if you'd like. Well, I guess that's if I'd like. Maybe it's just a year of overload with the phrase. The next time I want to hear it is in a Weird Al Yankovic holiday record. It feels like a bad cliche, almost, after a year.
A year? Already? Only?
It's been a year of personal change, a year of personal and professional growth, but every day has included a mental image of that day. Sometimes, the reminders have been forced, with moments of silence, or with an obvious change from how something might have happened a year earlier.
When those reminders have been strong enough, it's been a year spent alternately proud, angry and wistful. I put three quotes on the bottom of my annual holiday e-mail. I still feel like I'm living by them.
Angrily: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon." --George W. Bush, 9/14/01
Proudly: "We will build a monument, their names will be etched in granite, there will be an eternal flame burning, but I'll tell you what's more important than that, and that is that we show them as they look down upon us that we are not afraid today. Get back on the airplanes! Go back to work! Rebuild America! We are not afraid today. We are not afraid." --The Rev. Calvin Butts, 9/23/01
And wistfully: "Things have changed since those times/Some are up in 'G'/Others, they are on the hog/But they all feel just like me/They would part with all they've got/Could they just once more walk/With their best girl and have a twirl/On the sidewalks of New York." --"Sidewalks of New York," James W. Blake/Charles E. Lawlor, 1894
A year?
Already?
Only?
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Michael Fornabaio--mmef17@yahoo.com