The Life in My Years

An eight day trip to New York City in four posts.

Note: I hadn’t originally meant for this to be the first in the series of four, but the timing of the anniversary compelled me to change my original idea.

The 9/11 Memorial and Museum
Why are we drawn to the places that break our hearts, the sites that remind us of man’s capacity for inhumanity?

I’ve personally seen plenty, and each time I’ve felt the same sorrow and I’ve always asked the same rhetorical why. I’ve stood on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, looked down on the Sunken Road at Antietam, and wondered at the brutality at the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania. I’ve walked the battlegrounds and war torn villages of Normandy. I’ve seen the homes of the enslaved on the grounds of southern plantations. I’ve stood inside of the Schindler Factory, walked the grounds of Auschwitz in Poland, and seen the mountain of abandoned shoes in the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. I’ve touched the ebony wall of the Vietnam Memorial in the nation’s capitol. And then there’s the countless square miles of cemeteries; Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Appomattox Courthouse, Arlington, the San Francisco Presidio, and Omaha Beach.

We’ve just arrived in New York City, settled into the hotel and unpacked the immediate necessities – the phone chargers. We’d flown economy so naturally that groaning, creaking sound filling the room is our stomachs, reminding us that they would like some attention – stat.

Before we left for the trip we had already decided to check off one of our must do boxes and get dinner from one of the many halal carts that populate Manhattan. A highly rated one is about a 10 minute walk from the hotel.

Google guides us along some sidewalks and then send us across a wide park. We don’t realize where we are until we’re looking into a yawning square hole into which a perpetual waterfall is pouring on all sides.

We’re peering into the footprint of what once was a 1,362 foot tall skyscraper – the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Along all four sides of the pool there is a parapet with panels that bear the inscriptions of those who perished in the South Tower, and on Flights 175, 77, 93, and at the Pentagon.

It would seem reasonable that the names would be arranged alphabetically. But this isn’t a place to be guided by strict cold logic. The designers had a different, more meaningful approach in mind. The names on the plaques are arranged by “meaningful adjacencies,” described in the website as “where they were at the time of their death and what personal relationships they shared with other victims.”

Near the South Tower Pool stands a tree surrounded by a simple iron barrier that’s festooned with multicolored tags. It’s a Callery Pear tree and it stands on these grounds as a symbol of hope and resurgence. The 9/11 Memorial & Museum website describes the touching story of what is known as the Survivor Tree. “In October 2001, a severely damaged tree was discovered at Ground Zero, with snapped roots and burned and broken branches. The tree was removed from the rubble and placed in the care of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. After its recovery and rehabilitation, the tree was returned to the Memorial in 2010.”

Each of the colored tags carries a visitor’s personal message. After reading the inscription on a plaque that describes the tree and it’s meaning Cora finds a place to sit and cry.

Our walk to the food cart takes us through the park to the North Tower Memorial. It’s a similar pool, this one in the footprint of once was a 1,730 foot skyscraper. On 9/11, on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower, diners at the Windows on the World restaurants in the North Tower were enjoying a beautiful blue sky.

The parapets here bear the names of the victims of the North Tower and of Flight 11.

It’s a picturebook day. The sun is beginning to set. Puffy clouds and a still powder blue sky are reflected in the surrounding steel and glass skyscrapers of Manhattan. Maybe this is the best time to be here, under a calm, comforting canopy.

The park is nearly silent. People converse in hushed tones. There’s no running, no frolicking. The only punctuating sounds come from outside the park in perpetually busy Manhattan.

We only pause briefly here. All of the emotions, from Gettysburg, Auschwitz, the Vietnam Wall, Omaha Beach, and all of those other places where sorrow washes over all else, have come back to visit. What else is there to do but look down into the void, look up at the sky and the surrounding buildings and trees and wonder why?

And recall where you were on that morning 25 years ago.