The Towers

My friend Gertrude Bergen lives in a 19th floor apartment on West 24th Street in New York City, about ten blocks north of the World Trade Center. She has a terrace from which she could see the towers.

While the towers were being constructed, I lived in Texas. I never heard of these extra-tall buildings. After we moved to Pennsylvania,I went on an all day bus trip to New York with the League of Women Voters. Starting home after dark, our bus went through the Hudson Tunnel. As we came up on the New Jersey side, I looked across at Manhattan and was surprised to see those two giant rectangles rising high above all the other skyscrapers, thousands of lights shining against the black sky.

In the following years we moved back to Chicago. I was divorced, took a six-month trip to Europe, spent a year in Texas with my mother, moved to Albuquerque, bought a house, married John, mourned his death. (I’ve had an eventful life.)

On 9/11/01 I ate breakfast, made a second cup of tea, and carried it into my living room. I sat down on the couch and sipped my tea, anticipating a leisurely morning watching television. The plane flew into the North Tower.

I forgot to drink my tea as I watched the horror before my eyes. I saw the South Tower collapse. Like everyone else, my thought was, “This can’t be happening.” Nothing was left but a huge avalanche of black dust and debris chasing people down the tunnels of surviving buildings.

That night I called Gertrude. She assured me she was all right. Then she told me that when the planes hit the towers, she was in the basement of the building washing a rug her cat threw up on. She had no idea what was happening until she got on the elevator to go back upstairs. A woman on the elevator was crying. Between sobs, the woman told Gertrude about the planes hitting the towers and their collapse killing thousands.

Ten years later it still impresses me that I saw instantly the collapse of the towers thousands of miles from New Mexico, while in New York, Gertrude, only a few blocks away and in sight of the towers, knew nothing about it.

We have become blase about seeing things happen on the other side of the World. In Tripoli rebels wander through Omar Gaddafi’s ruined palaces. Do we fully understand what is before our eyes? Do we know what is happening in our own neighborhood?