Seeing 9/11

Is it possible?  Has it really been 11 years since terrorists highjacked planes and drove them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon?  I am not alone in remembering that day vividly.  We all remember. 

In the years since we have become accustomed to the technology that lets us be “right there” when anything happens.  A newsman stands in the street in New Orleans, and we watch hurricane winds tear at his jacket.  Ordinary people get in the action.  A tornado sweeps across Texas, and someone takes pictures with a cell phone, which are broadcast on local television. 

I still remember my horror, as I sat drinking my breakfast tea in my living room in Albuquerque, and watched the towers collapse.  It was like a movie.  I thought, “This can’t really be happening.”

It happened, and through the marvels of modern technology, I was there. 

My friend Gertrude lives in a 19th floor apartment on W. 20th Street in Manhattan   From her terrace she had a view over her New York neighborhood to the towers, taller than all the surrounding buildings.  On the morning of 9/11 she was in the basement washing a rug and did not know about the collapse of the towers until she finished cleaning the rug and started upstairs.  She met a woman crying on the elevator.  Thousands of miles away I saw it happen, while Gertrude, within a few blocks of the towers, was totally unaware as she scrubbed away stains on a little rug.

Now it is 11 years later.  Lots of things have happened.  I moved back to Texas and am now chained to dialysis three times a week.   Gertrude is still on W. 20th Street.

I met Gertrude when we were randomly chosen to be roommates during an Elderhostel in Sicily.  Both of us were short and neither of us was pretty.  I was the one with a big “Hebrew” nose.  I was a Texan with pure Anglo-Saxon ancestry, a product of Southern Baptist, covered wagon pioneers.  Gertrude was a New Yorker, granddaughter of Jews who fled the pogroms of Czarist Russia (think “Fiddler on the Roof”).    We hit it off immediately.  It was more than both of us being Democrats and lovers of books and theater.  We had similar views of life. 

I never had a more generous and thoughtful friend.  In Fort Worth there are three Christian women who have known me for more than 60 years.  The only time they came to see me was for my 80th birthday party   They do not invite me to Fort Worth.  They seldom call.  Gertrude calls me every couple of weeks and asks anxiously about my health.