On Being in NYC on 9/11 For The First Time

When September 11th arrives, like many people, I write my observations, reflections, thoughts and acts.


What makes this year different is that I now call New York City home. While there were attacks at the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, New York City experienced this horror like no other place.


Of course, I visited the city many times before moving here nearly a year ago. I remember Dad and I making the trek to Ground Zero on April 30, 2011. The place was desolate with the new Freedom Tower nowhere near completion. But just over 30 hours later, the place was full of euphoria and jubilation upon learning that Osama bin Laden had been killed. Alas euphoria and jubilation are invariably short-lived. While killing bin Laden brought some measure of justice, the evil he spawned was far from gone and was of little comfort to the residents and rescue workers who became ill as a result of cancer causing dust that remained for months after the attacks.


My walk to work this morning was like any other except for a small snippet of conversation of a mother telling her children about what happened on this day 18 years ago. The first Tower was struck at 8:46 a.m. At that moment, I was standing on the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 52nd Street. I tried to place myself there at that exact moment 18 years ago. Would I have heard a large noise? Or would have nothing seemed out of the ordinary on what should have been beautiful Tuesday morning? Had I been working in the Chrysler Building that day, as I do now, I would venture to guess that once the severity of what had happened had been known the building would have been evacuated and I, along millions of other New Yorkers, would have made the trek home in a daze.


The closest I've come to experiencing an act of terrorism in real time was the Boston Marathon attacks on April 15, 2013. Although I was a safe distance away at Minuteman Park in Concord, I could have just as easily been watching the marathon after having taken in morning baseball at Fenway Park as I had the year before. My decision to venture to Walden Pond might have saved my life, if not my limbs. As it turned out, given the global speed with which news travels, my mother in Northwestern Ontario knew about the bombings before I did.


Life carries on as it must. There is work to be done and other matters to keep. What happened 18 years ago today is difficult to think about. Yet we must remember. We must remember those who perished merely for going about their day. We must also remember who caused those deaths and the religious ideology which inspired their act. We must further remember that something like this can and probably will happen again as it has already. There might come a day when this country experiences an attack on a scale larger than that of 9/11. While there might be a 9/11 Museum it's reason for being is not an artifact of an ancient past.


When I walk the streets of New York today, people might not be talking about 9/11 but they are surely thinking about it.