7 minute read
9/11 remembered
Memories of a dark day
Advertisement
by Michael Hallisey
Swedish molecular biologist Dr. Jonas Frisen found that the cellular structure that makes our physical selves, systematically dies and regenerates itself in totality every seven years. Which, in the most literal sense, means we are not who we were a decade ago.
Life is not as it was 20 years ago.
Like Frisen’s study of carbon-14’s imprint on the human body, the events surrounding Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 created a timestamp upon the collection of generations who walk among us today. The sense of innocence that was lost to those who lived through the day was never a reality to the children who came after.
My son Liam came into this world just shy of two years after the day. As I write this, he’s six days away from attending his first year of college. Between those two milestones, he has developed a love for videogames like his father. He is proficient at first-person shooters like Call of Duty. The storylines captured in these games keeps a player’s attention by adapting real world headlines into the plotline. It represents the world theater he has always known.
His first memory of 9/11 was visiting the exhibit at the State Museum. His mother and I had spoken to him about it before, but our words failed to capture the gravity of the day. He later said he had understood the facts but didn’t comprehend the scale of it all until he saw the crumpled heap of the FDNY pumper Engine 6. In school, the details shared to him and his friends progressed as they grew older. In high school they watched videos. They learned who died. They saw “the jumpers.”
Twenty years ago, his mother and I were preparing to marry. I retired from a brief newspaper career and fell into a corporate job as a financial representative. It was a new endeavor for the insurance company, too, as it was delving into variable annuities whose performance was tied to the ebbs and flows of New York’s Wall Street. My job was to process new account paperwork and answer remedial questions from agents who made nearly eight times my salary.
Our team’s timesheet sat on top of a gray filing cabinet outside of our row of forest green cubicles. In the second box to the right of my name, I remember writing in “8:45.” Within minutes of sitting down, Melissa, a teammate, said aloud that a plane hit one of the Twin Towers. We chuckled and asked what kind. She didn’t know. Moments later, someone else shared that it was a 767.
“That can’t be right,” I said. Then a cold chill went down my back. I would later see a video of an incredulous Bryant Gumbel taking a phone call from a witness on a CBS broadcast of “The Early Show.” How he attempted to correct the caller’s own observation, telling him it had to be a prop plane. No, the caller said, it was a jet. “That would have to mean it was hijacked,” I said.
The Twin Towers stood toward the southern tip of Manhattan in New York City’s financial district. When I was 9 years old, my family and I rode the elevator up the South Tower and stood on top of the building. The 107th floor underneath had an observation deck from which my cousin and I peered through binoculars down at the people walking across the plaza.
Phones continued to ring with agents asking questions. We were going about our day until we learned of another plane. We stopped, stunned. I was processing my thoughts, explaining to myself that the first plane could be excused as an accident, but that the second was something else. I just couldn’t process that something else. The inability to connect the events to a plausible conclusion produced fear. I looked at Jackie, who sat next to me and asked, “What in the hell is going on?”
I made another feeble attempt to work by calling our sales support desk. I needed to address the paperwork in front of me. The voice on the other end asked, “You’re not calling out, are you?” I just said, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” In our efforts to grasp a hold of our everyday, we
The scale of the tragedy that took place on Sept. 11, 2001, is sometimes hard for younger people to grasp until they see the remnants of the destruction, like this twisted beam damaged during the terrorist attacks.
Memories of a dark day
lost sight of the sinew connecting us to the horrors 150 miles south of us. I was tasked with going down each of the aisles in our call center of 200 people instructing everyone to stop calling out to agents. Some of them were in New York.
My cell phone was little more than that. Texts cost 10 cents each, and to type a “C” or an “F” required punching the 2 or 3 on my keypad three times each. There was no internet access except for our desktops. Compression rates over the internet made videos look clunky. YouTube wouldn’t launch for another four years. Once we all strained our internet connection for news updates, the company opened the board room and turned on the television.
Cameras were focused on people hanging from the slender window slats between the Twin Towers’ skeletal facade as dark smoke belched from behind them. We thought of helicopters swooping in to save them, but that wasn’t happening. Soon after, the cameras started focusing on blurry shadows as they hurtled down to earth. Then we saw they were people. I thought about my cousin and those binoculars.
The person behind the lens kept his focus on the macabre act. Some of those who jumped were by themselves while others held hands in pairs and groups. I recall how I often defended broadcast news for showing the crying faces, as people demonized the news for exploiting the school children as they escaped from Columbine High School. Some events drive policy change. Without an emotional connection, that change seldom comes. Richard Drew, an Associated Press still photographer, captured the image of Jonathan Briley. The picture is best known as “The Falling Man.” Without the photographer’s focus, Briley’s family would have gone forever without closure. Matt, my best friend who I named as my best man, was an FDNY firefighter in the Bronx. I knew he wasn’t among the first responders, but I knew he would be at the World Trade Center. I just didn’t know how quickly he would respond. My phone calls started from work in the afternoon. Each time, I received a busy signal. I continued once I got home — a futile effort accentuated by a constant series of hanging up and redialing. I eventually received a phone call before midnight. At some point, I fell asleep with the phone in my hand. Our fraternity established a phone chain. Matt was OK.
Matt would spend the year at Ground Zero as part of the recovery effort. Since then, he’s developed health issues shared by many of his peers. According to an FDNY study, nearly 9,000 firefighters who were exposed to the 9/11 dust may be at greater risk for cancer. Another report through the city’s World Trade Center Registry found small increases in the rates of prostate cancer, thyroid cancer and multiple myeloma.
Broadcast news did not stop for nearly four days. The uninterrupted coverage of the attacks, and their aftermath, would go down as the longest news event in U.S. television history. Networks tossed regular programming aside for 93 continuous hours of news. This archaic form of doom scrolling took its toll. As the identities of those involved in the attacks were learned, racism towards Arab nationals increased. But, other behaviors had changed, if only for a few days.
The memories of those few days are as clear as the beautiful blue sky on that Tuesday afternoon. It is something I hope to never see again. There were no clouds. There were no planes.
The writer is editor-at-large for Capital District Family Now.
