Posted on 08/28/2002 5:25:23 AM PDT by MadIvan
About a month after September 11, I went along to Carnegie Hall to see "Stand-up for New York", a comedy benefit for the victims of that day. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani opened the evening, saying: "I'm here to give you permission to laugh. And if you don't, I'll have you arrested."
Colin Quinn, a sitcom star born in Brooklyn, shambled on stage in a T-shirt and jeans, scratching himself and talking about how his friends had changed during the past month. Otherwise normal people had suddenly became military experts, boring on about new missile systems and anti-bacterial warfare devices. Others were desperate to find a way to relate themselves to the tragedy, however tendentiously.
"If I'd taken the A train to work that morning rather than the F train, I'd have been down there," they would say. "These people never take the A train to work," said Quinn. "So I tell them, if I'd become an investment banker with Morgan Stanley rather than running a go-kart track, I'd have been there too."
He was absolutely right. I suppose it is only natural to sidle up to dramatic events to give your own life more polish. Journalists make a career out of it. There were speeches in the Commons from MPs who said that they, too, had once used the Boston airport used by the September 11 terrorists. Shudder. Others sought that empathetic link by telling me about drinks they had once had in Windows on the World, the bar at the top of the World Trade Centre. Creepy.
Finally, I got sick of hearing people who were not in New York that day telling me how they felt about it. Even worse were those who tried to explain it, justifying their grisly analyses by saying America must face up to reality. It was enough for America to deal with its local tragedy, all those deaths in New York and Washington. To then be told by the likes of Martin Amis that you are "hated and hated intelligibly" was just a little too much cold reason at a time of feverish emotion.
The most appreciated reporting in New York after September 11 turned out to be the New York Times's "Portraits of Grief", short, verbal snapshots of those who died. They told us of the real losses, stripped of grand theorising. New York felt more like a village in those days and these were the notes in the parish bulletin, uncluttered testaments to ordinary lives, no leaden meaning attached.
If you were there in New York on that day, the big picture was oddly hard to grasp. Even if you had not lost someone, there were so many everyday changes. The air was hard to breathe. Friends whose flats were blown out were bunking uptown. Parents were trying to explain to their children what they had seen.
Shops shut, businesses struggled, joggers changed their routes through downtown, baseball games were preceded by solemn commemorations and then there was the constant hum of cable television, predicting more death and destruction to come. The fear boiled away in the pit of every stomach. The last thing you wanted was to think about Afghanistan's problems or read apocalyptic musings by novelists.
So here is my parish note on September 11, about how my mundane life was knocked off course. I was supposed to be buying an engagement ring that day. I had been looking since July, when I decided I would propose. It seemed too tentative to propose without a ring, a prelude to one of those long, pallid engagements.
First I went to Van Cleef and Arpels on Fifth Avenue, where I was sneered at. I was told I could afford a ring with coloured stones set in a flower pattern, which looked like it came from a Christmas cracker. Then I tried the dealers along 47th Street, Manhattan's version of Hatton Garden, but felt besieged by liars and thieves.
Eventually a friend spotted what I wanted, a Burmese ruby ring, in a Christie's catalogue. So I marshalled my funds and prepared for September 11, 11am, my manly rite of passage.
Instead I spent the morning running round downtown Manhattan, watching bodies fall from the sky and sprinting to avoid a skyscraper as it chased me and hundreds of others down a street. When I should have been writing an enormous cheque to Christie's, I was cowering in a doorway in Tribeca wondering if I would be struck in the head by a piece of debris, cursing the fact that I had never told her I wanted to marry her.
Such was the scale of that day that everyone, I think, tried to measure it against their own life, to find something in it that related to them. The horror was too dreadful to contemplate for too long.
My thoughts revolved around the ring. Would I ever get to buy it? Would it even be fair to ask someone to marry me when all our lives seemed so precarious? Would she think I was proposing out of desperation? Say she said yes, would the fiends from Tora Bora ever let us have a future?
A priest with a parish on the Upper East Side told me about a bride who insisted on pressing ahead with her wedding two weeks after September 11, despite the fact that several of her wedding party had died. Her family wanted to postpone it, but the bride was hysterically insistent, so they went ahead, miserable as can be. Was this any kind of atmosphere in which to propose?
Well, I waited for about three weeks and had another go. The auction was rescheduled, but I was late, so I stood on the corner of 65th street and Madison Avenue bidding on my mobile telephone. I got the ring, asked her mother's permission and booked an inn in Connecticut for the deed.
We drove up on a late autumn evening. It was a classic American inn, awash with doilies and plates of cookies. I did not want to shunt the ring over a dinner table, past an empty bottle of wine. I wanted a clean, fresh day, no burning smells, no reminders of how quickly it can all change. So I waited until the morning.
After breakfast, we walked down to the edge of Lake Waramaug, surrounded by changing trees, and on to a wooden jetty. A few rowing boats bumped gently against it. I turned, asked and she said yes. I gave her the ring and we went for a row on the glimmering lake.
Margret and Philip Delves Broughton are now expecting their first child
Regards, Ivan
It's hard to know how to go on when death strikes home. When my older son died, two weeks after his 21st birthday, I wanted the memorial service at his college to be held the Saurday after his death. The college officials (wisely) insisted that it wait for two weeks.
Even then, it was almost impossible to get through the event. What I saw in the aftermath of 9/11 is a whole nation going through what a sad few of us do privately when a single young life full of promise is suddenly gone.
This article captures the nature of what it means, to "go on with life." I am happy for the couple whose story is told in this article.
(My friend, if you have not done so already, please check out the second link below. I think you will like what you find -- even though you are from "across the pond.")
Congressman Billybob
Regards, Ivan
I have a little trouble with this attitude. The entire nation was absolutely wonderful to New York in the aftermath of the attacks, and their good will and generosity was a reaction to the horror everyone felt. So as far as I'm concerned the people who were not in New York that day can bypass Philip Delves Brougton and tell *me* how they felt about it, for as long as they like. It's been almost a year and I haven't gotten sick of hearing from anyone (except Islamists and peaceniks, who I was sick of hearing from by 9/14/01)
I agree. I spent 6 weeks in New York during 1977 as a Merrill Lynch broker-in-waiting. Took my series 7 exam in the Twin Towers, spent my days in One Liberty Plaza.
Watching the Towers collapse, and hearing that OLP might follow was devastating to me as I sat and watched it happen on live TV.
See, you've spent more time at the World Trade Center than I have, and I've lived here for 21 years. It doesn't matter that you weren't here on 9/11; you fully realize what happened anyway. So did a lot of people who'd never been there, ever.
Watching the Towers collapse, and hearing that OLP might follow was devastating to me as I sat and watched it happen on live TV.
Of course, because you had memories of the place and could place it in a geographic context. It was the same for me. I had spent about three days at the Marriot WTC late last August, at a convention. Had a terrific time. The hotel was hopping that weekend; in addition to the convention there were two wedding parties there-- I was in the lobby on breaks and watched them posing for picture on the staircase before they filed off to the banquet rooms for their receptions.
So on 9/11, after the gigantic shock of seeing the towers come down, I kept getting punched in the stomach by other reports of smaller-but-still-really-painful destructions. Like seeing the Marriott pounded down from 22 stories into a mere fragment of itself with barely three floors standing, and 20 dead inside. And that little Greek orthodox church across the street, completely destroyed.
I often wonder about the wedding couples I saw that weekend, and how they feel looking at their reception pictures now.
Thanks.
So am I. My epitaph will be "Bah humbug!". ;)
Yet this piece moved me as well.
Regards, Ivan
Heh heh!!
The most amusing *real* epitaph I've ever seen is "I told you I was sick".
Thanks again for posting this.
FRegards,
CD
I'm beginning to think there's something wrong with me, because I can now go for weeks without thinking of 9-11, but the moment I do, the tears come forth as easily as they did on 9-l2, and my heart is as heavy and my anger is as sharp and focused as it was then. I fear that 20 years from now I shall feel the same way.
I understand where you're coming from. It hit all of us, not just New York. Still, there is an incredible difference between watching this on tv/Internet and actually being there.
I think the real key is that none of us forget just exactly how we felt that day. In the days ahead, we'll need that.
But most of all, I remember two hysterical young girls, who had just gotten out of BMCC trying to find a way to get crosstown, and get their 10 year old cousins out of the magnet school cross town (don't remember the name). I walked them thru the devlopment, to get them to the M14 a lot quicker, and I remember saying this "We're all just Americans now, because sadly, the people that did this see our passports as hunting liscenses, and they don't care much beyond that." I hope they still believe that, I do.
But, most of all, I believe this: Life's too short to live in the shoulda, woulda, coulda realm. So, with that, when I met Mrs Right, I faced two choices...leave in Dec, or marry her. The ceremony's in June. You see, the terrorists only win when we stop getting on with the business of living.
Exactly.
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