Out of time and space: musing on post-9/11 New York

I don't know why this is on my mind this morning, but it is, and I feel like writing a bit.  It's seven degrees outside and there's a full moon shining on the snow on the ground and it's so bright out there and beautiful; there's a really hot fire going in my woodstove warming my little farmhouse, and life is good.

Maybe that's what got me going on this.  

Here's the deal: I lived and worked in New York on 9/11, and part of my commute took me through Penn Station.  There are several things about that day and the aftermath that are sort of seared into memory: the ashen-faced department secretary who was frantically tuning the radio in her office to get word on what was going on, the group of us huddled around a radio down in my office wwaiting for word, any word at all about what was happening, the images of the towers collapsing that I watched from one of the student center TVs.

But follow me over the flip to see what really got me.

What was really hard about the immediate aftermath -- and by "immediate" I mean months -- were the rough, photocopied, handmade "Have you seen this person?" signs.  They were everywhere.  There were thousands of them.  I saw them all over town, but they especially got to me in Penn Sta every morning as I made my way to my train.  

Grainy black & white images of people, almost all of whom were happy and smiling -- they were snapshots of those people taken during a happier time and only called into this macabre use out of sheer necessity, pressed into service as desperate handbills to the gods or the universe or whatever possible power there might be.  

And they were all in vain.  As I passed those signs I knew -- I knew -- that they were in vain.  That the people missing in the towers would be, with very rare exception, gone.  And as much as I could, every day, I looked at their faces and wondered about their lives.

Every day that I saw them I went by wanting to be hopeful and share the hope of those desperate people who had made those signs.  But I just couldn't, just as I couldn't share the grief and fear and unknowing of the makers of those little signs.

Usually a commute through Penn Station is an exercise in civilized combat; it's you against the next person, it's the slow son of a bitch in front of you who is going to make you miss your connection, it's the gauntlet of homeless you pass through and never have enough money to give to, it's the guy with the fake HIV report asking for a handout, it's a lost tourist whose questions will make you late and have to spend another hour waiting for the next train out of there.

But those crude signs, made with that desperation and hope, made everything different.  People were no longer a nuisance; they were confreres, they were those who like me had passed through it all, they were those like me who were not on those handbills.

So those signs are for me emblemmatic of 9/11 New York.  They are what I most remember.  The hope they represented.  The fear and anguish they represented.  The loss and pain they represented.

We humans are by nature a hopeful species, I think.  I admire that in us; I value it in myself.  Hope can make really shitty things bearable, if the hope is that the shittiness end.  Hope can energize us to move, to make change, to make the world a better place.  Hope can make us think of things previously unthought-of and enlarge us.  Hope can make us keep going.  Hope and hard work won us the Congress in November.

But oh, it was hard to see those signs, knowing that hope was in vain.  Sometimes a false hope can be worse than no hope at all.  So in retrospect I sincerely hope that those signs gave solace to their makers, that they allowed them to ease into the reality of their loss, that they allowed all of us in the city to gradually come to accept what had happened at the same time as we dug ourselves out from under it.

Those little grainy, black and white signs, with pictures of once-happy people, in some way may have helped all of us heal.  I'm pretty sure that they helped me; even though I didn't feel the same intensity of hope that their makers had, watching them tatter and decay and fall away over the following months was a chance to ease into the fact of the loss that they represented.