Member-only story
How did 9/11 sneak up on me?
Guess 21 years is the charm.
I was supposed to meet my friend Bill on the plaza of WTC at the base of Tower One on Sept 11, 2001. We were co-writing a musical and met every Tuesday at 8:30am at the Cosi Coffee Shop before his first class at Tisch. But on Sept 10 of that year I was feeling lazy so I called him and asked to skip the meeting. We did.
I was, therefore, sound asleep in my bed when my building shook from the reverberations of the plane hitting the tower a block from my apartment. I was physically shaken awake by the sonic wave. My husband, who was late for work in the next room, was shouting, “A bomb! There was a bomb!” as he watched the insane huge confetti of thousands of pieces of copy paper rain in crazy patterns, like a snowstorm of legal documents thrown against the ridiculous cobalt blue of the sky.
The rest of the day has been documented over and over.
Every year I remember what’s coming because of the annual Ghost Light (not its real name) memorial — the piercing double-beamed Tribute in Light to the victims of 9/11 gets a dress rehearsal one week before the actual event. Here is how it goes every year: I see a bright beam of white light touching the passing night clouds as I’m cheerfully walking home from some new bar or restaurant in my neighborhood and think, hey! I wonder if…
