Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Autumn in New York

I love the Fall. Back to school, start of the holiday season, cooler weather and all that stuff. But I’m always surprised to find that yet another year has past since September 11th. It’s a very vivid memory in my mind and a very personal topic for me and my family. You see, we’re New Yorkers.

My husband and I were born and raised in New York City and let me tell you there is no more beautiful place to experience autumn than in New York. The air is crisp, the skies are brilliant blue and the smell of burning firewood and the crackle of leaves awakens your senses from the humid numbness of a summer in the city. On September 11th, 2001, that all changed. As native New Yorkers, and also having spent a good chunk of my advertising career fighting my way up Madison Avenue, meeting clients down in the financial district, I have many fond memories of the World Trade Center as well. Visiting on class trips as a kid and then later having lunch on the plaza (yes, from a dirty water hot dog cart – Mmmmmm the best!). One year, there was a summer concert series held on the plaza and on a breezy September day, much like September 11th, I took the 9 train down to see Mary Chapin Carpenter. Long flowing hair, faded blue jeans and just a couple of backup musicians and she sounded absolutely wonderful. I met her in person that day and got her autograph right there beneath the shadow of the tallest buildings in New York City. That was almost 10 years ago and although it’s one of my favorite memories of the Twin Towers it somehow makes it all more difficult to move into the coming week – knowing that right where I stood, such an awful thing later happened.

I wasn’t in New York City on September 11th. Luck (or maybe something else) found me on I-95 heading North to my company’s Rhode Island office and all I could do was listen to the radio and hear reports from around the city as the Towers fell. When I heard about the first plane hitting, and then the second, quickly followed by reports from around the country of highjacked planes and the evacuation of major cities, I stopped at a parking lot of an empty movie theatre to call my husband on a pay phone. The sky was bright blue and there I was telling my husband to turn on the news because the country was under attack. We made a hasty plan for him to leave New York with our 9 month old son if he absolutely had to and where we would meet as I drove back towards home.

Well – it’s 6 years later and it’s all boiled down to individual accounts of ‘Where were you on September 11th’, that hardly ever come up anymore. Because I’m a New Yorker, I think about it often. We lost many friends that day. Firefighters we knew from the old neighborhood, business colleagues and classmates. I tell my kids about it. Charles, my 6 ½ year old, has seen photos and he knows that one day when we used to live in New York, some terrible people flew planes into the big buildings. On Tuesday, we’ll try to find a memorial service somewhere in town so that he can stop for a few minutes and remember. I’ll have a good cry but mostly I’ll just be missing Autumn in New York.