A lot can happen in twenty-five years, and a lot does happen.
Twenty-five years ago, I had one child, one year away from kindergarten, and two parents. We lived in an apartment at street level. That preschooler is now grown at 29 with two younger siblings and my parents are gone. We own a house in a nice, suburban neighborhood with good schools and safe streets.
Twenty-five years and one day ago, our little family was driving home from visiting our parents on Long Island. September 10th was a bright, shiny day with the bluest-blue skies that you could hope for. Our apartment phone wasn’t working and the next morning Verizon would be coming bright and early; no sleeping in after our visit and travel. I opened our front door to let them in, and I turned on the television – The Today Show. There was sadness, perplexion, but no shock, not yet. A plane flew into the World Trade Center. It happens. Small planes have accidents in the city. Watching the other plane fly in was mouth-dropping, heart-stopping, panic-inducing, and the shock and the fear did not leave for months, probably not for more than a year. I was two hundred miles away and still, if a plane flew overhead, I cringed. A car backfiring would make me jump. I stopped making eye contact with anyone. I just wanted to be home. I did the shopping, I did what I was supposed to do, and I went home. In the women’s magazines they called it nesting, and we were definitely nesting. Cooking, cleaning, household projects. Years later, we did it again with the pandemic, but this one, this time of home and family was deeper. While the pandemic was fearful and unpredictable, 2001 was the same but more.
In the after 9/11 times, I tried not to watch the coverage. I would listen to witness stories. But that was the extent of it. We weren’t in the city on that day, but our friends were. I grew up in that city. My husband and I visited the World Trade Center. He had co-workers there, two of whom didn’t come home that day.
Some years I write about today and some I honor it privately. The first anniversary we kept our new kindergartner home and took him to the State Museum in Albany to see their 9/11 exhibit. This year, I’m at work and preparing for the New Year, the Rosh Hashanah holiday that begins tonight. In my writing, on anything, I usually wait until it comes to me – the thought, the first word or phrase, the focus. Nothing came, and I thought it would be another quiet year, one of contemplation, prayer, and stillness.
And then, we went on vacation at the end of August. We traveled to Canada – Quebec and Ontario. We’d been to most of the places before, since my own childhood. I had family in Toronto and if I recall correctly, an aunt in Thunder Bay. I still have some cousins there, all from my paternal grandfather’s side of the family. On this visit, I was astounded by the sheer number of Canadian flags on buildings, on houses, in shop windows, and believe it or not, on a few cars. Truly, in the fifty years I’ve traveled there, this is just not a thing that Canadians do. Here in the States, you could practically fall over the number of American flags flown. That’s not something they do in Canada. But they’ve never been treated the way they’ve been treated recently by our government. We were even met by one very, very, v-e-r-y angry Canadian.
This piece will not be a diatribe or a discussion on the shortsighted, contemptuous, and mean-spirited foreign policy our current government is following, and I certainly won’t mention names, so I decided instead to talk about books.
After 9/11, hundreds of books came out – think pieces, witness accounts, documentary photos, everything you could think of. I bought exactly two books about 9/11 in the past twenty-five years, both of them within the first two years, maybe three.
The first book is Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey by Maira Kalman. The reason I bought this book is that my son and husband rode on this boat exactly one month before the attacks. It was heading down the Hudson and they were invited on board with some others and rode it from the harbor in Troy, NY to Albany where they disembarked onto the USS Slater. I think I’ve told that story before.
The second one I bought was Jim DeFede’s The Day the World Came to Town. I don’t know if it’s still in print (it is!), but it was the story of the morning and following days after 9/11 when all air traffic ground to a halt. The United States was closed. Planes were still in the air. They couldn’t come here.
They were diverted and landed in Gander. Gander was already the place where emergencies came to land when crossing the Atlantic. Gander, a small town of about 11,000 people on the island of Newfoundland was where thirty-eight jets landed carrying about 7000 people, just about half of Gander’s population. At first, they were expected to remain on the planes and they did so for over twenty hours, but after security checks, the people of Gander opened their public buildings and took in who they could. When there was more people than space in those buildings, they opened up their private homes. Passengers covered every square foot of Gander. They were given food, shelter, clothing, and comfort. The passengers remained in Gander for five days.
The Canadians in Gander refused to take any money. They were just doing what they do, taking care of neighbors. Opening their homes, their selves to the not-strangers, but new friends who needed them. It was a beautiful act in the shadow of terror. It was extraordinary in its ordinariness.
We have always had a special relationship with Canada. We need to nurture it, we need to repair it because losing it is unthinkable, unbearable, unneighborly. We cannot let that be forgotten. They are more than our friends and allies; they are our neighbors and family.
They have always stood with us, and we should not forget that, ever.
