*This is from 2008, and is a repeat post from 2023 – written originally for a newspaper column called Confessions of a Book Addict (which I am), a column I did for several years while being a rural librarian in Upstate NY. It’s been, now, twenty-three years since that day, so much has changed, both personally and collectively. Have we learned anything? Gosh I hope so. Have I – oh my! Yes, of course, and no, not enough; it’s an on-going project.
Another anniversary of 9/11 has been got through and as in years past, for me, accompanied by a deep sigh of relief. Seven years have passed since the worst and, in truth, best day I ever spent in New York City, a gorgeous fall day I suspect politicians, historians, philosopher and poets will be memorializing and attempting to contextualize long after I am gone. Why was it the best day? Because New Yorkers, and I was one for twenty-one years after my near idyllic childhood in Delaware County, behaved so well, so compassionately and with such deliberation. Everything shut down, thousands of lives were lost and thousands more of us had to get home on foot or crammed into buses after witnessing an occurrence so unprecedented and unnerving we might have had the perfect excuse for bad behavior. I was downtown, not close enough to be in danger, although too close for comfort, and everyone I met on the trek north was for once and for all open – open hearted, open minded – as if the tragedy, showing us how quickly lives end or are changed forever, stripped away every mask we had put on that morning to keep one another out. Poems were read and looked for; W. H. Auden’s September 1, 1939 – the first stanza of which, seen below, was oft quoted and seemed eerily prescient although he was, of course, thinking of a very different conflict in a very different time:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
My beloved grandmother, had she been alive, would of course have gone to her Bible, as she did every day without fail no matter the size of the crisis, large or small, or whether there was, in fact, a crisis at all. She was the wisest and best person I ever knew; her children would say she had to be having married a man as difficult as my grandfather could be, but I believe her own childhood amidst good people, farmers, innkeepers, fly fishermen and all, just over the county line in Beaverkill, N.Y., gave her a happy perspective on all of life, and a deep sense of its meaning no matter how inexplicable the events and people of any given moment might seem. I bought, borrowed or re-read books, as I always do, to get me back to a good place where I felt safe again – books about grief (On Grief and Grieving by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was one), books about fire fighters (every one I could get), books about Islam (A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam by I. A. Ibrahim as well as a paperback copy of the Koran I still haven’t opened), and books about hope, spirituality and forgiveness (M. Scott Peck’s The People of the Lie and The Different Drum as well as many others). I read Robert Frost and Whitman, my favorite poets, and tried not to cry every day even while I kept, for far to long, a promise I foolishly made to read all of the memorial pieces the New York Times was publishing on each and every known victim of that horrible day. One of them was my college friend Laura Rockefeller, a great person with a lovely smile who just happened to be working at Windows on the World stage managing a breakfast meeting for one of the companies in the building, a job she performed once or twice a year. Many of the books I bought were left unread; I was much too restless, as if waiting for the other shoe to fall, especially when enough time went by and we all realized no one else would be rescued from the pile. For comfort I re-read Sherlock Holmes; his certainty and brilliance were what I needed right then, not to mention the innocence of a world where planes and skyscrapers didn’t exist. But they do and although Baker Street will always be one of my favorite addresses, real life exists, good and bad, right here and now in the Catskills. I didn’t return home in ’03 entirely because of the events of September 11, 2001, but it, and Laura’s much too early death, made me want to be where I really wanted to be, which was here. Next week: a return to good cheer and more worthy non-fiction.
