This is New York. This is America.

Last night at about this time the S.O. and I were just returning from a dinner cruise around Manhattan island. It was, I don't need to remind you, September the Eleventh, five years on from the original September the Eleventh, and the city was commemorating the dark anniversary in various ways. Relatives read lists of names at the WTC site. George Bush made a speech and attended a mass at St. Paul's. And throngs of people throughout Manhattan did what Bush and our own Civic Leaders back in Amarillo cynically recommended that Americans do in the immediate aftermath of that frightening day: they shopped.

Yesterday morning we listened for the bells that chimed from the various churches around the city at the minutes that the planes struck the towers, and at the minutes that the towers fell. Then we took the C-train down to High Street in Brooklyn and walked back toward Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge. The previous evening we'd taken the subway back to midtown after barhopping in the Village. We’d passed Rockefeller Center as we walked backed to our hotel from the subway stop. It had just become the Eleventh as we walked and Rockefeller Center was already crawling with cops. But they weren’t anxious cops or cops who had been summoned because of a threat. This was routine, and the cops were saying things like, "See anything over theah? Me neitheh, let's get some pizza."

So I expected a higher security presence on the eleventh and in fact the subways were littered with MTA employees and security, but the entrance to the Bridge itself was guarded only by a couple of cops on bikes. It was easy, even, to forget, until you glanced toward the financial district and saw the big empty hole that still, five years on, oppresses the skyline by its absence more than any presence could.

Manhattan was a strange place to be on the anniversary. So much was utterly normal and so much wasn’t. After crossing the bridge, my fiancée and I caught the train back to midtown and grabbed the cheese, olives, and roasted tomatoes I had purchased earlier in the week from Di Palo’s, in a part of town that has become Chinatown to everyone but the Di Palos. To them, their corner remains Little Italy, and always will.

We grabbed our food, plus some wine, and headed for Central Park. We had a nice, quiet picnic two blocks and a world away from Manhattan. Two blocks and—for the most part—a world away from the Eleventh of September, although we did watch as a group unfurled a giant flag across the Great Lawn.


At six, after a short cab ride to the Hudson, we boarded the Duchess for our dinner cruise. It was mostly a tourist thing: drinks, dancing and a nice dinner as you ride the ferry around the lower end of Manhattan island and then up to Roosevelt Island. There you turn around and head down to Liberty Island and then return.

It was, as I say, mostly a tourist thing, but of course this was the Eleventh of September, and as we approached the financial district, the Tribute in Light shone its two great beams of light from the spots where the WTC towers had once stood. But—as always in life—there was a twist. The massive beams of light were impressive enough in themselves, a powerful exemplar (as is all of Manhattan) of human hubris. But at the top of the beams we witnessed a serendipitous and singular beauty that no one could have predicted or planned for, and that I cannot presume to describe. The beams struck the clouds in a way that could not but evoke a religious awe.



We stood together on the top deck of the Duchess as we sailed around the Statue of Liberty and for a time we could see both the Tribute in Light and the Statue in our field of vision. And tears actually streamed down my face as it suddenly hit me full on: I had just spent a week in a city of immigrants and history, of wealth and despair, of madness and dreams, of art and fear, of freedom and limitations, of soaring peace and of petty wars. This was America, and in an instant I realized how important the battles we all fight to save her depleted soul really are.

After the cruise, we rode a pedicab back to our hotel. Our driver (peddler?) wasn’t the sort to let irony wash over him unacknowledged. When we asked him to take us to 48th and 8th, he informed us that the intersection we were headed toward was his own answer to the question, “Where we you on September the Eleventh?” He told us that story, and then he switched gears and bragged about his eminently brag-able city. Five years have passed. So much has changed. So much has not.

spacedark