Never Forget - 19 Years Later

From the terrace looking southward, the view of the Tribute in Light yesterday was obscured, but it pierces the night with such strength and beams so high into the sky that it is visible and unmistakable, even all the way up here in Yorkville.  This has always been the most comforting of the remembrance traditions for me - it echoes the memory of the Towers throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood, so tall they were.

Every kid who grew up in the city had an obligatory field trip to the observatory; out of town friends who visited my family were ushered down there to see what were the tallest buildings in the world for a good bit of time.  As a high schooler in the East Village, my friends and I would meander farther downtown and over west, but once I got out of the numbered streets, I became disoriented (still do), despite having a pretty good sense of direction; the Towers reoriented me - I just had to look up and I knew which way was southwest, and from there could figure out how to get to the next destination.  My second summer of law school, I worked at a firm in the financial district, and the nearest Petite Sophicate - the only shop at the time that carried suits and separates that consistently fit me - was in the lower levels of the Trade Center; I used my first significant earnings that left me with spare change to get a few more suits from there (that still hang in my closet, despite no longer fitting and being pretty hopelessly out of fashion - I keep thinking I might learn to tailor them some day, repurpose old relics).  The last time I was at the Towers was late that summer of 2000.  A friend/former colleague had interned at The Hague and had Dutch friends visiting, and asked me to come out, because “they have never met an Asian person before, and I told them about you, and they are so interested to meet you.”  So I put on my ambassador hat and suggested we meet nearby at the base of the Towers, so the Dutch friends could gawk at me and at the Towers in one fell swoop during their limited time in the city.

And then 19 years ago, after being away much of the prior year finishing my last year of law school and the summer to study for the Bar Exam, and then traipsing off for an extended jaunt through Asia on my post-Bar trip, as I was flying back to return home permanently, they were attacked and fell. I saw them 6 hours later on CNN, burning, then gone, and smoldering, absorbing and trying to grasp it all alone, as I was waiting to be processed through Canadian immigrations in Vancouver, where my plane had been rerouted when the airspace closed.  Only upon seeing the television images did the enormity and completeness of the loss sink in.

19 years.  So long ago, and yet, not.