This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 11, 2011 - NEW YORK - Where were you when the towers fell?
I was the news editor for the website of the Post-Dispatch on Sept. 11, 2001. As I was getting ready to come downtown, I got a call from my web producer telling me a plane had flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Center -- the first hint of dark news on a sunny Tuesday morning in Manhattan. Other crashes quickly made clear that these were no accidents.
My immediate thoughts went to my two daughters in New York City, one on the Upper West Side, the other in Brooklyn. The Brooklynite had come down with a bad case of mono, so I was pretty sure she wasn't going anywhere; a quick phone call determined she was fine and would stay put.
My other daughter was between jobs and had been doing some temp work, including jobs in the financial district downtown, so I needed to make sure she was safe. When I phoned her apartment, her sleepy voice told me I had found her still in bed. She wondered why all those helicopters were flying around. I told her what had happened and said she should go back to sleep.
Now, 10 years later, I am approaching my third anniversary on the staff of the Beacon, a news source that didn't even exist on 9/11. I'm in the midst of a two-week trip to New York City. The Brooklyn daughter, after living for several years on the Upper West Side, is back in Brooklyn, though she plans to pick up and move to the West Coast for a new job next month. The Upper West Side daughter is in the East Village.
Over the past decade, both have married, and the main reason I am here, on Grandparents Day, is to meet my grandson, Jonah, for the first time after his birth on Aug. 1. Born several weeks premature, he still is in the neonatal ICU. All I had seen so far were pictures that filled the screen of my laptop, so I was surprised the first time I held him gingerly that his head was more like the size of a baseball, cradled snugly in my palm.
I spent the next few days sitting patiently in the hospital waiting room for my turn to go back and see him for a few minutes, working around my daughter's schedule for nursing him. But on Grandparents Day, instead of heading to Mount Sinai, I got up before dawn to attend the 10th anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero.
The event's solemnity was sharpened by the new terror alert that authorities had declared a few days before, based as usual on credible but unspecified information. Security was tightened on bridges and around potential targets, and the old mantra of "If you see something, say something," was emphasized once again.
But for the most part, the city seemed the same -- horns blaring at overcrowded intersections, children being led in a group to play in Central Park, daredevil cab drivers taking their fares on wild rides.
As pervasive as commemorations of 9/11 must seem around the country, in New York they literally have been everywhere. Every newscast, every night, on every station has featured some variation on the questions: What do you remember? What have we learned? What have we lost? How are you different?
If you hadn't seen enough replays of the towers coming down, magazine covers filled the newsstands, most of them showing some version of the dust and the smoke and the flying paper that has come to symbolize the terror attack that quickly defined a new century.
At Sunday's ceremony, survivors wore pale blue ribbons and often sported T-shirts or carried photos featuring their lost loved ones. Signs declared that the victims will be forever young and forever in our hearts. Reporters swarmed to the surviving family members, and the interviews often sounded very familiar:
"I saw the planes ... They never found the body ... It's still unreal ... I'm still angry."
As survivors began to read the names of the 2,983 victims whose name are inscribed at the newly opened memorial, bells rang six times as moments of silence were held for the times the towers were struck, the times the towers fell and the times planes smashed into the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
Music from James Taylor, Yo-Yo Ma and Paul Simon worked as a bit of a balm for the pervasive sadness. And the refrain that became almost a cliche after 9/11 and was sounded again this past week -- be vigilant, but if you let fear rule your life, then the terrorists win -- mingled with the messages of hope that surviving family members gave as they recalled the good times they had with those that the attacks took from their midst.
Earlier in the week, New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg had even urged that the site where the towers once stood no longer be called ground zero, because of instead of looking back at what happened 10 years ago, the world should emphasize the rebirth of lower Manhattan, including the new skyscraper growing taller as each week passes.
The lesson is this:
While no one can forget what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, neither should it keep us from celebrating all that has happened since, and will happen from this anniversary forward. So on Monday, after a day of remembrance, New Yorkers and everyone else should be able to move on and focus not on the past, but on the future -- where for me, every day will be Grandparents Day.