on saturday it was too hot in the apartment so we decided to sit in the car, which is new and has good air conditioning. that turned into and idea (his) to drive around manhattan--literally around it, around the edges. so we headed up to FDR Drive and went south.
we merged onto west street (i think it was west street, anyway). there were these fences along the side of the road that were covered in some sort of green astro-turf. fences and fences and fences. and then he said, 'that's it.' and i noticed the enormous lack of buildings behind the fences. the buildings behind the gap with nets covering their facades, their glassless windows. a sign behind the netting on building that said something like, 'we're still here' or 'still in business' or something...i don't remember now what it was. a spray painted sign, like on a white bedsheet, the paints red and blue. i swear i didn't imagine this.
anyway, that was it. that was the world trade center. first time i'd been there in 11 months. first time i'd seen it without the towers. (first time for both of us, actually.) i couldn't see much through the astro-turfed fences, but i could see the hole. a clean hole, now. i read something in the paper last week that called it the 'footprint' of the towers. i like that. but everything looked so clean. the road was clean. the fences were clean. there were people walking around--a couple of them taking pictures, a couple of them cops or security people, but most just new yorkers going about their business. and everything was so clean. it was nothing like the pictures i'd been so drawn to back when it happened, the ones i still can't stop staring at to this day: the horrible, horrible destruction, the metal, the decimated concrete, the smoke.
i couldn't stop saying, '...wow.' over and over. twisting around in my seat to watch it go by. it wasn't as traumatic as i'd thought it would be--but then, as i said, it was so clean. if you knew nothing about new york--ok, if you lived in a cave in antarctica--you probably wouldn't even know there were once buildings there--you'd think some swank new luxury apartment complex was about to be constructed.
we kept driving up the west side highway...at what point does it turn into the henry hudson parkway, or is it always both? and we wondered aloud, together, how many businesses had had to move out of the area then decided to stay where they'd moved to; whether or not we were surprised that no other attacks like that have happened in the last 11 months; how the patriotic zeal that took hold of most people last autumn now doesn't, to use his words, burn as brightly; and at what point it's going to sound silly of us all to still talk about it like it happened last week, to rehash where we were and how we felt as though we've never said it before.
every time i see a picture of the towers, or of their wreckage, i still get this awed, dread feeling and i think, '
i can't believe they took them down. two planes flew into the buildings, and they collapsed, and now they're just not there. i can't believe it.' it's strange how real that feeling still is. and how i still can't quite wrap my head around how it all happened. it really feels almost like it was a movie that i saw, but every once in a while, i remember that it was real.
anyway. that was my saturday.
