September 11, 2001 08:03 PM

I'm sorry I didn't show earlier; I had to keep my phone line open for most of the day.

This morning: For no reason I can fathom, I have a badly upset stomach. I decide to call in sick. Alex goes to work.
I'm sitting on the couch wrapped in an afghan, watching bad cartoons. The phone rings. Alex says, "Hi. The whole world's gone mad." I think he's just talking about a hectic day at the office, until he tells me to turn on the news.
The tower's burning.
The World Trade Center is on fire.

My friend Lauren calls me a few minutes later, asks if I'm watching the news, asks if she can come over. She does. (She brings leftover soup and homemade bread. I love Lauren.)
While I'm waiting for her to come over, the first tower collapses. About three minutes before she shows up, so does the second one.

At this point I'm shaking, and all I can say is "Oh my god, oh my god, oh god, oh my god." All I can think is that I used to work about two blocks from that area, and that my sister works some ten blocks further away -- when she isn't out on maternity leave, as she is now.
I call her anyway. She's crying.

Lauren shows up. She's heard from some other local friends, who are gathering to sit together and say Psalms (traditional in times of danger or grief). I want to go, but I don't want to leave the house when people might be trying to reach me. We say a few together, with the news on and the volume turned almost all the way down.

They keep showing the towers collapsing, and I keep not believing it.
They're gone.
The Twin Towers are GONE.
They're just GONE.
I still can't believe it.
From my bedroom window I can see a good chunk of the skyline. It's a beautiful clear day. I can see the Empire State building, all shiny in the sunlight. I can't quite see the spot where the World Trade Center ought to be; there's a cloud in the way.
The cloud is white and gray smoke. There is no more World Trade Center.

The phone lines are screwy. I try to reach every friend I've got in the city whose number I have. Gabe is okay. Laura is okay. I can't reach Meredith or Constance or Merav. I can't reach my parents' cellphones.

I get a phone call from Seanan, in California. On behalf of the entire online filk community. Merav is online at #filkhaven and she's okay. I ask Seanan to let everyone know that I'm all right.

The World Trade Center is gone.

Mom calls. I tell her my sister is okay.

It's bright and sunny outside, and birds are singing near my window.
No, really.

Lauren calls her mother, her aunt who lives in Manhattan, her brother who works there. They're okay.

We heat up the soup for lunch.
Alex calls. They've closed the museum where he works, but there's no subway or bus traffic into or out of Manhattan. He's walking down to the 59th Street Bridge to see if they're letting people walk across.

Constance calls. She's all right.

I go online briefly, long enough to pop in at #tribrunchma and #filkhaven and tell people I'm alive. They've been worrying.

On the TV, the streets are full of smoke and ash. Somewhere in my memory I know what it must smell like.
I can't hold the death count in my head. I can't even hold the property damage in my head.

God damn them, they trashed our skyline!

I wonder if Annette is okay. I don't have her phone number. Damn, I should have asked when I was online.

Alex gets home, and I can hug him and cry a little.

With Lauren and Miriam, we take the bus to the nearby Booth Memorial Hospital to see if they're taking blood donations. The buses are refusing fares, and letting people ride free because of State Of Emergency.
Booth is taking blood donations, but there's a five-hour wait. They take our names and phone numbers, and will call us either tonight or tomorrow.

And that brings us to now. I have to go; we're about to go to our synagogue to say Psalms again.
I love you all.
I'll be back later tonight.

"Someone has a cut a hole out of the sky
And with it cut a hole out of my heart.
How can I find the breath to ask them why?
Someone has a cut a hole out of the sky.
Forgive me if I turn away and cry;
It hurts too much. I don't know how to start.
Someone has a cut a hole out of the sky
And with it cut a hole out of my heart."

-Seanan McGuire, 09/11/2001, 7:40pm EST

September 12, 2001 3:49 PM

I keep getting emails and phone calls from net-friends, from here and elsewhere...

"Hon, we've got FedEx out here, you've got my cellphone number -- if there's anything you need, call me!"

"Please, please tell me you're all okay, and have you heard from [name]?"

"Does anybody know if the Dreamer Clan is all right?"

"I'm so glad you're safe ... is there anything you need?"

"...Yes, I'll tell them you're okay. Stay safe out there."

"I'm glad all the New York Brunchers are OK. We're really worried, relieved, saddened, and humbled by this whole thing. If there's anything I can do to help out, you've got my e-mail, my adress is [edited], and my phone is [edited]. Stay together, OK?"

"Batya, I'm SO glad you and Alex are ok. So glad. Please let me know if there is anything you need."

"Just making sure you're still okay. We love you."

You can't tell me internet friendships aren't real. I've always said that, and I have been made to understand that at a deeper level than ever before.

I love you all. And yes, if there's anything we need, I'll let you all know.

September 13, 2001 11:30 AM

Quoth Paranoid Android: "...what will we do with the area where the towers stood? I guess in a couple years or so we'll have it all cleaned up... A memorial park, I should think. Or an ABM/SAM site. Maybe a combination thereof."

Not a memorial site. Not a park. Not another goddamn monument.

Rebuild the Towers. We'll need the office space, we'll need the TV-and-radio broadcasting antennae at the top, and dammit, I want my skyline back.

Maybe a plaque at the base of the new Twin Towers, yes. Maybe the entire ground floor as an indoor memorial, with the names of the victims on the walls.

But no way in hell should New York fail to rebuild what those bastards knocked down.

[Added later:
Hey, look! You can tell Toon is really pissed off, 'cause she's swearing a lot!
...and I was about this close to typing, quote, "Rebuild the fucking Towers," unquote.
I blame that partly on the proofreading I've been doing on Seanan's novels, though, 'cause they're in first-person narration and her protagonist swears like a sailor.]

September 13, 2001, 11:58 AM

Weird Voice In The Back Of My Head: "What if the hijackers were actually disguised aliens and this is part of some massive interplanetary hoax?"
Me: "Shut up, Weird Voice, you're not helping."

September 13, 2001 2:40 PM

Quoth Jesse: "America is not a family. Mankind is a family."

Jesse, I agree with you, and then again I disagree. As usual. :)

Yes, humanity is a family. But that doesn't mean America isn't one. America is a smaller family inside a larger one.

I'm identifying right now as an American, and as a New Yorker. And I am entirely willing to strike back at the perpetrators of this monstrosity.
Because nobody beats up on my brothers and gets away with it. Not even my cousins.

September 15, 2001 08:52 PM

Quoth Jesse: "This is hubris! It's like your greatest knight took a hit in his unhelmeted head, but you're encouraging future knights to remain bareheaded because he looked so good and brave that way.
"If you need the offices, build down. Go underground. For God's sake, don't wave another red flag under the bull's nose....
"Don't be a fool, New York. Stay down!"

Jesse, I've been trying and trying to think of an analogy that would resonate to you, and make you realize that this isn't just about pride. The trouble is, I don't know of too many things -- things, as opposed to people -- that you love.

I'm gonna take a stab at it.

Suppose someone decided that your music was evil, for some reason. And that they were going to break into your place and smash your equipment and every copy of every recording you'd ever made.
Would you say "gosh, I better not make any more music, 'cause it would just provoke them to come back and do it again"?

Would your answer be different if they'd killed people who had your music? Would it be different if they'd killed people who happened to be standing near the spot where you kept your music? Would it be different if they'd bombed the record store that was selling your music, and everybody there got killed?
Would it be different if you weren't even entirely sure what you'd done to provoke them, because whoever did it wasn't making any announcements about why they'd done it?

I love this city. By that I don't mean merely that I enjoy living here. I mean that I care deeply about the place. It's not the same kind of love as one can have for a person (or a group of people), but it is a real and abiding love ... and it is not limited to the inhabitants of the city, but extends to the atmosphere, the surroundings, and, yes, the architecture.
I loved the Towers. And I want them back. And I don't think I'm alone.
We can't rebuild the people we lost. We can rebuild the buildings. And I see no reason why we should not.

More about the nature of provocation as soon as I find the right thread.

September 16, 2001 1:29 AM

I've been thinking a lot about the whole question of Why Are They Doing This To Us.

(Pardon me while I ramble. Trust me, this will all become relevant in the end. Well, most of it. Some of it. I hope.)

Some years ago I had a bit of a revelation -- well, okay, it was more of a kick in the head, but it's worked -- about people and their behavior. Well, two, actually. The first one goes like this:

People (especially, but not limited to, otherwise reasonable people) do not behave like jerks unless they feel that they have been injured.

Where this came from is that a friend of mine was acting like a complete jerk. To me, in particular. And it took me a stupidly long time to realize that he wouldn't be doing that if he didn't think that I had done something wrong to him.
Once I had that, I was able to figure out what I was doing wrong, stop doing it, and offer an apology -- combined with an explanation of what I thought he was doing wrong, of some of which he had been completely unaware. Until I showed him how he had hurt me (in this particular case, by telling him what I was afraid he was going to do next, which shocked him), he hadn't realized the half of what he was doing.

This led to my second revelation (which is somewhat less relevant to my eventual point than the first, but I thought I'd mention it):
If you have been hurt by someone with whom you desire peace, do not conceal your pain when you deal with them.
If I'd acted in such a way as to pretend I hadn't been hurt, I would never have been able to effect a reconciliation. And I would have lost a good friend and colleague.

Now, I've had to amend these ideas somewhat over the years. To begin with, the first one took its present form when I realized that when people feel they have been injured, they do not necessarily direct their jerk-like behavior against the people who have injured them; they don't even always direct it against the people they think injured them. (Your boss insulted you. You come home and snap at your kids. Happens all the time, and it's damn hard to avoid.)

But nobody -- and if you have evidence contradicting this, please tell me -- nobody acts like a jerk unless they feel that someone has acted like a jerk unto them.

Which comes to the next bit. Say someone is a jerk to you. You say "where the hell did that come from?" And you realize that it's because they feel that you, personally, have injured them.
What you have to do next is re-evaluate your own behavior. Not, and I stress this, not immediately try to appease the Person Behaving Like A Jerk. But try to figure out if you really are doing anything to injure them, and if so, is it something you're willing/able to stop doing, and/or apologize for, and/or try to remedy.

'Cause it might not be. If they're angry because you mow your lawn at odd hours of the day, then a compromise might be reachable ... but if they're angry because (f'rinstance) you eat meat, and they think you shouldn't? Or because you're a cop, and you arrested a friend of theirs? Or, to take a really bad reason, because you belong to a particular race (or religion, or gender), certain members of which have caused them real or imagined injury in the past?
Or again, it might be something that you could stop doing, but it wouldn't really do them any good. Say, if they're angry because you're holding down a job that they really wish they had gotten instead? (In which case, it's the person who did the hiring who has injured them, not you. But ... well, anyway.)

The point is ... yeah, I'm pretty sure I had a point lying somewhere around here. Oh yes. The point is: Yes, the people who attacked us probably have a reason. No, check that: certainly have a reason.
But it may not be a good reason.
It may be because of something that we really did wrong. Or it may be because of something we did that we don't think is wrong. Or it may be because of something we didn't do at all, but that someone has decided to blame on us.

Do we need to re-evaluate our foreign policy? Probably, yeah. And if we find anything therein that makes us say to ourselves, "jeez louise, no wonder they attacked us, we asked for that!", then we need to consider making some huge, huge changes in our behavior.
But remember, it's entirely possible that we won't find anything like that at all. In which case we have to accept that we are not directly responsible for the attackers' anger at, or hatred of, us -- which may mean we can't do anything about it.
There's the really scary thing. See, if it's our fault (even in part, even in really really small part), then we can do something to fix it, or at least we could have done something at some point in the past to prevent it. And I think this may be at the heart of the insistence of some that we must be at fault somehow: fault implies control.

If it's not our fault, not even a little bit, then that may mean there's nothing, absolutely nothing, we can do. Except treat the symptoms.

We could start trying to find the actual source of the anger/hatred, and see if we can do anything about that ... but that would really require the help of the people involved. And if they hate us that much, they're not likely to be much help.

This is getting too long. I'm going to stop now. I hope some of the above made some sense.

Brunchmeet In The City, 09/16/2001
In attendance: Toon (Batya), Alex (Alex), IsMaryann_WantsToBeGinger (Annette), Jack Havoc (Chad), nebulous menace (Sandy), Helen (Helen), Harmonious (Miriam), DramaShrink (Meira)

Subway delays and general dilatoriness aside, a splendid afternoon. Bought the wonderful torus-shapes of carbohydratey goodness known as bagels at H&H, cream cheese of various flavors and drinks at the grocery next door (though none of us bought the disturbing bottle of Snapple Diet Air). Ate lunch on the side steps of the Rose Center (aka The Planetarium Formerly Known As The Haydn) until a few persnickety security guards told us that we couldn't sit there and had to move to the benches.
Wandered into Central Park, sat down on the lawn next to Belvedere Castle, and played a round of GM Jam (a style of roleplaying game -- in this particular round we encountered a lost teenager and his sentient kite, a tribe of rat-men, a bunch of giants who keep a terrarium with us in it, a big-ass loaf of bread, and bipedal roaches wearing clothes).
Came back to the Rose Center (where Jack Havoc and Alex finally caught up with us) and ogled all the pretty space exhibits, including a brief Big Bang show narrated by the recorded voice of Maya Angelou. Walked around the Scale Exhibit showing the relative sizes of everything from The Entire Known Universe down to A Proton (in gradual stages of course), skipped down the spiral ramp detailing the age of the universe, and stared up at a big virtual globe of the Earth (on which the clouds, the vegetation, and the oceans kept melting away and then coming back again -- the purpose being to show the outer layers of the planet, the effect being Damn Creepy).
Made merry in the Gift Shop, where we were tempted by astronaut ice cream sandwiches (kosher!), dangly earrings, globes of Mars and the Moon, planispheres, photocollage jigsaw puzzles, and a gorgeous Astronomy-themed Monopoly set, on which the two most pricey properties were represented as the Andromeda and Milky Way Galaxies.

And saw the City doing its damnedest to pull itself together.
The Park wasn't as crowded as it ought to've been, but there were plenty of people there, relaxing for distraction and for therapy. Signs up all over the place: advertising for a survivor support group, showing pictures of people still missing, urging people to find out if any apartments near them have pets with owners who are never coming home. American flags everywhere; one was tacked up with a small sticker that read "Islam is not the enemy. Hate is not the answer."
The air is clear and fresh. The smell of smoke is all but gone. Nobody's forgotten ... but it's enough, for now, just to go out and walk the streets, and nod to strangers in the park, and feel the city breathing.
And know that the city is, after all, still breathing.

*clears throat awkwardly* That got away from me at the end there. Ah heh. Sorry about that.

...and finally...

=====
September 28, 2001 01:17 PM
Day Of AtOnement

Um ... okay. This is about something extremely personal and subjective that happened to me on the night of Yom Kippur (Wednesday night), and I wanted to talk about it here. I'm not quite done putting words around it, but I'm afraid that if I wait until I'm done I'll never post it.

A lot of you probably know, or have guessed by now, that my faith in my God and my religion has always been a pretty cerebral thing. An act of will as much as anything else. The sort of faith that's at least two parts doubt: "I don't understand You, and I don't think I can understand You, and I'm trying really hard to be okay with that, and I just really hope that You're there and that You know what the hell's going on, because I sure don't."

I've also said before that I obey my God's commands out of respect, and out of a belief that He knows what's good ... but love? It's hard to love Someone, I've said on more than one occasion, if He never talks to you.

So that's more or less where I was, on Wednesday afternoon. I'd also been having some trouble getting into a properly penitent frame of mind for the High Holidays: this is, after all, when God judges us, and writes down our judgement in the Book. And what with one thing and another, since September 11th, I'd just been trying to get back to a place where I wasn't angry with God or terrified of what He would do (or allow to happen) next.

Anyway, yeah. Wednesday evening.

A lot of things must have been moving around randomly in my head around this time. I can even pick out a few of them. That piece from the Onion -- God Angrily Clarifies "Don't Kill" Rule. The wording in some random pro-choice advertisement, about a pregnant teenage girl who died of a botched back-alley abortion because she was too afraid to get her mother's permission for a legal one. Our rabbi's speech two weeks ago, when he talked about God as a compassionate father who nonetheless cannot, will not, spare His children pain if the pain is necessary, and who suffers with our suffering. Or his speech that night, when he talked about the two sides of Yom Kippur and how this year none of us should have any trouble feeling the awe and fear, and that instead we should try harder to feel the love and trust that God will forgive us. There must have been others.

Or maybe none of that had anything to do with this.

I can't remember if it was during the rabbi's opening speech or just after that, when the cantor was beginning the Kol Nidrei. I just remember the feeling, and how suddenly it hit me....

It was as though someone were just behind me, someone much bigger than myself, and holding me in an embrace. As though the someone had leaned forward to murmur in my ear, I'm here. It's going to be okay.

I think I gasped. I know that stunned tears flooded my eyes, and that the thought came into my head that this had to be my imagination. Me making up little stories in my head, as I've done for as long as I can remember. I realized that wasn't true when I couldn't add dialogue to it -- or, well, only my own half of the dialogue.

Stay with me? I thought. (I don't know why; it's just what came to mind.) And where I would have written an answer -- "I can't" or "I am, always" or something predictable like that -- there were no words, only that warm emotional snuggling of protection and reassurance. Only the feeling.

It left, gradually. But by that time we were well into the opening prayers of the night, and words I'd known all my life seemed to have suddenly acquired a new set of meanings -- meanings of such beauty and tenderness and unexpected bitterness that I couldn't stop weeping.

For the first time in my life I had been given to know that my God loved me, and had always loved me. And I understood that with my sins, I had disappointed Him; and that utterly aside from the question of punishment, He grieved for the pain that I had caused myself. And I knew that regardless of what I had done, He would always forgive me.

He is my Father, and He loves me.

The rest of the fast seemed almost like an afterthought, at times.

So ... here's where I am now. I'll probably write more about this over the next week. Or else I'll decide that it wasn't something to talk about here, and delete the thread.
I just thought I'd share.

Have a good weekend, all. You know I love you.