I Still Don't Know

It was the kind of late-summer day that you wanted to hold onto any way you could, a prospect made difficult by the fact that the days were getting shorter and the feeling of summer had faded away with the passing of Labor Day. That's something that will always stick with me: what a nice day it was.

By the afternoon of September 11, 2001, we needed a break from watching the constant television coverage that could provide no new details and instead simply replayed the horror. After leaving work early, we took our son over to our friends' house, so that he could play with their two boys, who were slightly older. We four adults sat outside watching them, not talking much, because really, what more could we say? I watched the kids and secretly hoped for some kind of a kid conflict, because I wanted to face a problem that I knew I could solve.

We all knew, I think, that our friend Chris was dead, but none of us came out and said it. The facts were, though, that Chris worked in the World Trade Center on the top floors, and while he was officially "missing," the only thing that would have kept him from getting home to his family, or at least calling them, would be that he was no longer alive.

But we held out hope, because it was the only thing we knew we could do. Everything else just seemed so meaningless.

And that's the image burned into my mind: four adults sitting outside on a brilliant September afternoon watching three children cavort in the safety of a fenced-in back yard. In the distance, only a dozen miles away or so, is Manhattan. In the next day or so, the smoke and smell of the fallen towers will waft across the river, but on this afternoon, the clear blue sky is relatively quiet, a rarity in an area with so many airports. Every once in a while, though, a fighter jet streaks overhead. Nobody knows what to say, nobody knows what to do, and nobody wants to be alone.

I still feel that way eight years later.