five years on

Five years ago, of course, was that ter­ri­ble day. It feels so odd to be away from New York on the anniver­sary, almost like I aban­doned it. So I thought I would think a lit­tle bit about where we were then, and then maybe it would be eas­i­er to think about where we are now.

When I took Avery to school this morn­ing, it was hard to look at the girl with almost two num­bers in her age and remem­ber the lit­tle near­ly-five-year-old, small enough to car­ry, going to school on the sec­ond day of kinder­garten, when the unthink­able hap­pened. It was only years lat­er that she told me, “I was the last one in the big red door,” mean­ing the door in the school yard at PS 234, min­utes before the first plane hit the build­ing just four blocks away. I asked her yes­ter­day what she remem­bered of that day, and there is very lit­tle. Which is so good. My moth­er sug­gest­ed that of course it will always be some­thing that hap­pened to her, some­thing she will always be part of. But thank good­ness she was­n’t near­ly ten on that day, when we tried so hard to make her not part of it.

It was such a famous­ly crispy blue-sky day of course, and I sup­pose the time might come some day in the future when there can be a crispy blue-sky Sep­tem­ber morn­ing that does­n’t feel ter­ri­bly wrong. And a tiny, tiny part of every school dropoff remains root­ed in that morn­ing, when leav­ing her at school was fol­lowed almost instant­ly by such fear and inde­ci­sion, haste and wor­ry. But the oth­er side of that coin is how glad I am at every school pick­up that it’s all gone fine, there she is, all’s well. And I’m not sure I would have been smart enough to feel that way with­out that day, so per­haps it’s a sil­ver lin­ing of sorts.

John is there today, prob­a­bly just wak­ing up in his tacky hotel room in mid­town, short­ly to walk over to Times Square and start his work day. It is the first anniver­sary that we haven’t been togeth­er, and the first I have spent out­side New York. I remem­ber spend­ing the first anniver­sary at my new art gallery, on a street that was cor­doned off for months after Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, with so many vis­i­tors com­ing in to be glad the gallery was there, glad the street was open, that the chil­dren were back in their school on the cor­ner that had been closed until Feb­ru­ary. That’s what Avery remem­bers. “It was awful hav­ing to move schools.” But she remem­bers that in much the same way that she remem­bers the hat­ed “cor­po­rate flat” where we stayed here in Lon­don for the first few weeks. A place not of our choos­ing, filled with tem­po­rary things, know­ing you did­n’t belong. And how good to get to a place where you did belong, and could put down roots.

I remem­ber that the school’s web­site, oth­er­wise com­plete­ly upbeat, pos­i­tive, for­ward-look­ing even in the dark days of not know­ing where we would relo­cate to, had one pho­to­graph that seemed to acknowl­edge what had hap­pened to us: a pic­ture of the school cal­en­dar, hang­ing slight­ly askew in the prin­ci­pal’s office, with yel­low smi­ley faces mark­ing off the days of Sep­tem­ber, and stop­ping abrupt­ly at Sep­tem­ber 10. I won­der who post­ed that pic­ture? It seemed to me to rep­re­sent all that had been lost.

Five years on, in anoth­er time zone, anoth­er apart­ment, anoth­er school, even with four com­plete­ly new cats! In a strange way it’s odd to have feline com­pan­ions that weren’t with us in those dark days, but only a total­ly crazy per­son like me would think of some­thing like that. I thought this morn­ing that Dor­rie would come to clean today, not dear Car­men who I met at the police bar­ri­er at Canal Street on what­ev­er day after Sep­tem­ber 11th, sad and devot­ed. When I cleaned out Avery’s clos­et this spring, final­ly purg­ing it of years of out­grown clothes, I found the lit­tle skirt she was wear­ing that day, a lit­tle orange two-lay­ered skirt with pink gauzy flow­ers sewn to it. I remem­ber I put it on her the next day, too, think­ing in some dogged, crazy way that then it would­n’t be “what she was wear­ing on that day.” Of course it stayed “what she was wear­ing on that day” for­ev­er after that, no mat­ter how many times she put it on.

Tonight friends will come for din­ner, since it seemed as if we should be with oth­er New York­ers. And then tomor­row won’t be the anniver­sary of any­thing, which will be good. I have to remem­ber how for­tu­nate we are that no one we knew died, that we’re togeth­er. How much worse it could have been, and was for so many peo­ple. My sin­cere plan is to become a big­ger per­son for whom it isn’t always all about me. To all of you in New York, we’re think­ing about you.