In old New York

I like pastoral scenes and the occasional bucolic experience but at heart I'm a city girl.

When I was a kid we spent a fair amount of time living on the lam in Chicago.

We would briefly occupy this tiny apartment and that tenement walkup before moving on. Good times. And I mean that.

Mostly our windows looked out onto drab alleyways that always seemed empty except for metastasizing garbage and melting snow.

But I loved the city, and then we left the city.

Many years later I returned to the metropolitan Chicago area and ended up living there for seventeen years.

I will never forget the September day in 1974 when I first saw the Sears Tower from the Dan Ryan Expressway.

As you well know I'm not often without words but I doubt I eked out a syllable for a whole thirty seconds.

The immensity of that building! It has never failed to impress me throughout all these years.

As a rule I have not been as intimately acquainted with the New York City skyline as I've always tried to be with that of Chicago, but I can identify the well-known buildings.

While on a family vacation during the summer of 1996 I saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center for the first time, live and in person.

Naturally I snapped pictures of the towers from the ferry on that chilly gray fourth of July, but they're packed away and I cannot find them.

The best I can do is give you Andrew with a funny expression on his face, posing with Lady Liberty in the background. He was seven; she was a hundred ten.

And then there's Audrey with Andrew, getting ready to board the ferry. She was thirteen. Audrey, I mean. I don't know how old the ferry was.

Although I cannot remember my exact thought process upon seeing the towers from the harbor, I do recall being gobsmacked by the sheer imposing brilliance and symmetry of them. How could one not?

They were certainly beautiful.

After seeing the interior pictures posted a few days ago by my friend Angel of Woman Honor Thyself, I wish we'd made time to visit the towers. They would stand for only five years more.

And it is still unthinkable to me that they are gone forever.

On our trip to New York this past May, I was anxious to see Ground Zero. 

When we finally reached it I thought there must be some mistake. How could that massively horrible thing have happened in so small a space?

But it did. I saw it on television. I watched as the towers collapsed and I waited for TG to arrive home from Washington DC where he'd gone that morning.

Across the street from Ground Zero is St. Paul's Chapel, Manhattan's oldest public building in continuous use.

George Washington prayed there on the day of his inauguration. You can gawk at the pew he occupied.

The cemetery that fills the space between the church and the street, just a few hundred yards from where the towers once soared, is like a rapt and breathless vacuum.

Near the church portico there is a bell mounted on a pedestal. The topmost surface of the pedestal, just inches below the bell's clapper, is imprinted with a schematic of the World Trade Center.

The bell was cast at The Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London on July 26, 2002. It was dedicated at Trinity Church Wall Street on September 11, 2002. Embossed on the bell are these words:

TO THE GREATER GLORY OF GOD

AND IN RECOGNITION OF

THE ENDURING LINKS BETWEEN

THE CITY OF LONDON

AND

THE CITY OF NEW YORK

FORGED IN ADVERSITY ~ 11 SEPTEMBER 2001

I was so moved by the bell and its message that I reached underneath, grabbed the iron tongue, and rang it. I will never forget its one-note song of poignant memories, still ripe and full down all the years.

The Millenium Hilton scrapes the sky directly across from Ground Zero as well. I shudder to think what those who occupied rooms and suites on the upper floors of that hotel witnessed on Nine Eleven, before they were evacuated.

At the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site there was a flag bearing in its red and white ribbons the names of all those killed by Islamic terrorists on American soil ten years ago today.

A day like any other. Except it wasn't.

There was also a to-scale model of the Statue of Liberty encased in glass. She's covered -- all but her pretty face, which seems to wear a worried expression -- from torch to sandal sole in pictures and badges and notes and buttons and other Nine Eleven mementoes.

Later that day, walking through Battery Park to the Staten Island Ferry, I saw Fritz Koenig's sculpture The Sphere, now ruined, which once sat burnished and smooth, impervious to the elements, between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Its head is bloodied but unbowed, just like New York's.

Then to pass beneath the massive American flag starkly suspended above the escalator I rode to the Staten Island Ferry embarkation lobby, was a privilege.

There is pain in remembering just as there is that bone-jarring ache common to all irreparable loss. But remember we must.

The song says I'm gonna make a brand new start of it in old New York.

In this new New York as in that old New York, there abounds one thing the terrorists never counted on. It may be something as prosaic as garden-variety hope but I suspect it is something more profound: the vision that is born after all hope is gone.

Whatever it is, I felt it there. I sensed it on the wide streets and in the warm air and I saw it in the avid faces of all those who had come to be part of the spectacle, if only for a day.

I tasted it in the delectable food served by gracious people in restaurants such as La Parisienne Diner and Junior's.

I marveled at it in the relentless insanity and industry of Times Square.

I listened for it in the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd at Yankee Stadium.

My bones rattled with it in the screeching, lurching crush of the madly careening subway cars.

It was the passion and humor and enthusiasm and never-say-die gutsiness of a spectacular American city.

The greatest city in the greatest country there ever was, or ever will be. Forged in adversity.

God bless America.