9/11/01 From 1021 Miles Away

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets

* * * *
Whichever online resumé/job search websites that existed in the late 1990s were in their infancy, so the professional job search that I pursued from 1997 till 2000 was so old-fashioned in its technology that whenever I describe life in that time period to friends in their twenties or thirties I think they picture me in a suit and fedora with a cheroot in my teeth and a lamp with a green shade angled over my work.

I bought the New York Times each morning and discarded everything but the Employment pages. (“Employment” sounded so much more professional, and hopefully permanent, than the “Help Wanted” label in the local paper.) There would be three to six new ads for editorial positions each day. I’d swivel around in the office chair from the table on which I laid out the ads to which I would respond to the computer on which I’d rewrite my cover letter to match my resumé to the ad’s requirements. All of the jobs were in New York City. I was 28, an award-winning newspaper columnist with years of editorial experience, and hungry.

Something like two dozen job interviews resulted. Something like zero jobs resulted. I’d drive to my hometown train station (Poughkeepsie) and travel to Grand Central Station. When I’d exit Grand Central into the morning light of what I always hoped was my first day in my new life, I would look for the Twin Towers and orient myself. All of the jobs for which I interviewed were south of Grand Central and many were in the Financial District. The next half-hour to forty-five minutes were a pleasant walk to my job interview and next new life.

None of the jobs were in those two buildings. Each of them but two were near. I was interviewed three times for the job of Editor-in-Chief for the quarterly journal of the Museum of American Financial History, which was in the Standard Oil building at 26 Broadway. One of the interviews was with John Herzog, CEO of his own financial services company and founder of the museum, in his CEO-sized office in that famous building. If you’ve ever stood at the Charging Bull statue near the New York Stock Exchange, you were next to that building and its curved front and huge bay windows above the ground floor. I was behind one of those huge windows one afternoon. If I’d been hired for that job and held it for a year or two, I would have been at 26 Broadway and possibly covered in dust on that Tuesday twenty-five years ago.

I wasn’t, though. Each of the jobs wanted someone with experience at a daily newspaper and my experience was at a weekly. The Museum was the only one that brought me in more than once for interviews. I am not an impressive individual even now, and I was less so when I was 28 and hungry and at a job interview.

I have since met and come to know quite a few people who were in Lower Manhattan that day and the weeks after. Several were volunteers at Ground Zero. Some of them have since passed away from respiratory ailments likely caused by exposure to toxins in the air that day.

At the beginning of 2000, I finally landed a job in publishing: it was in the technical documentation department at Square D’s factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. That factory is 1021 miles away from Ground Zero.

At my desk at 7:30 a.m. (8:30 a.m. Eastern time) on 9/11/01, things started to happen in NYC before I’d finished my first coffee. Because cable internet was not yet a thing (we had T1 lines), heavy online traffic crashed every website for everyone very quickly. The email system slowed; emails actually arrived out of order. An email from my friend John in New Paltz was how I learned that something had happened in NYC. An email from my mom was how I learned of the collapse. Someone found a TV in a training room and we saw everything that everyone saw.

My personal experience of 9/11/01 is unimportant to anyone who is not me. I share these personally and rarely. What I write here is the most I have ever written about my memories, and if you are reading this, that means I hit “Publish.”

As I wrote, I was not in New York City that day. An upstate New Yorker my entire life, I’d failed to find a job in NYC in the late 90s, burned my life in New Paltz, and in 2000 I found myself in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. By 9/11, I was 32 and in my second year at Square D.

For weeks after September 11, 2001, I heard a whispered, “He’s from New York,” just as I approached any gathering. I would politely tell people that I’m not from New York City, but that meant nothing to most. I usually felt like I’d made a mistake to burst the bubble of a person’s belief that my New York origin meant that I knew something brand-new about loss, about this new type of loss. “New York” was an incantation for two weeks or so, words that I never spoke but were spoken around me, and they seemed to allow people to get some grief out, as if I represented something. Surely I knew someone who’d died in the towers.

I am certain that none of those murdered that day is someone I knew. Several members of my Marist College class died there that day, but they’d been business majors, and their names are not names I’d ever known. That day I worried about a cousin of mine whose subway changeover stop was at the World Trade Center, but I learned a few days later that she was safe, and I worried about a friend who was a graduate student at NYU, but she was safe, too. I was and am still happy that both were safe.

I walked home the four miles from the factory that afternoon. Alone in my apartment that night, I cried. I still did not know if I’d lost anyone I knew. The days after 9/11, I felt New York-homesick with a fierceness I didn’t understand. I was homesick for an experience that wasn’t mine: I had tried so hard to land a job in Lower Manhattan, after all.

It was like I mourned the absence of something I never had.

“In my end is my beginning.” On September 12, 2001, I drank upon waking for the first time in my life. I drank like an alcoholic before that date, certainly, but a line was crossed that day in that bit of my personal history. 9/11 had nothing to do with my first-ever six a.m. drink, even though I wanted it to. I wanted to grieve, but I didn’t know how.

The remainder of the decade that followed, people whispered other introductions about me, I fear. Rather than, “He’s from New York,” they muttered frustrations about me. I heard them sometimes. That part of my life ended in 2010, happily.

I had things to grieve, but I didn’t know how to do that. Life since 2010 has offered me much to mourn, also, of course. I’m still learning how to grieve and live, “into another intensity,” as Eliot phrases it. Lessons about grief never cease. Lessons about grief never cease because love never ceases.

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Mark Aldrich is an award-winning humor columnist and a writer/performer with the Magnificent Glass Pelican radio comedy improv group, which just completed its thirty-fifth season: