I said to a friend and colleague just the day before yesterday, “I can’t believe I’ve lived through two unlikely epochs in NYCs long, storied, successful history of it to see tourism utterly collapse. Again.”
As remarkable as that is, upon reflection I realized what a selfish thought, admonished and roundly by the chorus of the thousands of souls lost to both tragedies: I’ve lived.
As have you, dear reader. And while we may feel pangs of guilt about that, and the tsunami of sadness that, rogue in nature, will take us out, level us, triggered by never the same words, a nearly reminiscent blue sky, the cry of the mother denied her son being taken off life support in April that wrent my psyche in two like the curtain in the temple, no sometimes reaching for a Snickers bar will set me off. This I don’t mind. I am glad to be made mindful of our loss, personal and collective, that makes me and us less than we might have been.
That is the lesson for me this year in my annual September 10th rumination. It has been suggested this global crisis has finally turned the page on the horror of that day at the World Trade Center, that these lovely children around us are maneuvering finally in a post 9/11 generation. I believe there is truth to that having watched time lessen the impact year after year on my younger and younger charges I brought to Lower Manhattan. It had been so much the focus of experiencing NYC for us trying to teach them, as the need waned in each successive crop of Eighth
As an exercise lately, I try to imagine framing NYC to a hypothetical group of tourists that day in whatever part of a future they may return. We will inevitably demarcate the pre- and post-COVID city, and September 11th will become ancillary to that larger story.
Except for it’s good lesson that fuels whatever larger story takes hold: Life wants to live. And those that lose that tether need to see it in our eyes who carry the sadness, the memory and the joy of those who have moved on.
