Time does tend to heal. Even damage from attacks like those on Manhattan and Washington, DC. Especially if you don’t keep picking at the scabs. Then, the wounds fester. Gets all kinda bad.
But if you keep them protected and the grime away. Time does do its magic.
Usually, by leaving scars. Nothing in life, after all, is free.
Scars
Scarring makes sense for the body—get us back working as quickly as possible—even if it’s not pretty. Never say die and all.
One gets patches of skin that don’t tan. Has a different tone and texture, sometimes raised, other times grooved. For bones, they come back thicker in places. Ache in response to the weather.
But, one lives and keeps moving.
For Better and Worse
Some scars heal up better than others. When I broke my ankle, the bone knitted up well, and I can walk and run, though sometimes lousy weather makes it ache. And it doesn’t like jumping jacks at all. But, no limp. Only have to adjust some exercises.
As for the craniotomy to remove the meningioma behind my right eye? Well, that did its job of pulling the walnut-sized tumor from over my temporal lobe. Stopped those seizures. But the tissue of the meninges between the frontal and temporal lobes scarred thickly. Now, that thickened spot keeps the pressure on the right temporal lobe.
Presto—permanent Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.
A chronic but reasonably easy-to-maintain condition. A few pills before bed. A full night’s sleep is now a MUST; I have to cut out nightcaps and, well, any wine after about 7 pm. (Interferes with the medication. Boo.) At least scars don’t grow and get worse like tumors do.
So, again. I’m alive. Sans brain tumor. Writing. With my family. At least my wife always wanted a man with a scar on his face. Mostly forehead, in my case. But close enough for her.
9-11
September eleventh wounded. The Country. The two cities that got gashed. And the many families that lost parts of themselves.
It has healed for many of us.
Has decidedly left scars.
In the people who lived through it. In the many who watched. In NYC. Washington, D.C. A field in Pennsylvania. In our body politic.
The Country
Our country is left with a vague paranoia that “something gonna happen. Some day.” Led us to Afghanistan, then Iraq. A growing obsession with Islamic terrorism. Usually seen from afar. Sometimes closer to home. Either way, it stirs up hatred of the other.
It birthed the TSA and a new way to fly. Gave us longer security lines. And the NSA received vast resources devoted to keeping an eye on malefactors, real and imagined. Knowing so much that Snowden thought himself a hero for letting us know the price of this Safety. After we stopped a man trying to light a fuse sticking out from his shoe, we now take our shoes off to fly.
NYC
New York City survived two buildings vanishing. Humvees with mounted 50 caliber machine guns parking near intersections on Broadway. Uniformed military on our subway armed with automatic weapons. Having to prove you needed to be in lower Manhattan. I still have the letter allowing me to go there and the one to enter my building at 11 Broadway.
We got a smoking car in Times Square. Had the jolt of fear that it was happening all over with the 2003 Northeast blackout.
New Skyline
Brass-balled real-estate developer Larry Silverstein stared down the Governors of both NY and NJ and got the insurance companies to pay for twoattacks—one for each tower.
This all while paying $8.5 million a month in rent ($102 million a year) on what was now wreckage, filling a hole in the ground.
Then he built another, taller building in their place.
With an appropriately dignified memorial in the footprints of the buildings that came down. Absences full of meaning. Once a year, filled two columns of light shooting into the firmament.
A changed but still grand skyline.
The People
Many lost family and friends that day. Of those wounds, I cannot speak.
I got to walk home that day.
While sirens no longer make me wonder if this is the same disaster still unfolding, I do not like when airliners fly low. Especially close to Manhattan.
And then, when a twenty-something airport security officer started to lecture me about why they had to confiscate a two-inch Swiss-card knife—I got cross.
This boy might have watched something on TV when he was little. From the safety of his couch. At home. Afraid? Sure. Angry? Probably. But he didn’t have to worry about a beam falling from a building and smashing his skull into a pulp as he walked through a blizzard of burnt concrete dust.
He doesn’t get to tell me jack about that day.
I was there, see.
Hell, he probably watched me walk through the worst of it. Watched us. A hell of a lot of us.
Sure. He’s just doing his job.
But to lecture me?
There are only a few thousand people on earth who have that right. And he ain’t one of them.
Yeah, I know.
But most scars aren’t pretty. They’re functional. Even if I’m not sure what they are holding together inside me.
An Isolated Few
Few people would get my outsized annoyance at something so seemingly small.
In fact, in the twenty-odd years since that day, I’ve met only one person who was down there that day. A fellow writer. And that only through email. Not ever have I met anyone sitting in a bar, or at a dinner, or waiting for the bus who can speak of what it was like down there that morning. A photographer friend of mine was downtown that day. He took several shots. Few people have seen that I know of. If you’re interested, check out his site here: https://www.charleseshelman.com.
Sure, I know my former coworkers, but we haven’t stayed in touch.
An odd sort of solitude.
Course, scars like this are inside. We don’t wear badges, after all. So, it could be most anyone of the right age. How would I know?
Most people in NYC don’t dwell on it. It comes up, of course. But most of us didn’t pick at the scabs afterwards. We don’t poke at the scars now.
For us who made it through the day, simply surviving was a lot.
There is one thing I do think about sometimes. That hasn’t scarred over. Quite yet.
UA 93
That’s UA Flight 93.
And the rallying cry: “Okay. Let’s roll.”
Most people were caught unawares that day. Sucker punched. Some ran to rescue and were killed when it all came down.
But Todd and those few men on that flight knew they were going to die.
They acted to thwart the bad guys’ plan anyway.
I’d like to think I’d have had the stones to do that.
Though, I hope I never have to find out. And continue to be grateful I live here. In NYC.
Department of Old Words
These are the three previous essays about 9-11, the day of, a year later, and ten years on.
- NYC on 9-11: What it was like to the trapped inside the news that day
- NYC: A Year Later
- NYC: Ten Years On