Read Online Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate - Free Book Online
Authors: Phillip Lopate
Ads: Link
longer make out the Manhattan skyline; all you could see was a billowing black cloud. Later my wife told me she had actually glimpsed the top of one of the Twin Towers in flames, and I envied her. I found myself envying everyone who had actually witnessed the buildings on fire or collapsing. Of course I had no one to blame but myself, having secreted myself indoors for the first few hours. I still can't imagine running into Manhattan to get a closer look, but I could have gone up to my roof. In the fury of the moment it hadn't occurred to me; probably because I was terrified, the spectating impulse had shut down. Now I saw thousands of people on foot crossing over the bridges into downtown Brooklyn.
When I reached Atlantic Avenue I turned east, away from the water, and began to encounter hordes of office workers, released early from their jobs. Not all of them seemed upset; there was a sort of holiday mood, in patches, brought on by unexpected free time. Two young men and a woman their age were even laughing as they recounted to each other the morning's events, how they had been stopped on their way out of the subway. The middle-aged and elderly, on the other hand, seemed profoundly disturbed, as if they had not expected anything so terrible as an attack on America to happen in the last quarter of their lives. Just as there is something unseemly when a young person dies, so the natural order of things seems wronged when the elderly, braced for their own diminishment, illness, and death, must absorb the bitter shock of how vulnerable and perishabletheir world is—the world they had counted on to outlast them. I myself felt, at fifty-seven, that the attack was a personal affront to the proper autobiographical arc, as though a melodramatic and unnecessarily complicated subplot had been introduced too late in the narrative.
All at once, I wanted to be with my family. My cocoa-colored shirt was flecked with white ash, like birdshit, when I turned in to my daughter's school. Parents crowded the lobby, many picking up their children to take them home. To my way of thinking, school seemed as safe a place for Lily as our house; I saw no reason to take her out prematurely. Cheryl was standing by the door of the multipurpose room, waiting for Lily's class to leave at the end of dance period. When she came out, Lily seemed happily surprised to see me, in midday; I hugged her. She trooped off to her next activity. Cheryl milled around with the other mothers and some of the fathers, who had returned from the financial district: they were all comparing personal accounts, and engaging in that compulsively repetitious dialogue by which an enormity is made real.
A few days later my wife reproached me for having shown up with ash-laden clothing, my shirttails left untucked. She said I could have frightened the children. I replied that I didn't think anyone had even noticed me. But, on some level, her reproach was justified: I was indulging the fantasy of being invisible, I was not being a team player. Some sort of communal bonding had started taking place, foreign to me, beautiful in many respects, scary in others. My wife and I both felt anguished that day and all week, but it was an anguish we could not share. The fault was mine: selfishly, I wanted to nurse my grief at what had been done to my city. I mistrusted any attempt to co-opt me into group-think, even conjugal-think.
That New York was the primary target I had no doubt. I felt so identified with my native city that it took a mental wrenching to understand all of America considered itself assaulted. I knew, of course, that the Pentagon had been hit and another plane had gone down in a Pennsylvania field, but I chose to see it as an attack on the values of urbanism, vertical density, secular humanism, skepticism, women's rights, and mass transit. The American flags that started appearing everywhere may have been fitting ways to honor the heroic local firemen and police who died in
When I reached Atlantic Avenue I turned east, away from the water, and began to encounter hordes of office workers, released early from their jobs. Not all of them seemed upset; there was a sort of holiday mood, in patches, brought on by unexpected free time. Two young men and a woman their age were even laughing as they recounted to each other the morning's events, how they had been stopped on their way out of the subway. The middle-aged and elderly, on the other hand, seemed profoundly disturbed, as if they had not expected anything so terrible as an attack on America to happen in the last quarter of their lives. Just as there is something unseemly when a young person dies, so the natural order of things seems wronged when the elderly, braced for their own diminishment, illness, and death, must absorb the bitter shock of how vulnerable and perishabletheir world is—the world they had counted on to outlast them. I myself felt, at fifty-seven, that the attack was a personal affront to the proper autobiographical arc, as though a melodramatic and unnecessarily complicated subplot had been introduced too late in the narrative.
All at once, I wanted to be with my family. My cocoa-colored shirt was flecked with white ash, like birdshit, when I turned in to my daughter's school. Parents crowded the lobby, many picking up their children to take them home. To my way of thinking, school seemed as safe a place for Lily as our house; I saw no reason to take her out prematurely. Cheryl was standing by the door of the multipurpose room, waiting for Lily's class to leave at the end of dance period. When she came out, Lily seemed happily surprised to see me, in midday; I hugged her. She trooped off to her next activity. Cheryl milled around with the other mothers and some of the fathers, who had returned from the financial district: they were all comparing personal accounts, and engaging in that compulsively repetitious dialogue by which an enormity is made real.
A few days later my wife reproached me for having shown up with ash-laden clothing, my shirttails left untucked. She said I could have frightened the children. I replied that I didn't think anyone had even noticed me. But, on some level, her reproach was justified: I was indulging the fantasy of being invisible, I was not being a team player. Some sort of communal bonding had started taking place, foreign to me, beautiful in many respects, scary in others. My wife and I both felt anguished that day and all week, but it was an anguish we could not share. The fault was mine: selfishly, I wanted to nurse my grief at what had been done to my city. I mistrusted any attempt to co-opt me into group-think, even conjugal-think.
That New York was the primary target I had no doubt. I felt so identified with my native city that it took a mental wrenching to understand all of America considered itself assaulted. I knew, of course, that the Pentagon had been hit and another plane had gone down in a Pennsylvania field, but I chose to see it as an attack on the values of urbanism, vertical density, secular humanism, skepticism, women's rights, and mass transit. The American flags that started appearing everywhere may have been fitting ways to honor the heroic local firemen and police who died in
Similar Books
