My family had moved there earlier–in 1966–and so I spent my first birthday and the subsequent seventeen ones on Grace Court. My father, Brooklyn born and raised, had decided, not unreasonably, that a one-bedroom on West 10th Street was cramped for three. My mother, Boston born and raised, declared that the trail would lead no further than Brooklyn Heights, and still glows with maternal pride that she spared me and my brother an upbringing in Flatbush or Sheepshead Bay.

And Grace Court was a beautiful block, with Promenade views without the pedestrian foot traffic of the Promenade. And the building, then rent-controlled, now co-op, where we lived was big and rambling and in disrepair. There was the super, Mr. Nader, and his three daughters, and his German Shepherd, Lobo, who spent much of his time sticking his head out of Mr. Nader’s first floor window and barking at anything that came near him. Unfortunately, Grace Court was a dead-end street, now a cul de sac, and was perfect for stickball, with first base roughly demarcated by Mr. Nader’s window. This was fine as long as you were under four feet tall. If you were any taller, you risked being decapitated, or at least scalped, by Lobo.

Lobo died terribly, poisoned by something concealed in raw hamburger meat, and everyone believed that Sarita had done it. Sarita was British, but not really particularly from anywhere, read tarot cards, and was certainly capable of poisoning Lobo. Years later she attacked a friend of my mother’s who had befriended her for a time, and years after that a friend of my brother’s got a peek into her apartment and reported she was running a dog mill.

There was also Mary R. who used to pass out in the lobby, and who was saved from certain Mr. Goodbar fate by her conversion to Sufism. In the basement laundry room I would watch as she unfurled yards and yards of white cloth from the dryer. I could remember her in the hallways with her business suits, her cigarette and her highball glass, and then, one day, there was all this white.

And Mrs. Sours, who always wore purple wool. Adults always just seem indistinguishably old to children, but Mrs. Sours was about a hundred. She had gnarled hands, chin hair, and unusually sparkly eyes. We called her, not inventively, “The Witch.” Once when my father was in the elevator with her, a cockroach crawled out from her purple sleeve. Mrs. Sours died during the heat wave of 1977 and no one noticed for a while.

Mrs. Thacker was the doorwoman and from down South: Kentucky. Her son had been the super before Mr. Nader, but young Thacker had left and Mrs. Thacker had stayed. I don’t know if she was an official employee of the building–very little was official in those days–or if she just liked to sit in the lobby, but she was there every evening. The front door of the building would be propped open and Mrs. Thacker would sit. What she was preventing or welcoming is unclear since she was grossly overweight and hobbled by diabetes and most likely everyone would have been much safer if the door had been locked and Mrs. Thacker had been in her apartment. Still, she was there to tell us not to run through the lobby, and to bear witness, and to chat with passersby in speech that would be of interest to linguists; Mrs. Thacker pronounced the past tense of regular verbs as their own syllable, as in, “Sarita attack-ked Vivian…”

Which is all just to say that when the man who ran me over with his car moved to Grace Court in 1971, he fit right in.

It’s strange to begin to see your own increasing age in the world through the increasing ordinariness of electronic appliances, but in 1971, air conditioning was a luxury. So were push button phones, and there were no such things as answering machines or VCRS. And so it was not exactly a mark of abject poverty in 1971, on a hot summer day, to anticipate the opening of the fire hydrant, though it was as illegal as it is today. But Mr. Nader had the wrench, and he had the cap that made the hydrant sprinkle rather than dribble or push you back like a rioter. And sometime in the early afternoon I heard the sound of water on pavement.

I had a one-piece bathing suit in pink. It signified the start of my fascination with velvet at age six. When the bathing suit was wet, if you ran your hand over it one way it turned a sleek and shiny icy pink with tones of metallic gray in it. If you ran your hand over it the other way, it became a rough deep rose, spiky like freshly turned earth. It was transfixing. Perhaps too transfixing for street play, even on a cul de sac.

I appeared in the living room in it and my mother looked dubious–she hated hot weather and I had never been allowed to play in the hydrant unattended. I could hear the shrieks of joy from the other kids on the block, the uneven sound of the water being held back by the older boys and then released with renewed vigor. I could tell I was in for grave disappointment unless something radically new and unexpected happened. And I don’t know what it was, but it happened, and I was allowed to go downstairs after being told to be careful.

The water was cold. Everyone was either in the spray or on the sidelines, baking up before another pass. The jets were forceful but not overwhelming and on the edges the mist was fine, producing rainbows when viewed from certain angles.

I remember the deliciousness of running through the arcing water, the rough feel of cooled-down wet asphalt. I remember my last run, the dim realization that no one else was in the water with me; that in fact they were all on the sidewalk; that in fact they were all looking at me with a mixture of concern and pity; that in fact, they were all yelling various things at me.

Like, “Hey!”

Like, “Watch out!”

Like, “Car!”

And I remember seeing, at the last moment, the blue Volkswagon Beetle, right before it hit me, right before I slid up the triangular surface of the Beetle’s hood and almost up to the windshield and then back down to the ground.

The next thing I knew, I was on the sidewalk across the street from my building, bleeding, worrying the velvet on my bathing suit–smooth icy gray, rough spiky rose–and repeating, idiotically and futilely, it seemed even to me at six, “Don’t tell my mother!”

My mother, of course, appeared shortly after that.

As for the man who ran me over, he drove us to the hospital. He was in his mid-twenties and had just moved into the building; this had been one of his first drives down the block as a resident. He talked a lot, and it would be reasonable to assume it was because he was nervous, but the following thirty years proved he was always nervous and he always talked a lot.

As for me, I was more or less ok. Banged up. I had a bad bruise on my right leg, the one that had led the hip-check of the Beetle. The blood had come entirely from biting my own tongue. By evening I was recuperating on the couch, the TV rolled out from my parents’ bedroom, as it was on these convalescent occasions, which would expand to include, before the year was up, a tonsillectomy, a broken arm, and chicken pox.

Then the man came into the apartment with a stuffed animal, a maroon owl with white wing and breast accents. “Now don’t go getting hit by cars to get presents,” he said to me, before moving into the dining room to present the next and more important element in his anti-litigation package: a small baggie of pot for my parents.

While they torched up at the table and got to know one another, I watched the TV, named the owl–not inventively–Hooter, and listened to the rise and fall of their conversation over the familiar acrid smell that constituted Happy Hour at Grace Court in 1971.

In the late 70′s the man who ran with me over with his car wanted to be a rock star. He played at Max’s Kansas City, a place I had discovered with older friends. We would go to see The Speedies and my mother and her friends would go to see the man. Or, they went once. Because, apparently, the man was not a very talented musician. But we wound up with his 45, the cover shot a photo of his wife’s foot in a furry high-heeled mule on the octagonal black and white tile of Grace Court. I spent some time staring at it, trying to reconcile the leg in the bathroom with the man’s wife, who lived in sweatpants and wore glasses and was a little bit bent over.

Then the man converted to orthodox Judaism, adopted two daughters from Korea, single-handedly destroyed a New Year’s party of mother’s with an a capella version of “Proud Mary”, and told us one day a long story about how a goldfish in his apartment had died, but he had brought it back to life.

My friends began to refer to that day in 1971 as the day I hit the car.

I went to college and lived away for ten years after graduate school. The building went co-op and couples with no children moved in and there were no more stickball or volleyball games in the circle at the end of the block. The absence made me remember the sheer numbers of us–girls playing jacks in the front of the building, older boys trying out their hockey skates, younger boys playing handball. “Outside” was simply a destination, a place to be. The Good Humor man came every night of the summer, invariably during dinner, and the year of the bicentennial the street was packed with all of us–old and young. And Mr. Nader guarded the building and its prime rooftop view of the tall ships with, it was rumored, a gun; Lobo kept a little patch of sidewalk open in front of his window.

When I’d grown and moved away, it was always interesting to see who I ran into when I came back. And I usually ran into the man who ran me over. He was always out on the street, talking, smoking, hanging out. It was difficult to talk to him because, while he expressed great interest in anyone’s doings, he did most of the talking, got most of the details wrong, and there was little opportunity to correct him. In 1999 I was living back at Grace Court for a few months and wound up leaving for work the same time as him every morning. I tried to walk slowly; I walked the long way to the subway, avoiding him.

And then one night a few years later, in the fall, I went over to my mother’s for dinner and there was the man, sitting outside the building. “Welcome Home, Lizzie!” he said. His eyes sparkled. He looked thrilled to see me.

“Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

“That’s what I do,” he said, “I sit here and I welcome everybody home. Welcome home! Where are you living these days?”

“Just on Henry Street,” I said.

He’d let me go, he said, so my mother could have me over, he was sure she was waiting eagerly. Since I went over about once a week for dinner, I wasn’t as confident as he was about her enthusiasm, but I went upstairs.

“What’s wrong with Michael?” I asked. “He welcomed me home. It was creepy, it was like ‘The Sentinel’ where the suicide guards the gates of Hell.”

“He’s in very bad shape,” my mother said. “He has brain lesions. But very good meds. He’s in a great mood. It’s terrible.”

Then in the winter, I went over again, and he greeted me once more: “Ellen!” he said. “Welcome home!”

“I’m Lizz,” I said.

“I meant Lizz,” he said. “I know who you are. I meant you were going to see Ellen.”

“Why are you standing so far away?” he said. “Come closer.”

I’d been standing in front of the door, but I walked over to where he was sitting by the shrubbery.

“Where are you living these days? Tribeca?”

“No,” I said. “Just on Henry Street.”

“One of the kids from the building is living in Tribeca,” he said. “So I thought maybe that was you.”

“No,” I said.

“It’s cold,” I said.

“I’ll let you go,” he said. “Go and see your mother.”

I wasn’t going to see my mother; I was feeding her cat while she was away. But like so much of life among neighbors, the details, the distinctions somehow aren’t important, or important enough.

I fed the cat and stared out the kitchen window into the courtyard, a vantage from which I’d often looked, tossing water balloons and, later, cigarette butts. Sometime in the early 80s a sign had been posted in the lobby requesting the cessation of chicken bone tossing into the courtyard, but that hadn’t been me–I was already gone.

The apartment was quiet, the street was quiet, everyone on their way to somewhere else. Which is exactly where we’d all always been heading anyway, despite the way time can slow and warp at the moment of impact, or in the daily living of life behind identical doors that only in dreams would we mistake for our own.

But that turned out to be exactly the problem with this particular forward. It was a mock article about an “incident” on a plane from Los Angeles to New York. A flight attendant noticed a passenger attempting to light a piece of string protruding from his rectum. He was subdued by the flight crew and later discovered to have his intestines chock full of plastique, C4 to be exact.

The article then detailed the arrest of the passenger, whose name was something like Mohammed el Sharif Mohammed Mohammed Ali Baba. It contained droll “quotes” from the flight attendant: “I just thought he was trying to set his farts on fire, like all the other passengers do…”, the ticket agent: “Well, it did raise a red flag since his name didn’t fit on his ticket….”, and security: “We did have our suspicions; he was walking like he had a stick of dynamite up his ass…” and so on. It ended by coining the term “butt bomb”.

As I deleted the forward I wondered why I found it so unfunny. Certain things I found momentarily well-crafted, or at least pitch-perfect, but overall: nothing. I mean, I have a sense of humor and it doesn’t really veer toward the PC. I like “The Onion”. I laughed out loud at their graphic for 9/11: A map of America, in flames, through cross-hairs, with the tag line “Holy Fucking Shit”. I emailed their “article”: “Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell” and even the less geniusy “Gore Delivers State of the Union Address into Bathroom Mirror”. I read with interest and a kind of sick amusement a straight article on cutting edge teen slang and the effects of 9/11: “Ground Zero: a big mess; as in, ‘My room is, like, totally Ground Zero’; 9/10: passé; as in, ‘That haircut is so 9/10.’” I even laugh at lightbulb jokes. Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: That’s not funny.

But the email, arriving as it did on a day not unlike 9/11 in its warmth and sun and blue sky, just pissed me off. And it pissed me off more that it arrived from out of town. And perhaps it pissed me off because I know now what a real 757 sounds and feels like exploding into a real building; it’s loud and it shakes buildings like mine, two miles away. In fact, I had two opportunities at that experience that morning, once at 8:48 and again at 9:06. And perhaps it wasn’t funny because I live on the corner of Atlantic Avenue, the main Middle Eastern shopping and restaurant district in Brooklyn, and so I saw in the week after 9/11 how the police set up roadblocks all around my house to prevent retaliation against businesses that are older and more established in America than many possible retaliators might be.

An impossible eight months later, the clean up at Ground Zero is almost complete. Groundbreaking for rebuilding WTC 7 is planned. The EPA has backed down and agreed to clean apartments most wrecked by the blast. Con Edison displayed and stopped displaying the twin beams of light (called by many in Brooklyn the “Batcave Signal” for its odd trajectory from here and the optical illusion that there was only one beam. Even odder was that, given the flight patterns from Newark Airport, you could watch airplanes bisect the beam of light, surely not what anybody had in mind).

In other words, life should be going on. And it is, in all the sorts of unpredictable and exhilarating and wonderful and awful ways that it does, before, during, and after even an event of the magnitude of 9/11. But many New Yorkers will tell you, in the midst of all that life going on, 9/11 doesn’t really recede.

And by claiming it the territory of New Yorkers, I don’t mean to diminish the grief of anybody anywhere. The planes that never made it were going from one coast to the other; taken as they were, they left a trail of destruction across the same country they were supposed to traverse. And, self-evidently, the towers were a hub of international business, filled with people young and old who had come here from somewhere else, which is the case, ultimately, with most of America. In fact, I’m a good two degrees of separation from personal loss, and that was a distant cousin of my sister-in-law. This makes me no more connected to the actual death count than a random sampling in Buffalo, Akron, or London might produce.

But still. It doesn’t take much to conjure up a second by second multi-sensory recollection of that day–from my early morning phone calls, to watching the first tower shimmer and crumple like a heat mirage; from the streetlights that came on then because the ash had blotted out the sun to the paper that blew across the river and rained down on Brooklyn Heights for the first twenty-four hours. That day was the beginning of the smell–complex and horrible–that lasted for three months, growing more sporadic and dependent on wind conditions but never really diminishing in its power to bring you back. There were the incessant sirens of the first day, and later, the sound of F16 flyovers, particularly when Bush was in town. And there was the dull knowledge, for a time, that you would be awake until you could finally fall asleep again, and when you woke you would be alert, awake until you could repeat the process the next night–the dullness of grief, however abstracted it might be on the personal level.

For those in New York, it is not too outrageous or sentimental (though New Yorkers specialize in both of these) to say that the grieving continues. There’s an immediacy that can’t be escaped, even as much of the city carries on with the business of being the city, and it’s an immediacy that hits at odd times. It’s there in the shared belief that all the planes are flying too low and the sneaking suspicion that we’ll be the old folks at a picnic somewhere someday, flinching at the sound of a jet. It’s there in the ruined Cortlandt Street station, with its spray-painted “DO NOT STOP”, its buttressed poles, its American flag and the clocks in the empty token booths that no longer tell the time. It’s there, of course, in the gap of skyline, but in smaller ways as well.

The other day I was walking through the neighborhood and there was a flyer on a lamp post, as there are on just about every lamp post. But this one, I could see from almost half a block away, was not about dog walking or guitar playing or someone’s lost Palm Pilot; it had the iconic look of a 9/11 flyer. Illogically, I wondered how it could have survived intact for all this time. Of course, other people have gone missing since 9/11; in fact, the missing flyers of 9/11 were just an exponential and heartbreaking boom of a time honored tradition. But as I got closer I could see the picture of Giovanna “Gennie” Gambale, whose family’s “missing” flyers had thoroughly, exhaustively, covered Brooklyn Heights in the days after 9/11. I sped up toward it, wondering now quite insanely, whether someone was still searching, or whether she’d been found after all, if this wasn’t a neighborly way of letting all who’d wondered about her know that, after all, she was ok. But it was for a memorial service: “A celebration of a life”. These are the things that happen now.

Friends of mine came to New York the other week, stealing a day away from a wedding in Connecticut. We want to see Ground Zero, they said, and so I found myself at the South Street Seaport at noon on a Friday, drinking beer and waiting for our viewing platform time of 3:00. It was strange to be getting buzzed in the early afternoon, while not on vacation, while in my hometown; it was stranger still to be wasting so much time when there was a whole city to see, but Ground Zero had become the focus. When it wasn’t sensible to drink any more beer, we walked across town and around the perimeter of Ground Zero.

The viewing platform, beyond its problematic inception to begin with, is a greater waste of time than drinking flat beer at the Seaport. It looks out over hallowed ground, undoubtedly, but it doesn’t look like hallowed ground. It looks like a construction site with a lot of Porto-Potties, which it also is, and visitors are allowed three minutes to stand there, pray, take photographs, whatever it is they’re moved to do. I was moved to get off it as quickly as possible because, in terms of 9/11, it’s as close as you can get to the difference between experiencing something and watching it on TV. Not sanitized exactly–there’s no sanitizing this–but removed, remote. There’s more force to be felt looking at the Burger King on the corner, still out of business, still spray-painted: “Temporary NYPD HQ”, “Medical Trauma”, “Triage”. And of course, most people are there on the viewing platform because they’ve only seen this on TV, there to pay tribute by experiencing it, which they can’t.

Dissatisfied somehow, I took my friends to “Here Too Is New York”–the impromptu gallery that opened in the wake of 9/11, displaying hundreds of photographs, from professional high-speed shots of the planes hitting to the possibly more powerful homey shots of people looking up, looking across river, looking dazed and stunned and changed–you can see them captured in that split second of becoming different from what they once were.

We watched a few minutes of video there, a documentary of the first twenty-four hours. The part playing when we walked over to it was of the next morning, smoke swirling, a lone rescue worker walking on the rubble, probably eight stories above the ground, but there was no scale to measure anything by. “That’s it,” I told them. “That’s the sound.” And it was, the quiet and the crunch of rubble, even though I didn’t get anywhere near Ground Zero for about two weeks, even though I’d never heard that sound exactly, but like the smell of that day, somehow that became the sound of the experience.

We left shortly after that, walking in silence for a block or so. “I feel like I should take you to Central Park to ride the carousel or something,” I said, finally.

“No, that’s ok,” they said.

One of the things I’ve done before and after 9/11 is teach English Composition at a small business college in midtown. I try to convince students who are majoring in accounting that writing is important, will help them in their business lives, can even be fun. But I’ve been teaching for thirteen years so I’ve long since stopped being a zealot or a therapist about the transcendent power of words.

I read a blurb once that said, “There are stories in here that can save your life…” I remember enjoying the book, whatever it was, but I never felt as though any of the stories could save my life. Chemotherapy, I think, can save your life, penicillin, antibiotics, alternative treatments, even a well-timed phone call from a friend; Demerol can’t save your life, although you believe when you get it that it can. In any case, it’s safe to say that none of stories told so far could have saved any of the 3,000 people who died on 9/11.

But still. I’m contracted to teach the five-paragraph essay in all its assorted rhetorical glory and so for the past couple of terms, for the “process essay” I asked students to recount their experiences on 9/11. It has a built-in focus, no shortage of detail, and they, like everybody I know in New York, will talk about it with an immediacy that can’t be faked. It’s not long now, when I meet people, before we’re talking about 9/11–where were you? What happened? What was your story? This won’t, of course, save our lives, and there’s even a self-consciousness to the subject, a betrayal of damage, of an overly soft heart, obsession–all the things you don’t necessarily want to lead with when meeting someone new.

But I believe in the subject matter as a worthy thing to write about, obviously. This term I had a student I’d had once before, in the quarter right after 9/11, before I was assigning the essay. He’d been absent the second or third week. When he returned the following week, he handed me a xeroxed clipping from “The Daily News”. “I didn’t know who to ask for a note,” he said. “But I was at a memorial service for my brother.” The sheet he handed me was part of the roster of obituaries that appeared in all the papers. He’d carefully highlighted his brother’s with a yellow pen, smudging some of the toner with the force of his strokes. His brother had been a Port Authority Police Officer. He had died when Tower One collapsed.

I adjusted the assignment this term, when my student reappeared on my enrollment sheet. I didn’t want him–or anyone, for that matter–to write about what happened if they really didn’t want to. I gave them two options. When I gave it out, my student raised his hand. “Why?” he said, “is everyone incorporating this into their curriculum like it’s just another good thing to write about?”

I’d figured the alternate assignment would avoid this kind of response. “I’m assigning it because how that day unfolded for you is a process, and like it or not, probably the process that is the most vivid of your life.”

I’d figured he’d do the alternate assignment, but he didn’t. He handed in two pages, a grammatical nightmare of almost unbroken run-on sentences that detailed his ride home from work. It ended, with perfect grammar and, not incidentally, its only moment of conviction: “I resent having to churn out what happened on 9/11 to please teachers who lack the imagination to create another assignment.”

To which I wrote in the margins: “A total cop-out. You had a choice.” Then, the favorite of teachers who lack the imagination to say anything more at the moment, who are suddenly unsure of how their words will be met: “See me.” This was a student I like. He wasn’t the strongest writer in the class, but he showed up, was engaged and engaging, and kidded around easily. I felt bad our relationship had taken this turn.

He came to see me after I handed back the work. “That was a cop-out,” I said.

“I don’t agree,” he said. “I expressed my opinion and you expressed yours, so we’re even.”

If there’s one thing thirteen years of teaching has given me, it’s patience and the ability to resist saying things like, “But I’m the teacher.” So I waited. “You want me to correct it?” he said.

“I want you to rewrite it,” I said. “You can do the other option.”

“Why can’t I do this one?” he said.

“You can,” I said. “But I can’t help what I know, and I know that driving home was not what that day was about for you.” I was about to say more, about needing to get a handle on things, that the most emotional events didn’t necessarily make the best writing, but his eyes had turned red with a swiftness that rattled me and him too, I think. “I understand,” he said and took his folder and went out into the night.

The next week he met me at the door. “I’m dropping the class,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Just joking,” he said. “No, seriously. I’m rewriting the paper, and I’m writing about that day, but I’m not done.”

“Ok…” I said.

“And it’s five pages so far, instead of the three that the assignment was,” he said. “Is that all right?”

Because I’m a New Yorker, among other things, I said that was all right.

I wish he didn’t have five pages to write, but it’s better, I think, than pretending he doesn’t. I hope there’s a time when cocktail and dinner parties in New York are their awkward ice-breaking selves again, when there’s not the automatic reference point that we can talk and talk and talk about. But I don’t imagine that will happen all that soon as perhaps it has in other quarters. In the meantime, there’s the old legal trick question: “When did you stop beating your wife?” Hard to answer without implication, if indeed guilt exists. It’s a good question to pose about 9/11.

It was a partial lie, of course, the unspoken, “…with really good restaurants, important museums, significant theater, and the financial pulse of the world…” hanging heavy in the air. We liked having it both ways: little town and power capital. Let’s face it, in most New Yorkers’ derisive “Middle America” slurring was included everything besides Los Angeles, San Francisco, the college town where they may have spent four years, and Seattle after Kurt Cobain.

Still, no one lives in a city of ten million. We live in villages, in many cases smaller, more provincial and more proscriptive than the inbred fundamentalist backwaters we allude to like we know what we’re talking about. But in the days since 9/11, we’ve been shell-shocked, knocked down, and made earnest. Sadly, our blood isn’t needed right now and it turns out most of us don’t have viable disaster skills. Volunteering at Long Island College Hospital that first day, I answered three questions in the negative — Did I have a car? A medical background? Know CPR? – and was given a sweet smile and a number to call on an hourly basis. Days Two and Three I wondered why I had never learned to weld.

Clearly, I am not alone. And that left many of us with little to do but bear witness and simply populate the city, our mere presence, our one hundred, one-hundred and fifty, two-hundred pounds, whatever, anchoring the city in the way the World Trade Center once did. This close to the blast site, with its mountain of rubble burning and, even in total collapse, still higher than the Washington Monument, there is little joy in being alive while it sinks in and sinks in and sinks in and we understand war is coming. But there is the accident and the necessity of being alive and somehow letting everyone know it. And we seem to be doing it by joining the rest of the country, our de facto secessionist tendencies wiped away by grief, our small town sentiments aroused by fear, and our notions of what it means to be a Rockwellian American filtered through the lens of what is still New York City.

If you somehow impossibly woke up on Day Two or Day Three and didn’t know what had happened, you would have wondered where you were living. Strangers nodded as they passed on the street, beat cops stood on every corner and people came up to them to shake their hands or pat them on the backs. No car horns honked. When you went into stores, inquiries were made about your family and friends. Everyone safe? Doors were held. Lampposts were covered in notices about church services, synagogue services, mosque services, ecumenical services.

Downtown there were more signs: The Blood Center Has Reached Capacity. Thank you. Please try again next week. Flags flew from every stationary and moving object: homes, storefronts, cars, people. At the candlelight vigil on the Promenade on Thursday night there were more flags, prayer, fewer renditions of, say, “My Sweet Lord” than “The Star Spangled Banner”.

We fell in love with our mayor.

Had we not had been preoccupied with sorrow, rage, fear, and the sudden unfurling of history, we would’ve noticed sooner how weird this was. We’re walking the streets and lighting candles and talking politics not so altered we don’t know how altered we are. But too altered to really understand what it means to be here on 9/12, 9/13, 9/14, 9/15, 9/16…

There is nothing wrong with this. Nothing except it’s all so wrong. Not in its essence. We are Americans living in America. Even if our streets, cosmetically speaking, seldom resemble the America we think we know, you know, that America, there’s nothing foolish about emulating the aspects that, once scorned, suddenly seem comforting.

But because it’s a transformation informed utterly and completely by evil so profound most of us haven’t yet even scratched the surface of it, it can’t help but bring with it a certain shadow-self sensibility. From this, we’ve produced not an accurate image, but instead a retina image of a small town we think we can recall or become, that we can see when we close our eyes instead the vision of two big bullets filled with human shrapnel, instead of the World Trade Center burning hellishly and falling straight down like a KO’d brain-dead boxer.

At our core, we are already a real community, which is what this is all about, and we always have been. At the pettiest level, most of us don’t even have enough square feet to make staying home a lot a comfortable option. We’re out and about and rubbing elbows and rubbing each other the wrong way, and more often the right way. Confronted with lesser evils, we’ve come together in the face of them time and time again. There are shopkeepers, people on the subway platform, neighbors we know and who know us. The sane and loving, and there are millions of us, have always found their ways to one another.

In the late 60’s there was a children’s book, “Maxie”, set in New York City. Maxie was an old woman who felt useless (and if written now, clinically depressed…) so she decided not to get out of bed one morning. Before long the entire neighborhood was on her doorstep. One neighbor woke up from Maxie’s slippers on the floor and had overslept. Another knew to leave for work when Maxie’s too tightly sprung window shade shot up. Others set time by Maxie’s teakettle, from her bird chirping when she fed him, when she got her newspaper and her bottle of milk, and so on. This being New York, they surrounded her bed – rather menacingly, to my child’s mind — with concern and not a little irritation. So Maxie got out of bed.

My friend, Angela, had her concerns about a neighbor in the days following the blast. He’d moved in across the street, and had a bright florescent light, so she was always aware of when he was home and she could see him as he moved around the apartment with his shades up. His lights, she said, hadn’t been on since at least Tuesday. Sitting on her stoop, after the candlelight vigil on the Promenade, we watched his dark windows.

Then he came home. A man entered the building and a moment later the lights on the third floor flipped on. We sat there cheering, feeling this small joy over a stranger we didn’t know by name or face, by occupation or anything else, but whose absence we had noted. We imagined, only half-jokingly, going up to him and saying, we’re so glad you’re alive. Chances are he wasn’t anywhere near the blast. But chances are he would understand.

As I write, there are plenty of lights that are not flipping on, and plenty of people feeling the pain of that, up close, or across streets, across the country and the world, people who are known or not known but who are grieved. If we are transforming ourselves, and clearly we irrevocably and inevitably are, it needn’t be in parody, grotesque or otherwise, and it needn’t be conjured from sheer shock and reaction. New York is not a small town, not the kind we imagine exists somewhere free from cruelty or isolation but plump with kindness and old-fashioned virtue. The flags will probably fall away or be waved for war instead of the complicated ways they’re waving now, car horns will sound again, and we’ll witness or perpetuate any number of little or big incivilities. But the sentiment behind this new city is not a bad one these days: I’m so glad you’re alive.

When you come right down to it, and New York City has, it’s the only sentiment that matters. And that’s not just about small town America or just about big town America or just about America at all.

There was a noise, but there’s always noise in my apartment, and this sounded like a too heavy truck rumbling over hollow asphalt. The second noise shook the building. And was followed seconds later by the phone ringing. I couldn’t hear who it was, but I could hear that call waiting was beeping while the message recorded. It occurred to me that I probably didn’t want to be in the shower anymore. After all, if there was a “second” noise, some causal chain had been activated in my mind, and simultaneous phone calls at nine in the morning added links to that uneasy chain. But I thought maybe something had exploded in New Jersey.

The calls were from my mother and my ex-boyfriend, the former an avid radio fan, the latter with an unobstructed view of the World Trade Center. He had heard the first noise and seen the smoke. For him there was no second noise because he saw the next plane bank directly into Tower 2.

“Paper,” he said. “It looks like glitter and it’s falling on my windowsill.”

He said, “I’m holding a memo from 1998.”

On the TV I had turned on, an anchor on channel 2 was speculating on an air traffic snafu, but she lacked the conviction of my ex-boyfriend. “The plane went right for the building,” he said.

A friend called then. “Hey,” she said. It was the last time I would talk to anyone who hadn’t heard what had happened.

But I got her up to speed. One plane would be a horrible accident, but no one was naïve enough to believe that two represented an exponential accident, so we agreed to meet on the Promenade, several blocks away, knowing already that we would be viewing the aftermath of a suicide mission. But the mind fills in the details the way it wants to and so I know we headed there thinking we’d see the work of two small planes flown by two suicide bombers. Not that we had a context for what that would look like, but that was the story we were going to see.

I walked down Montague Street to the Promenade. Brooklyn Heights is proud of its proximity to Manhattan and for its arguably best views of the Manhattan skyline. The star among that skyline, The World Trade Center, could catch the morning or evening light in all sorts of incredible ways. If you were on the Promenade, you were invariably feeling good about being in New York, and the view only increased that occasional feeling that you were, as mayors liked to tell you, living in the best city on Earth. On July 4th, if the fireworks are set off from the Seaport, there is no better or more crowded place to be than the Promenade.

It took a while to get there. The restaurants and stores on Montague Street were all getting their morning deliveries and small groups of people were huddled around the trucks listening to the radios. A block from the Promenade I stopped to hear the news that at least one of the planes was a hijacked 767. That meant people. People who had boarded a plane with only their usual amount of aviational apprehension. People who had known something had gone horribly wrong, but who, in the manner of all us on the ground, were probably just making up their story along comprehensible lines. Ok, they probably thought, this is bad. This is really bad. Where are they taking us? And of course, only the ones of us left still retained the answer.

“My God,” a man said, crying. “Those poor people.”

I found Marian on the Promenade. She was holding her free Bloomberg radio that had seemingly been sent last year to every resident of New York City. “It finally came in handy,” she said. “The Pentagon’s on fire.”

“Is it a coincidence?” I said, but I already knew.

“It’s not usual for the Pentagon to be on fire,” she said, as if I were about five. And in that split second before I asked the question I was that young. “Innocence lost” is a phrase about as overused as the 23rd Psalm, and New Yorkers often seem to have little innocence to lose, but if innocence is the inability or the unwillingness to expand at the same rate as evil, then we all lost more innocence than we knew we had.

The towers were on fire. And it was bad. It was really bad. But I was surprised that the fire seemed – not contained, since it was clearly raging out of control – but limited somehow; there was still a lot of building that was clearly identifiable, most of it, in fact, in contrast to the smoke and flames that poured out of some upper floors like a particularly bad wound or abscess. And that is important because everyone, I’m sure, believed that as horrible as everything had become, there was an end in sight, a fire to be controlled, stories to be written, people to be grieved, repairs to be made.

When it went down it seemed to have the texture of sand you can hold in fragments in your hand before crumbling it like powdered sugar. Even as it happened, only a mile or so across the harbor, like some distorted mirage, like some bad video feed, there was the feeling that somehow it would stop, that somehow our belief in structural integrity, in our lack of premonition, we could will it back to form, like some wacky trick film. In the screams and cries and oh-my-God’s that filled the Promenade in that moment, in our almost kinetic pull towards the bedrock of Manhattan, there was the wish, the breath, the somatic strain to make it stop.

But it stopped at the bottom. And then it was beyond bad. It was beyond really bad. It was beyond anything we could imagine. And then we knew that there was no end to the story. We’re designed for closure, perhaps a result of being born, living, and dying, perhaps a result of the twenty-two minute sitcom. It doesn’t matter. When you stop being able to guess at any possible outcome, something shifts. And it shifts in particular ways.

One man, having just watched thousands of people die in front of him, strode down the Promenade, shouting, “Get out your uniforms, boys and men.” A plane flew overhead.

“Why is there a plane?” someone asked. “There shouldn’t be a plane.”

But mostly it shifted into silence and simply waiting for what unfathomable thing came next. The woman who had screamed loudest left the Promenade quickly. I thought about the people who must have been evacuating at that moment, probably telling themselves in the stairwells, Ok, this is bad. This is really bad, but I’ll keep going. I didn’t know then about those who knew exactly how bad it was and jumped. Marian and I sat down on a bench together. We watched thousands of living people, moving like one entity, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.

It was one of the only beautiful sights on a hideously ugly day. There they all came, Marian’s husband among them, their backs literally to death and destruction, as they headed away. Of course, Marian’s husband reported, it was no Sound of Music exodus, that they were sure the bridge was coming down when the tower came down, that there was a surge of panic and pushing from the back of the bridge. Still, he said, every car, every van, every bus going over the bridge, stopped at the pedestrian walkway and loaded up to capacity with passengers.

We didn’t know that then. So we just watched the bridge from a distance until the smoke and ash and dust from the tower blotted out everything. And we left the Promenade then, to close windows, to try to get phone calls through, to wait for the smoke to clear so that we could see and try to believe that there was nothing where there had once been something and know that even then there would be no end to the story.