AUGUST 7, 1974

I am five years old. Each morning a yellow van stops in front of our
south Brooklyn apartment building. On the ride over to my summer camp
in Manhattan Beach, I listen to the radio voice talk about the new Twin
Towers and the amazing event that has just transpired there: A man
from France has crossed the space between the top of the North and
South Towers by walking across a steel cable. Soon, I will see the
Towers myself, because my father works nearby, and I am big enough to
visit his office and play with the typewriters. He will work at that
same office even after we move to New Jersey in 1978 and will continue
to pass through the World Trade Center PATH station until he accepts a
position at a midtown firm four years later.

SEPTEMBER 16, 1984

My parents host a special celebration, a "180th Birthday" party,
marking a year in which my father turns 40 and both his parents, my
Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Sam, turn 70. The festivities take place at
Windows on the World, the restaurant located on the 107th floor of the
World Trade Center’s North Tower. Naturally, my mother’s mother, my
Grandma Rose, is among the guests. Although she hides it behind a crisp
dress and under a stylish hat and smiles as she sits beside me in
front of an eponymous window for a photograph, she is not well. The
next day she is admitted to New York Hospital. She will die there on
September 30. My cousins, my sister, and I will not be allowed to visit
her in the hospital, and our customs do not include viewing the dead. I
am glad I have that last photo from Windows on the World.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

My father no longer commutes by train. He drives to and from midtown
Manhattan each day, and he tries to avoid traffic. When American
Airlines Flight 11 hits the North Tower, he is already at his desk
midtown; my mother is back in New Jersey, visiting my cousin’s new
baby; and my sister, a graduate student at Columbia’s School of Public
Health, is preparing to leave for class. Once my sister knows that both
Dad and her boyfriend are safe (in fact, they will both walk the blocks
to her Upper East Side apartment; my father cannot drive home and my
future brother-in-law cannot return to his apartment downtown), she is
able to reach Grandma Ruth, now a widow ensconced happily enough in an
assisted living residence near our parents, on the telephone. They
speak while they watch CNN; they witness the collapse of the North
Tower together at 10:28 a.m. Grandma has always told us that her first
memory is of hiding in the cellar while the Allies bombed the factories
near her German hometown during the First World War. Since she, too,
will be gone within five months, the September 11 bombing will be among her last.

I am in Cambridge. I am teaching. I don’t discover what has happened
until, on a break later that morning, I check e-mail at the humanities
building’s kiosk.

SEPTEMBER 29, 2007

I have been living in Manhattan for eight months. I’ve reconnected with
a friend who now resides in Jersey City and have been invited to a
dinner party she and her husband are hosting at their home. My route to
her house will begin on the Upper East Side, cross town to catch the C
Train to Chambers Street, and proceed to the PATH train departing from
the new World Trade Center station. I realize: I’ve seen Ground Zero
many times these past months, but only from the safe distance of a
passenger window in a car. I have not yet found the need—or the
courage—to get up close and personal.

Now there’s little choice. It’s still light when we leave the station.
Some fellow passengers—tourists, I suspect—snap photographs of the
view. We are beneath ground level, but space yawns around us. I see
cranes and tractors and machines I can’t identify; I see dust and dirt
and metal and more.

After dessert, the return trip begins. It’s eleven o’clock. Dark. The
train snakes back into the World Trade Center station. Everything is
illuminated with spotlights. It seems Ground Zero does not sleep. By
the time I’m home, it’s past midnight. Despite the several glasses of
wine I’ve consumed, I’m not sleepy, either.