I have been thinking so much this week about what I was actually doing on September 11 that now I don't have the heart to write about it.... I've lost my nerve.... Suffice to say I was not at the coal-face, so reflecting on where I was seems rather lame.... just sitting in my uptown apartment watching it on television along with the rest of the world. My daughter was in Central Park with a babysitter, I was anxious for her to come home but my husband thought I should stay in and wait for her rather than head out (when they did get in from the 72nd Street Playground shortly afterwards they didn't even know anything was going on). I was meant to be heading for a glucose test as I was 7 months pregnant.... but I assumed that appointment would be cancelled... though I do remember reading later in Vanity Fair that a gazillion people had called a particular Madison Avenue store on the morning of 911 to put their name on the waitlist for some key fashion item. The world's a funny place.
My husband had called to tell me what was going on and alert me to turn the television on in the first place..... when I say called, in fact he left me 46 messages on the answering machine and when i started clearing the "call me back NOW" messages I thought to myself, oh no he's lost his job. He's in banking, we knew it would happen eventually. However I discovered a few years later that losing your job is not 46 phone messages, losing your job is walking in the front door in the middle of the day and saying "I'm done". That was a week before our third girl was born. Anyway, my husband didn't get home until quite late on that fateful September day, but they were told to stay away from the windows of their midtown office. Mmmmm. Our friend Adrian arrived on our doorstep that night, he had been in NY on business and pulling into the World Trade Center in a cab as the attacks started. In fact he did take a series of macabre pictures that turned out to be a timeline of the plane hitting the first tower. Was meant to just be a snap of WTC to show the kids on his return to Sydney.
I gave birth to a healthy baby girl on 8 November, and as we were leaving New York Hospital, waiting in the cab queue on the morning of November 12 the dude in front of us said OMG there's been another attack. American Airlines Flight 587 had crashed into a Queens neighbourhood killing everyone on board, and some on the ground. So we got into a cab and in his first ever knee-jerk reaction my husband said "this is what we're going to do, you and the kids are going to return to Australia, and I am going to finish up here". Coming from him... well I've just gotta tell you that's not the way he talks. He's more a "captain goes down with the ship" kind of guy. Anyway, by that evening I think we knew that sadly this catastrophe was not related. More of a bonus for the "bad guys".
So we had three more glorious years in the city, until the day hubby came home in the middle of the day... but that's another story. And now I've gone and written about 911, I guess I found the heart after all.
Image is my favourite New York Magazine cover, December 21-28 2009.
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