Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Head Games
Sunday, September 11, 2011, Red Wing, Minnesota
T
Ten years ago today, I stood in front of my apartment building in lower Manhattan and
watched the World Trade Center towers burn. I didn't see either of the planes hit. I was
puttering in the kitchen, readying myself to get to work at the keyboard—I had a theat-
er review to write—when my aunt Claire called me from Westchester just before nine.
I thought I knew what the call was about. My father had flown up from Georgia
and was staying with her. After eight months of living alone in the cookie-cutter condo
where my mother had died, he was ready to take my advice and move to New York, and
that day he was supposed to come into the city to look for an apartment. Claire was go-
ing to tell me what time his train would get to Grand Central Terminal. But that wasn't
it, of course.
“Turn on the TV,” she said.
No one knew anything at that point. I hurried downstairs to the street—I live on the
eleventh floor—and found an astonished crowd of my neighbors, maybe two hundred
people, gathered in the middle of a Greenwich Village intersection, about two miles from
what came to be known as Ground Zero. The twin towers were a feature of the neigh-
borhood, looming elegantly over it in the distance; if you looked downtown along our
street, they were a fixture of the skyline. This morning, everyone was looking up and
watching, aghast, as the north tower, gashed and aflame, spewed smoke into the air, and
a breeze carried it toward Brooklyn against a pristine blue sky.
Someone had a radio. The first reports were that the plane was private; a pilot had
veered tragically off course. Hungry for more information, I went back inside and was
about to step into the elevator when I felt a shudder in the air; the second plane had hit
