Thirteen Years Later

It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s been thirteen years since 9/11. I was sitting in front of my computer that morning, responding to a couple of e-mail queries from a copy editor who was working on the manuscript of The Everything Collectibles Book, which I had submitted several months earlier. Simultaneous with me doing this, I spied a headline AOL news story with an image that showed white smoke billowing out of one of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. The initial scuttlebutt was that a small plane had crashed into it. Like just about everybody at first, I assumed the craft had accidentally slammed into the building.

I promptly clicked on my television set for further details. And what transpired before my eyes over the next few hours was surreal—an unfolding nightmare. There was talk at one point of there being 30,000 potential victims at the "Ground Zero" site. What all of us were witnessing in real time was the stuff of an apocalyptic disaster movie; inconceivable only a day earlier. It was not something that we ever imagined could happen on American soil in the world’s most renowned city.

At around lunchtime that Tuesday morning, my younger brother and I walked to our neighborhood’s main thoroughfare a few blocks away. It appeared that life itself was in suspended animation. Everything had gone quiet. The standard impatient hustle and bustle and honking of horns, on what typically was a busy street at that hour, was missing. There was a kind of hush enveloping our sliver of the Bronx and—we knew—every section of the city as well. I distinctly recall the local convenience store run by Arabs had placed a big American flag by its front door. The owners no doubt feared being associated with the perpetrators. Later, a very loud jet fighter flew over and unsettled what could best be described as a stunned calm. All of us wondered and worried, too, whether further attacks were in the offing. Suddenly and without fair warning, living in the big City of New York didn’t seem so big anymore. A feeling of vulnerability, which we had never before experienced, was palpable. Neighbors emerged in the late afternoon with candles and silently walked up and down the streets. Flags emerged in places I had never before seen them flown. Ironically, it was a picture perfect September day with blue skies, comfortable temperatures, and low humidity, which apparently aided and abetted the monsters, who had hijacked the jet planes, in locating their targets.

The talk in the terrible days and weeks after the attack was how we would never be the same. After all, how could we be after witnessing this horror in a locale that always seemed so grand and impervious to any harm? Thirteen years have passed and we—very definitely—are not the same. The world is an extraordinarily dangerous place and the threats of terrorist violence are omnipresent. Traveling on airplanes, for one, has become a time-consuming, chaotic ordeal. The thought of having to pass through metal detectors to attend a baseball game is one more glaring example of how—even in our leisure pursuits—our freedom of movements have been compromised beyond repair. So many of the things that we do from now on are going to be attached to some measure of hassle because of a possible terrorist threat, even when the possibilities of one coming to pass are slim. It’s an unhappy state of affairs we find ourselves in, and the passage of time is not going to return us to what was—in retrospect—the less complicated world we called home on September 10, 2001.

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