A couple of memories

[avram]

Charles Johnson has been running 9/11 photos in his Little Green Footballs weblog. (Due to bandwidth limitations you might not see them; I’ve downloaded one and stuck it on the server I’ve been using for images. You don’t have to look if you don’t want to.) Seeing them a couple of days ago, I realized that I had forgotten something: that 11 Sep 2001 was a beautiful day. Somehow that detail had been edited out of my head, maybe crowded by all of the grainy video footage. But it was — warm, bright, clear azure skies, and not a cloud to be seen. Except the big one, stretching out over Brooklyn, narrowing and dark gray to the northwest.

The other thing is a bit weird. One of the things I kept hearing repeated was the claim that the footage of the plances hitting, the towers collapsing, looked just like something from a Hollywood action movie. On the day, I couldn’t help thinking how much it didn’t. In a movie the planes would have been shown moving in slow motion, to convey threat and a sense of mass. In real life I was amazed at how fast they went; I never get to see airplanes moving at full speed with something behind them. In a movie that fall of the first tower would have been clear and visible. In real life I saw the first tower fall live on TV, and I wasn’t sure what I was seeing; a cloud of smoke went up, and then for a while there was no telling what had happened, except that my net connection had just gone down, which should have told me.

OK, a third memory, from six months later: In March and April I had a contract job at a place on 51st Street. On the six-month anniversary there were minute-of-silence memorials for 9/11; I’d forgotten about them, and walked up out of the subway right next to one. There’s a firehouse on that block, and there was a circle of cops and firemen, and a larger circle of civilians outside that; I joined in, one New Yorker among my fellow citizens, temporarily united in this show of respect. We stood silent for a short while, and then there was a signal of some sort (I forget what) to indicate that it was over, and the crowd dispersed instantly, like smoke on the wind, like New Yorkers with someplace to go.