ManicDDaily

When I first moved to New York, I lived on Mott and Houston.  All my prior experience of New York had been situated on the Upper East Side, a perfect grid of numbered streets, famous avenues, Central Park.

Now I was just north of Chinatown and Little Italy, beyond the scope of integers. (For non-New Yorkers, Houston, if numbered, would be approximately zero street.  The island goes on about for hundred or so blocks south.)

But who knew from south?  Or north?  Uptown/downtown?

How, when I came out of the subway, and hardly knew right from left, could I find my way anyhere?  Even home?

A friend clued me in.  Look for the twin towers.  Way downtown.  Anywhere else was up.

And there they were.  Always to be found.  Gleaming silver through blue, haze, cloudscape, twilight.  Twinkling in the middle of the night.  Perhaps not the most distinguished buildings, but sentinels, and in their way, completely thrilling.   You are in New York City, they said, the BIG BIG apple.  A place where, when you look up, you need to crane your neck.

I don’t want to write here about the sight of the planes, the fireball, the anguished streets.

What I want to write of is September 12th.  A friend called us early in the a.m.  “We have to do something,” she said.

So, she and her kids came over, and, first things first, we baked.  Chocolate chip cookies for the rescue workers.  Then made sandwiches.  Then took everything to St. Vincent’s Hospital, a would-be triage center.  (There were, unfortunately, virtually no wounded; almost everyone at the towers died at once.)  As the day went on, we made the rounds of local restaurants, collecting buckets of ice (it was a hot day and we were told that ice was somehow needed), even later, sorted pairs of tube socks (it was supposed to turn cold that night. )

As the skies grew orange, then purple, then dim dark grey, with smoke, dust, lights, we took our baggies of chocolate chip cookies, bandanas wrapped over our mouths and noses, to the West Side Highway, handing them through the truck windows of workers going to and from the site.  They kindly took them, one guy even handing us back face masks to wear in place of our scarves.

I don’t know if anyone actually ate the cookies, wore the socks, but making them, collecting them, made our lives sweeter, stabilized our feet, gave us for those couple of days at least, some direction; a sense of which way was up.

I give thanks.

For a poem about 9/11 the day.