9/11 : A Love Story

Dreams are often little bits of life taken in and reorganized into tiny bits of feeling, later remembered as possible clues to what may lie ahead.  Like I said, my impressions formed in me early, and my identification with my family as "New Yorkers" paramount. I grew up on WNET, the New York PBS station that became my first Film School, before NYU. I take that back, Bugs Bunny was my first film school. Anyway, I remember my teenage brain obsessed with "Monty Python's Flying Circus", the best British import to hit the U.S. since the Beatles and the Kinks. One sweltering August night after Monty Python was finished, WNET ran a series of anti-war films and documentary newsreel footage commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What I saw before me, was hardly celebratory as black and white newsreel footage showed the shadows of human beings gone in a flash were now images on the sidewalk where they had stood and breathed moments before. A naked man walked aimlessly amidst a barren landscape, where was nothing left, only smoke and rubble. Faces turned to camera one side, half melted.  Women holding children, deformed, in their arms, crying.

Sleep did not come easily that night. Images, dark and full of torment, haunted my dreams. I kicked off the sheets trying to push away the shadows where a dark fear the size of a mushroom cloud hovered over me, when a series of dreams ensued. First, I was seated on a plane with my Mother seated beside me, when suddenly several men walked up the aisle carrying guns. They passed out notes written in prose, saying we were soldiers marching to war on behalf of God. I knew we were about to die when suddenly the dream shifted, and I was looking out over the George Washington Bridge and the majestic New York skyline which was now engulfed in dark, black smoke that hovered over the lower portion of the city. I woke in a sweat, my heart pounding like a drum and ran downstairs to tell my Mother. The summer of 1973, and I quickly forgot the dreams.
Years later as I sat in my office in Westwood, on hold with United airlines trying to book a flight back to New York for a shoot I was producing, when I staring across bustling Westwood Boulevard where an advertisement for women in the Armed forces took up the entire side of the building. The female soldier seemed to warn me on some level, as I studied her stance, holding her gun out in a warning against the enemy to not come any further. I thought it was off as I waited on hold attempting to make flight arrangements for my Mother. As I was about to book my seat on United flight 93, I suddenly remembered the dreams from when I was a kid. Maybe it was the female soldier giving me a superstitcious chill, but something inside me said to me "wait".

I then put down the phone, called my usual airline of choice, Delta,and booked us on separate flights through New York's JFK airport on September 10, 2001.
Instead of on United flight 93 on 9/11.

 The morning of September 11th, I woke without the sound of the alarm, as a haze of confusion parted in small steps and the fog of traveling weeks on end lifted slowly, a soft thin veil parting past and future, on a day that would prove to be like no other. The "kitty-alarm clock" - the cold wet nose of Binky the love cat, now transported me back into my bedroom, as I look around at the cool green curtains partitioning out the September heat and mass hysteria about to erupt. I lie in stillness taking in the moment.

The heaviness of jet lag weighs down in my ankles after several weeks of living in another time zone while driving my mother around the Tri-State area, on what I called the "Goodbye" Tour" - visiting sick relatives in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, who are about to pass on. Driving highways I used to know, forced my brain to reconnect the dots, and now I lay exhausted. Even though my body was back in California, my head was still driving around New York somewhere. I woke early, as I was still on East Coast time. Just twenty-four hours before, I was taking the Lexington line downtown to say good bye to my cousin, the spitting image of my Dad and my favorite uncle Ralph, before flying back to Los Angeles that afternoon. As I navigated my way through the construction site walking past scaffolding, and vats of cement waiting to build yet another high rise, I was transported back in time. My father would take me to the construction sites and show me how the buildings were made. He leave before dawn each day to lay brick on the apartments, hospitals, and office buildings built from the 1940'S through the 1970'S - West side, East side, Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Saint Vincent's Hospital to Riker's Island, and eventually, the World Trade Towers, my Dad came home caked with crusts of cement clinging for life. A special pink gel which looked like it came from Mars, softened the caked on cement, transforming him from construction worker to father. Every day he would rise early and cross the George Washington Bridge to the other side, Nirvana, land of opportunity.

All these memories weigh heavily as I glided over the hard wood floors, heading for the phone to dial my BF, Neil, to pursue the java quest and meet at one of the laid back Santa Monica cafes. As he answered in his famous effete way "When did you get back? What were you doing there?", I also herd a warning in his voice.

"Obviously, you haven't turned on the television yet this morning", he snapped. The last time Neil had said those exact same words, John F. Kennedy, Jr's plane had just been reported missing over the coast of Martha's Vineyard.  Not a good sign.

I put down the phone and walked to the television, pressing the power button, not really wanting to know what society ill lay waiting to bum me out. The calm cool collected voice of news anchor Peter Jennings' describing how an unidentified airplane had just flown into one of the towers at World Trade Center stopped me dead in my tracks.

Images flooded me. My former boyfriend proposing in the lobby of World Trade Center. Hot dogs with my family in Battery Park. No Nukes concerts. Climbing to the top of the Statue of Liberty in St E's camp. This was a bad dream that I wanted to wake up from and couldn't.

Somewhere between Nine fifteen and Nine-Thirty A.M. time stopped. The second plane hit Tower Two. Peter Jenning's voice began to crack as he described the unfolding events. I fell to my knees, collapsing along with the buildings. Planes hitting the Pentagon. Seven minutes as a dumbfounded president refused to leave his seat before a Kindergarten class. I stepped from my apartment door, only a few miles north of LAX, where I had lived with constant jet noise every day for the past fifteen years. Except for that day.


When the news of the planes used in the attack came out and I learned United flight #93 had crashed into the ground after the brave passengers stood up to terrorists and prevented it from hitting the Capitol, I suddenly remembered the dreams and realized how it wasn't my day. As long as it doesn't touch us, we never know the depth of tragedy until it strikes our door.  

9/11 will be the day I grew up and learned home is what you carry around inside of you, no matter where you live. We are one global home.
Peace.