September 11 Books

Books for remembering September 11:





Read my review of Bikeman here.

Where Was I When....?

I have seen around the blogosphere today people's remembrances of where they were on the morning of 9/11/01.

I was doing payroll. And I had to finish it before I could leave, or the company wouldn't have had any paychecks on Friday.

I was the part-time controller for a small contractor, where my husband was a technician. My three-year-old son came to work with me every day.

Just about nine, the phone rang. It was the just receptionist and myself in the office that morning. Everyone else was out on jobs or sales calls. The phone rang. It was the owner's friend, calling to see if he'd heard the news. We got out the tiny old black-and-white TV our boss used to use for tailgating, which for some reason he kept in his office. We found an outlet and turned it on. It only got ABC. We tuned in just in time to see the second plane hit the second building.

I called my husband, who was over an hour away in a rural county working on the construction of a grain facility. Then I called my mom. I had one uncle and one cousin in the vicinity of the Twin Towers, though neither one had their offices in the WTC at that time. My uncle had been in the building for the first Twin Towers bombing in 1993.

The rest of the morning is a blur of phone calls and a tiny black-and-white TV screen. We watched as the towers fell one by one. I didn't finish payroll until after ten. I faxed it out and gathered up my son to leave. It was then that the first reports came about a plane crash in Pennsylvania.

The rest of the day was spent in front of the TV and on the phone, crying mostly. I am from New York City. We used to drive past the Twin Towers on our way to our grandmother's house in Brooklyn. We would argue over who got to sit on the side of the car passing closest, because you could look up, up, up out your window at the tall South Tower just before you plunged into the darkness of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

When my husband was coming home late that night on the Thruway, eastbound from near the Pennsylvania line, some 400 miles west of New York City, the overhead message boards in the rural darkness said simply, "NYC Closed."

It would not be until the next day that I learned that all of my family was safe. Phone lines were jammed, and my uncle didn't actually get home until after midnight.

September 11

Public domain image from Wikipedia

A September 11 Memoir

Thomas Flynn's Bikeman is a moving epic poem about his experiences in Lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001.

If the word "poetry" evokes highbrow language and stilted rhymes,
do not be put off. Flynn's poetry is free-form prose, and it speaks in
the vernacular. In the following verses, he contrasts the burning
towers, while they stood, with the Statue of Liberty, just off in the
harbor:

"No, this is not the lady of the harbor
who carries the torch of dreams.
It is a barbarian beacon, with no intention
to warn those who see her beams."

Flynn's story is harrowing. Parts of it are painfully -- and
"painfully" is really an inadequate word -- sad. It is completely
devoid of humor, but not of compassion. It is real. It concerns his
experiences in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the towers.

I have been privileged to read the personal story of a survivor of
the Twin Towers. He wrote that story shortly after the attacks, in an
email sent to his colleague, my sister. She sent it to me, and since
then I have read it over on subsequent September 11's. Of course, that
is a private memoir. Now, here is a memoir which the entire world can
share.

I cried through Bikeman. It is cathartic. Why do I need to read
these stories of survivors? Why was I plastered to the television for
weeks that September? Disbelief? Compassion? Guilt? I don't know. But I
think I value this because it is so easy to forget, for those of us who
experienced this from afar, the raw horror of death and destruction. We
should never forget.

I am a homeschool mom. My boys will read Bikeman in high school, when they study Modern / American history.