A 9/11 Story
Friday evening, I sat in my car in the driveway, riveted by a chapter of the audio book I’m currently listening to, Homer’s Odyssey by Gwen Cooper. I haven’t finished it yet so I’m not ready to do a review but I have to say this one section of the book took me completely unawares and I spent most of that time in tears.
Long story short, the book is about the life the author has led with a blind cat. This particular episode has to do with Ms. Cooper‘s experience of 9/11. At the time, she lived and worked within just a few blocks of the World Trade Center and the towers were her beacon to lead her home whenever she went out exploring her new city, where she had moved just months earlier. Ms. Cooper was one of the thousands of people who were on the Brooklyn Bridge, trying to get away from Manhattan, when first the South Tower and then the North Tower fell.
Among all the emotions Ms. Cooper was certainly feeling, her primary fear was for her cats, left behind in her apartment, and especially for Homer should the windows have blown out. His curious nature would have made him want to investigate and, being blind, he would not have known he was 31 stories up. Her fear was completely understandable.
Listening to this story—and I haven’t actually finished this episode yet because I badly needed a break—brought it all back, the intense pain of 9/11. Over the years, I’ve read or watched many accounts and the feelings have never lessened, the incredulity and amazement and utter pain. I know I’m not alone in this by a long shot and I don’t claim to understand the depths of emotion experienced that day or now by those who were actually there or at the Pentagon or in Pennsylvania or by those at the other end of phone calls and emergency radios who had an inkling of what had happened and what was still to come.
What made this particular account so unsettling for me was the personal nature of Ms. Cooper‘s story, the individuality of it. She made me feel her lack of understanding at first, then her confusion, her disbelief, her and everyone else’s sudden fear that the bridge was being blown up because of the movement and rumbling caused by the collapse of the towers, her desire to talk to her mother, her intense concern for her pets. She made me feel what I believe I would have felt if I had been there.
9/11 is an integral part of our national psyche now and I can’t help but relate it to the Jewish heritage of the Holocaust. I hope I won’t be misunderstood about that. I don’t mean to say the two experiences are the same, only that our feelings about 9/11 give us a window into how people have felt all these years about the Holocaust. Despite the horror of 9/11 and the intense emotions we still face regarding the events, perhaps that is one small good thing, a little more understanding.
And now I have to go listen to the rest of the story.
August 1, 2010
Posted in: Tales of a Bookseller
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