Several friends of mine have reminded me that, in the wake of the scurrilous and cowardly attacks on our great nation on September 11, 2001, I sent out several e-mail reports on that horrific event and the immediate aftermath. Here, for those of you who may be interested, are those reports. Please feel free to share them, if you consider them worthy of sharing.
8:45 PM, September 11, 2001
I have been in New York since last night (Monday, the 10th), and I can assure you that the City is calm, if shocked and aghast. This afternoon, with most public transportation out of service, the citizenry had to walk, I among them. I walked home three and a half miles from my office, and the streets were jammed with
pedestrians. You could see the smoke billowing from the collapsed skyscrapers. Analogies to a volcanic eruption were by no means inappropriate. I was reminded of the photographs of Vesuvius in eruption in 1929.
There was no panic, and there was an almost eerie quiet. No shouting, no laughter, no screaming, no crying, no arguing. The only exception? A "born again" street evangelist near Times Square, preaching the imminence of the "Second Coming"
to a congregation of none and a phalanx of pedestrians passing by oblivious to his expostulations. It was though all were in some sort of mild trance. The authorities had asked drivers to keep their cars and trucks off of the thoroughfares,
and I would say that 97% of the drivers complied. The traffic was that of a major "stay at home" holiday. The total absence of auto klaxons is eerie, and now, almost exactly 12 hours after the first jet hit the first of the two towers, there is still an eerie silence in the streets. In fact, it is even eerier because the sirens of the fire
engines and the ambulances have all but ceased.
Equally eerie, believe me, was walking home no longer seeing the immense Twin Towers, that, at 6:00 this morning when I went to vote in the Mayoral Primary, loomed over lower Manhattan as they have done every morning for over 25 years.
It will be a quiet night, but not a restful one, for the numbing shock has not yet really started to wear off, and the sense of loss and grief is therefore still not fully developed for the community as a whole. This is particularly so because we still do not know how great the death toll is going to be except that, as Mayor Giuliani
has phrased it, "it will be more than any of us can bear."
I stopped in at Mullen's, my favorite neighborhood pub, for an early supper and found myself sharing a table with a construction engineer who was on his way to
work on a building about five blocks away when the attack took place and who watched in catatonic horror as both airplanes slammed into the Twin Towers. He told me that, for the first time in his life, he ran like hell. He also explained to us that the incredible heat from all of the burning jet fuel melted the steel girders,
which is why the buildings collapsed the way that they did.
At the table next to us sat two bank executives who worked in a building across the street from the World Trade Center complex, each on a cellular phone,
meticulously phoning each of the 42 employees who were to have reported to work at 9:30 (45 minutes after the first jet slammed into the first tower) to make sure that all were accounted for. (All were.) Before they left, they told us that they had already been informed that their office building was "uninhabitable" and
structurally unsound.
I have at least a dozen long time friends who had jobs in the Twin Towers, and I am anxiously awaiting word about each of them. My next older brother, who is an investment banker, often did business there, and, I was, as you might imagine, immensely relieved to learn that he was not in the Morgan Stanley offices today, as I was afraid he might have been!
The Broadway theatres are closed, and a close friend who works backstage at 'The Producers' told me earlier this evening that the theatres are likely to be closed tomorrow (Wednesday) as well. All major league baseball games, and most concerts, including the opening gala for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln
Center, have been cancelled for today, at least, and as I write these words, President Bush is addressing the nation.
The devastation is great, and, as an art historian and passionate fan of 18th century architecture, I am anxious about the fate of historic St. Paul's Chapel, which was built in 1766 and is the last 18th century church building left in Manhattan, and which was, and I hope still is, directly across the street from the World Trade Center complex. George Washington worshiped there, and the pew in which he sat
has been preserved intact. Let us hope that it, and the Chapel, have survived.
Anyone who thinks about the magnitude of this senseless and barbarous act knows that our lives here in the USA, if not the world over, are forever changed. Our sense of security, our sense of personal freedom, our sense of community are forever altered, but this noxious and cowardly attack, founded in bigotry and intolerance, will galvanize the country and the free world and ultimately prove an inspiration for a whole generation, just as the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was a patriotic and communal inspiration for all freedom loving individuals in the United
States and elsewhere almost 60 years ago.
I know that it will bring no comfort to anyone but at the very least a Declaration of War will be debated in Congress. Who the enemy will be and how such a war could be fought, I do not know, but the forces responsible have gone too far and have to be eradicated for the sake of all humanity.
I don't care what the pessimists say, though. I steadfastly believe that good ultimately triumphs over evil each and every time because evil is always consumed or transformed by its utter negativity. If only people could and would remember the vivid exhortation of my treasured mentor and wonderful friend Pablo Casals, who taught me more than anyone else about what music is and how to listen to it. Don Pablo said, "We ought to think
that we are one of the leaves of a tree and that the tree is all humanity. We cannot exist without the others. We cannot exist without the branches. We cannot exist without the tree."
As I finish this letter, WQXR, the local classical station, is broadcasting a recording of Leontyne Price singing an especially well loved Protestant hymn, 'The Church's One Foundation', something that I have not heard done on that station in a
very long time.
My love and my thanks always!
Copyright, Teri Noel Towe, 2001
Wednesday night, September 12, 2001
I write this second report just before turning out the lights for what I hope will be a sounder and more restful sleep than I had last night.
The acrid aroma of the additional collapses at the Word Trade Center and environs is now floating North, up Manhattan Island, as a result of a change in the wind direction. To my nose, which I admit is not the most sensitive on the planet, it stinks like burning automobile tires. The stench is stronger, strangely, in my 8th
floor apartment than it was on the street when I went down to Mullen's, the neighborhood pub, for my supper again this evening.
The City is slowly beginning to become New York again. The conversation in Mullen's this evening focused on the heroic rescue efforts, discussions of preventive measures for the future, toting up the personal joys and sadnesses, and recounting the miraculous escapes. One of the regulars is a top echelon tax accountant. His wife, I knew, worked in the Twin Towers, for one of the New
York State agencies that had offices there. One of the jets slammed right into her office, but she had a doctor's appointment yesterday and was not at her desk. Her husband told me that she had spent the day today trying to get her office work reorganized, working from her desk in their apartment. He looked at me evenly
and said, "Of course, it hasn't hit her yet."
In a way, Reno summed up the situation for so many of us. The shock has not really begun to wear off, even though the daily routine is beginning slowly to revert to normal. There is still an absence of traffic, although there were significantly more vehicles on the streets in that part of Manhattan that is not cordoned off and quarantined, if you will. There were many more people going
around today taking advantage of the enforced leisure that this tragedy of inestimable magnitude has serendipitously provided. There seemed to be many more people with brand new shopping bags in their hands. Perhaps they were postponing their moments of emotional reckoning or assuaging their sadnesses with "pick me up purchases."
The business day was not easy, and there are always those who seem to make no allowance for the impact of a communal disaster. Neil's Coffee Shop was "short handed" this morning, but there were those who stormed out because the service was not expeditious enough. There was no cashier, and the waiter called out to me
as I got up to leave, "Five bucks even. Leave it by the register." He recognized those of us who were rolling with the punches, so to speak.
Long distance calls were next to impossible, and local telephone service was still a little bit hit and miss. There was no mail. My office has "caller service", and, when I stopped by the loading dock at the Lenox Hill Station to see if there might be anything to fetch, there were no racks, no employees, no mail sacks. It was as
though the Postal Service had gone out of business overnight.
The City is still quiet in the main. None of the noisy irritants that those of us who live here to one degree or another all associate with life on Manhattan Island. Even with increased traffic, not a klaxon pierced the air. No raucous laughter. No high spirits and loud voices emerging from bars and clubs. No boom boxes
blairing. But, as I sit at the laptop, tapping the keys, I know that the volume of the whoosh that the cars and trucks make as they travel down Seventh Avenue has increased noticeably.
The subways are still not back to normal, but some underground service has resumed. The buses are out in force, even though none is permitted to travel south of 14th Street, about a mile and a half above the site of the Twin Towers. Most, but not all, of the banks have re-opened. Tomorrow, the Broadway theatres resume performances, although the marquees will be dimmed in tribute to the fallen. The concert halls will reopen, too, and it looks like the financial markets will reopen on Friday. Baseball games and other professional sporting events, however, will not take place before Friday.
All of us have our fallen and our risen. My oldest and most valued friend from the Trusts and Estate Bar, who has ticker problems, worked in No. 2 World Trade Center. I hesitated to call his house, for fear of what I might learn and what "disturbance" I might cause. My relief was almost euphoric when I learned from a close mutual friend that Mike had escaped unscathed and that all but one of his
associates were accounted for. That was at 1:20 PM. A half an hour later came the follow up e-mail with the good news that the last one was safe and sound. Still, I have many others about whom I have no news, and I am, like many others, uncertain of who I know who might have been at risk, who I know who might be entombed beneath the rubble.
And my personal 'Ars longa, vita brevis' concern, St. Paul's Chapel, still haunts me. What may or may not have happened to this revered landmark and the pew in which George Washington sat I still do not know. As with the friends about whose fate I as yet know nothing, I remain ever the optimist. No news is good news.
There are the bitter, inevitable, and unintentional ironies and reminders in the wake of this atrocity, of course. Subway ads with the Twin Towers in the background, for example, and I wonder how long it will take for the powers that be to remove the billboard in Times Square that I saw riding downtown on the M-20 bus this
afternoon, a billboard that trumpets the arrival of the new Hallmark televisions network. Recalling the legendary Hallmark Hall of Fame specials that were a fixture of my childhood, the copy reads something like, "Story after story after story after story. (No, it's not the World Trade Center!)".
The image of that billboard flashed through my mind each time I saw the videotape of the collapse of the Twin Towers on the television tonight.
Our world, our preconceived notions about day to day existences, the postulates on which we take each breath and go about our daily affairs all may have changed, and they may have changed irreversibly and irrevocably, but, no matter how high a price we pay, no matter how great the changes may be, the sense of community
that seems so elusive, so imaginary so much of the time is at the moment so strongly in evidence, an unexpected but invaluable bulwark. I am amazed and deeply moved by the responses that I have received to the report that I sent yesterday. The reassurance that those e-mails provide makes me wonder if I have not underestimated the number of people on our planet who intuitively understood what Don Pablo meant, what Don Pablo pleaded for.
Nevertheless, the extraordinary sense of community that I feel at the present, that reinforces my faith in my fellow man, does not mellow my anger, my disgust at the spineless weasels, the conniving cowards who perpetrated these unspeakable and
unforgivable crimes, who massacred so many innocents. Still, I remain an unbending and implacable foe of the death penalty. Death is too easy a way out for those who crafted these insidious attacks, for those who incited the zealots who died in the process of carrying them out, for those who knowingly trained them, for
those who harbored them, for those who with malice aforethought supplied them with the noxious necessities for their crimes.
Over and over I hear in my mind's ear the radio interview that I heard just days before my 14th birthday, a "man on the street" encounter with an Auschwitz survivor who was told that a sentence of death by hanging had been passed on Adolf Eichmann, a low form of slime whose crimes against humanity are of the
same rank as those perpetrated yesterday. "Oh, no," this man protested. "They must not! They must not kill him! They must keep him alive for as long as possible, and every morning they must dress him, and they must take him out on to the streets in chains so that people can SPIT on him!"
That is the punishment that I wished for Timothy McVeigh. That is the punishment, and may it be as lengthy as possible, that I hope and pray will be meted out to those who are responsible in any way for the planning and execution of the unspeakable horrors that were inflicted on so, so many innocent souls yesterday.
And now that I have expressed it, I must put the anger behind me, and turn my mind and my soul back to more productive and more positive emotions and endeavors.
Pablo Casals's words continue to resonate in my mind's ear: "We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree and that the tree is all humanity. We cannot exist without the others. We cannot exist without the branches. We cannot exist without the tree."
Copyright, Teri Noel Towe, 2001
4:45 AM, Friday, September 14, 2001
As desperate rescue efforts continue, New York City nevertheless has begun the inexorable, inevitable process of returning to "normal". Will it be "normal" as those of us who have lived here for decades have defined "normal"?
Gone are those colossal upended saltine boxes that have loomed over us for more than 25 years, sentinels as defining of the Big Apple as their older colleagues, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Statue of Liberty.
Gone with them are friends, relatives, and myriad human beings of whose impacts on our day to day lives we were unaware until we read their obituaries.
But the transition to a "normal" that is yet to become "normal" has begun, and many have been changed and changed forever in the intense fires of this jihadic crucible. For many of us, the most astonishing transformation is in our attitude towards the incumbent "lame duck" Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, reviled by many, me
included, for the high-handed, combative, arrogant, puritanical, and vengeful demeanor that gained him the moniker the Brooklyn Mussolini. Grievously ill with cancer, beset by marital problems, our Mayor -- and, finally, in the waning weeks of his administration, he has become truly our Mayor -- has been on the front lines, displaying courage, fortitude, sensitivity, compassion, and total
command of the horrific situation, with a calm that, to many, conjured up the image of King George VI in London throughout the Blitz. Truly, these have been his finest hours. I find myself recalling the memorable exclamation of the Rev. Dr. Delany after hearing the actress Susannah Cibber, of tarnished personal reputation,
sing 'He was despised' at the Dublin premiere of Handel's 'Messiah': 'For this may all of thy sins be forgiven thee.'
Yes, a process of transition from one "normal" to another "normal" has begun.
Shock, grief, anger, frustration, helplessness are all emotions that one must experience in order for the memories to take over. As those of you who have read the two daily reports that have preceded this one know, I have begun that process.
I began it yesterday morning, on my way to the Cosmos Diner to have breakfast, as I do most mornings when I am in the Big Apple, with an old friend, a now 80 year old career Naval officer who was in the engine room of the Intrepid the day of the infamous kamikaze attack. Eager though I am for the Devil to consign the
dastardly perpetrators of these despicable and cowardly attacks to the same circle in Hell in which reside such luminaries of evil as Hitler, Eichmann, McVeigh, Dauber, and the architects of the Railroad of Death in Burma, I nonetheless found memories, long ignored, of the Twin Towers floating to the surface of my mind
like deck chairs from the wreck of the Titanic.
A celebratory dinner in "Windows on the World" 107 stories above the ground with my law partner of 20 years, David Ganz, a dinner personally supervised by that renowned and incomparable sommelier, Kevin Zraly. Stopping in at the State Tax Commission office on the 64th Floor to pick up Estate Tax Waivers, in the
days when you could apply for them in person and they typed them out on slips of blue paper while you waited and schmoozed with whatever officials and fellow lawyers happened to be there. My first "litigated" matter - a hearing before members of the Workmen's Compensation Board, one of whom smoked cheap cigars whose stench was every bit as caustic and repellent as that of the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. The co-op apartment closing from Hell in a conference room on the 86th Floor. The rattle and shimmy of the high speed elevators and the whoosh of the air through the shafts as the cars shot up and
down; the obligatory change from one bank of elevators to the other at the Sky Lobby on the 44th Floor. The hustle and bustle of the concourse at the bases of the Towers, a rabbit warren crossed with a beehive that was redolent of the organized chaos of the Viktualienmarkt in Munich.
All of these memories jostled for space in my psyche not only with one another but also with the bitter uncertainties that linger like the acrid odor of the still smoldering remains of the Trade Center. And by the end of the day yesterday, those uncertainties had grown. A response to one of these reports brought with it the news that a beloved prep school classmate, an investment banker who, as my
beloved Mother would have put it, is "one of the all time great guys", is numbered among the "MIA"s. Like those who have posted on walls and lampposts placards and handbills with computer scanned photographs and entreaties like "Have you seen...", I hope against hope. Please, Gates, please be on a fly-fishing trip in the
wilds of Canada, away from cellular phones, electricity, shortwave radios, and the conveniences of civilized existence. A headline in The New York Post glimpsed over the shoulder of a straphanger in the subway, which has reopened on a limited basis, brought with it the surge of fear that an old drinking comrade of mine at my
club, who is now a United States Marshall, might be among those dead and buried in the rubble, binladenized with the thousands of other innocents and valiant, selfless rescuers. I am not yet ready to look at the message board in the lobby of the New York Athletic Club for fear of seeing his name, neatly typed in the center
of a black bordered card.
Still, daily life must get back on track, and it has started to do so. Our offices were well populated yesterday, and work got done, even though the Courts are still inaccessible. Long distance calls are still an impossibility, and local calls are still a telephonic crap shoot. And the mail, and plenty of it, was waiting at the loading
dock of the Lenox Hill Station. Jimmy was back on duty, the racks of bags and bundled mail were in their customary spots. There are more people on the sidewalks, many more. The street vendors have all reappeared, en masse, and all at once. I could not help but think of that day every spring when it seems that every kid between 7 and 11 has gotten out his or her yo-yo for the first time. Embarking
passengers have resumed that obnoxious New York City practice of pushing their way into crowded subway cars before disembarking passengers can battle their way out. Auto klaxons can be heard here, there, and everywhere, even if the volume of traffic is still at about 2/3 of usual for a weekday. And the blasted boom-boxes are in evidence again!
Mayor Giuliani and Cultural Commissioner Schuyler Chapin have appealed to the theatres, concert halls, and museums to re-open, and. beginning with Broadway Theatres, they are doing so. My favorite Italian restaurant, a fixture of the Theater District since 1906, re-opened yesterday on a limited basis. I walked up to
Barbetta from my apartment on 28th Street and Seventh Avenue, to take an early dinner with a couple of friends. A vendor on the corner outside my building was hawking Twin Towers souvenir paperweights, the kind that fill with a blizzard of fake snow when you shake them. He had no takers, and one passerby shot the
vendor a disapproving look worthy of Medusa. Every so often a placard taped to a lamp post with a snapshot of yet another "MIA" of the disaster evinced a family's anguish and steadily fading hope. The unfortunate Hallmark network billboard in Times Square that I mentioned yesterday has been whitewashed over, but a similar
one a block south of the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue had eluded such treatment and still proclaimed its now bitterly ironic message. The theater district was quiet and sombre, but there were those, like me, who had answered Giuliani's and Chapin's call.
I have often said that the garden at Barbetta is the one and only place in Manhattan to which one can repair for an al fresco meal and forget that he is in New York City, and so it proved to be last evening, despite the undeniable and insistent presence of the spectre of ineluctable and unbearable sadness that looms over us
all. The customary bottle of Barone Fini's Alt Adige Pinot Grigio was uncorked, and I raised my glass to give my customary toast, the toast that the Tsaritsa Catherine the Great always gave:
"May God grant us health, happiness, success, and wealth, and may He grant them to us in that order!"
Never has Catherine's salutation had more meaning; never has it been more poignant.
Last night, I finally slept soundly. But at 1:20 this morning I was awakened by what I thought for an instant was an explosion, another terrorist assault on the City.
Would it be the Empire State Building, which is five blocks away from me, that would be binladenized this time? No, I quickly realized that a tremendous thunderstorm had begun to unleash its fury. A powerful cold front was marching through the Metropolitan area, a cold front that seemed to unburden itself of much more thunder and lightning than is usual. The rain came down in blustering torrents, and, clichéed though the analogy is, it had a cleansing effect, both physically and spiritually. As I write these words, the air finally smells as fresh as it can in Manhattan, and, even though the wet has certainly complicated the on-going rescue efforts at the World Trade Center, the message from the powers
that are greater than we is clear. The City has been reborn, immersed, and re-baptized. We are to soothe our wounds and our wounded, bury our dead, build on the ruins, and nurture our future.
Tomorrow, I shall go back to Rhode Island for a few days. I shall go back carrying with me the knowledge that there are many more out there who have listened to Don Pablo, who instinctively understand the inestimable value and importance of his exhortation, than I previously had thought. Since I sent out the first of these
reports the day before yesterday in part to try to deal with my own fragile emotional state in the wake of the attack and in part to assuage the concerns of family and friends concerned about my well-being, I have received communications from all over the world, many from people whom I do not know, people to whom these reports had been forwarded, people who have told me that
they have forwarded them on to yet more people, people who have told me that they have posted them on the web.
Each one of these communications has brought home to me the same powerful message, and for that I thank you each and every one:
We truly are the leaves of a tree, and most of us do realize that we cannot exist without the others, that we cannot exist without the tree.
May God bless all of us who remember the Golden Rule and who do our very best to live our lives by the principle of do unto others as you would have them do unto you!
Copyright, Teri Noel Towe, 2001
7:15 PM, Monday, September 17, 2001
It is now nearly a week since the World Trade Center was binladenized, and some 5,000 innocent individuals were plummeted and propelled into the next dimension without their consent and, in many cases, without their knowledge.
It is difficult to find words to express the conflicting emotions, the dichotomous responses to the kaleidoscopic and sometimes conflicting sequence of events, without resorting to platitudes and cliches.
One can only begin by giving thanks to whatever power is greater than we are for deigning to designate us to be survivors rather than victims.
I have not written since before dawn on Friday morning, in the wake of the 3rd day. I simply have not been equal to the task, and to write is to soothe my own wounds, my own fears.
The 4th day -- Friday -- was the beginning, and a tentative one, of a return to something that bore a vague, but palpable, resemblance to the status quo ante, a better standard, I think, than normal, for it will be a long, long, long time before day to day life will be normal" again.
Friday was a day of contradictions.
Everyone who was supposed to be in our offices on a Friday was. But attempts to place long distance calls still provoked busy signals or that enervating recording, 'All circuits are busy now; please try your call again later.'
The rains that had awakened me in the middle of the night continued, on and off, throughout the morning, and I cancelled my customary breakfast with my old friend who was in the engine room of the Intrepid the morning that the kamikaze attack took place and suggested that instead he meet me and my friend Nando for a late lunch at Mullen's.
The day at the office was as close to business as usual as one could expect given the tragic and traumatic circumstances. Subway service inched closer to the familiar, and, alas, the behavior of the passengers likewise.
Certain of my rituals became my rituals once more. I made deposits at the banks, as I often do for the law firm of which I have been a member for two decades. My bank officer and friend Henry D., was back at his desk, and the familiar faces, with two exceptions who, I think, had gone out for lunch, were back at the tellers' windows.
I cashed a check, and, first thing upon arrival, I settled my bill at Mullen's for the tabs for the previous two meals. (And, yes, Paul, Chris did relay your message, and he told me how much he enjoyed talking with you. How kind you are to have tried to track me down to a favorite watering hole!) First Tom, my friend who served on the Intrepid, and then Nando arrived, Nando VERY late because subway
service was still very erratic. An aura of relief and gratitude for survival suffused the table. We could break bread together, and we knew that there were so, so many who, through no fault of their own, would not ever break bread again with those special to them.
On my way back to my apartment, I passed a display of photos of the disaster in the window of a photo processing shop. Two of those photos brought a sigh of relief. Each depicted the portico of St. Paul's Chapel, laden with debris, dust, and detritus, but intact. Ars longa, vita brevis was satisfied. Prints of the photos were available in exchange for a contribution to the Red Cross. One individual in the crowd that was studying the photographs said it was a scam. I made the mistake of defending the photo lab. This goon threatened me with bodily harm for disagreeing with him, and I fled into the lobby of my apartment building, slamming the door
behind me, with this gorilla promising to get me on another day. So much for the sense of community that we all felt on Tuesday and Wednesday!
To quell my emotions, I immersed myself in work. I lost track of time, and I did not rejoin the real world until it was too late to participate in the candlelight vigil that had been announced for 7:00 PM. I had promised the owner of Barbetta that I would host some visitors from Montreal who were supposed to visit the City that night, and, at around 7:30, I took the subway uptown, getting off at Times Square.
42nd Street was cordoned off like a parade route, hundreds of people, many still holding their vigil candles, waiting for the President's motorcade, due to return from his emotional pilgrimage to "Ground Zero". It is so odd, so distorting, to be able to hear a pin drop on 42nd Street, but this was the second time in four days
that I had had that weird experience.
I made my way to Barbetta. A magnificent red, white, and blue floral display, in honor of the fallen, greeted me at the door. The restaurant was subdued, but there were more clients than the night before. I already knew that the guests from Montreal, hard as they had tried, had been unable to reach New York, but I had
heirloom Brandywine tomatoes from my gardens in Wickford that I had intended to have served to them in an insalate caprese as a coup de theatre, and I was not about to be denied the pleasure of enjoying them myself!
To my astonishment, a lavish dinner party was being held in the private dining rooms on the paneled parlor floor of the restaurant. I asked why the party had not been cancelled. It was explained to me that it was a rehearsal dinner, and that the groom had been working on the 36th floor of one of the Twin Towers. He had
escaped unhurt. How wonderful, I thought, that in the midst of abject misery and crippling grief, there are spots of euphoric joy, pockets of anticipation of better days to come. That party, that celebration of life, was still going on, I am happy to report, when I left Barbetta, a little after midnight. I certainly wish that bride and
groom many, many years of happiness!
I had intended to take the 6:30 AM train back to Rhode Island on Saturday morning, but I am sure that it will come as no surprise to anyone that I overslept. I took the 10:00 AM train instead. As usual, I walked up to Penn Station, toting my luggage, the laptop and the dufflebag that is fondly known as the traveling file cabinet. While waiting for the light to change at the corner of Seventh Avenue and
31st Street, I heard the skirl of a band of bagpipers, preparing their instruments. I knew at once that the funerals for the fallen among New York's Bravest and Finest had begun. It was not until I watched the television news in Wickford on Saturday evening that I learned that the funeral was that of the Chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, the legendary Father Judge. Alas, I did not know him
personally, but we shared close mutual friends, and this priest truly was a hero, and, as I learned that evening, he was killed by the falling debris while administering last rites to a mortally injured firefighter.
Those who have taken AMTRAK from New York to any point on the railway line to Boston know that, after the train emerges from the tunnel under the East River, it takes a route through Queens and over the Hellgate Bridge into the Bronx that affords a magnificent series of views of the Manhattan Skyline. Even though I had braced myself for the shock, the sudden and irrevocable change in those views that has resulted from the destruction of the Twin Towers, from their erasure from the horizon, was no less disconcerting, no less disheartening, no less devastating.
I immersed myself in work on the train back to Rhode Island. I needed some groceries, however, and, soon after my return to Wickford, I walked down to our neighborhood, family owned, market, the legendary Ryan's, to stock up on some necessities. The village, it came as no surprise, is united in its sadness and in its
patriotism, and I was roundly and repeatedly thanked for the first of these e-mails, which Rudi Hempe, the long time Editor of the local weekly, the Standard-Times, had printed in this past week's edition.
Buoyed by the expressions of gratitude and affection that I received from Ruth and Lucy, from Mike and Kathy, from Don and Allan, from Sam and Marlene, from Barbara and Carol, I retreated to the solitude of my nearly 200 year old house, to reflect, to continue to try to heal. I plugged in the laptop and checked the
accumulated e-mail. Among the many letters was a communication, forwarded by one of my law partners, from a firm client whose will I had recently drafted. He averred that, after having escaped from the Twin Towers last Tuesday, he would,
in fact, be coming in to sign the document as soon as possible. I had not known until that moment that he had been one of the many "at risk" on Tuesday morning.
As of this writing, I consider myself lucky. No law school chums among the missing and presumed dead. No college classmates. No elementary school chums.
But my prep school classmate Gates has still not been accounted for; I fervently hope that he is camping in the wilds somewhere, fly-fishing, oblivious to and ignorant of current events, one of the few who does not yet know of the horror visited on thousands of innocents by Osama bin Laden and his minions of malice.
And I still have not had the guts to call my club and find out whether there is a black bordered card on the message board bearing the name, perfectly centered, of my long time friend who is a United States Marshall.
As I prepare to return to New York tomorrow evening, my thoughts keep returning to what my mentor and friend Pablo Casals said: "We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree and that the tree is all humanity. We cannot exist without the others. We cannot exist without the branches. We cannot exist without the tree."
As all of my friends know, I am an avid gardener, and I know that trees have to be pruned. For the health of the tree, you must remove the dead wood, the diseased branches. And that is what we must now do to the tree of humanity, to the tree that is civilization. We have to rid the tree of humanity, the tree of civilization, of the
cankered and infected limbs and the diseased and contagious branches, and we must do so implacably and ruthlessly for the sake of the health of the tree, the tree of life that is the human race, that is civilization. Osama bin Laden, and the others of his despicable and cowardly ilk, must be tracked down, captured, tried for their
crimes against humanity, and held responsible for the thousands of murders that they have committed, if not personally, by extension, by authorization, and by direct command.
As those of you who have read my previous essays on this indescribable tragedy, this incredible assault on civilization and the community of human kind, I fervently believe that one should do his or her best to live life by the Golden Rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That credo, however, is a
double-edged sword. Osama bin Laden and his satanic acolytes have done unto us; now we must do unto them. A Christian is urged to turn the other cheek, and, agnostic though I may be, as the descendant of generations of Methodist ministers, I am perfectly prepared to, and almost always do, heed that exhortation, but, if you will forgive my being coarse, that does not mean that I am going to spread my cheeks.
The perpetrators of the evil, the horror, the nightmare of Tuesday morning last, are anathema, and they MUST be hunted down and held accountable for their appalling and unforgivable crimes.
President Bush today made reference to the Wanted Dead Or Alive posters of the Wild, Wild West of yore. While I agree with the President that we cannot and should not rest until this vile and vicious enemy of civilization is apprehended and punished, I am unswerving in my conviction that Osama bin Laden MUST be
captured alive, and that he MUST be delivered in shackles to the International Court in the Hague to be tried in open court for his Crimes Against Humanity.
Like Goering, like Keitel, like Laval, like Eichmann, like Quisling, like Tojo, he must be confronted by the evidence in open court. Like Goering, like Keitel, like Laval, like Eichmann, like Quisling, like Tojo, he must go down in history, hamstrung by the ball and chain of his own feeble, false, and futile attempts to excuse and justify his despicable, reprehensible, and utterly unforgivable crimes against his fellow human beings.
Osama bin Laden and his myrmidons MUST be taken alive, no matter what the cost. To do otherwise is to make him and his followers martyrs for all who would share the same demonic delusions and would seek to carry out similar appalling
crimes against innocent human beings.
And, once bin Laden is tried and convicted, as he surely should and will be, he MUST NOT be executed, for that would be a coward's way out, and, as it did with the crazies who share the views of that despicable creep Timothy McVeigh, to kill him will make him a martyr and an inspiration. The Auschwitz survivor's words that I heard a few days before my 14th birthday continue to ring in my ears, like the bells of Notre Dame rung by Quasimodo, the words of that Auschwitz survivor who was told that a sentence of death by hanging had been passed on Adolf Eichmann, that lowest form of slime whose crimes against humanity are of the same rank as those perpetrated this past Tuesday: "Oh, no," this man protested. "They must not! They must not kill him! They must keep him alive for as long as possible, and every morning they must dress him, and they must take him out on to the streets in chains so that people can SPIT on him!"
And so it should be for Osama bin Laden!
I go forward grateful that, God willing, I shall wake up in the morning able to enjoy an insalate caprese, able to work on my on-going researches about the various portraits of Johann Sebastian Bach, able to listen to Wanda Landowska's recordings of Scarlatti Sonatas and Pablo Casals's recordings of the Bach
'Brandenburg Concertos', able to devour a burger "full dressed" at 2nd Street Lunch, able to laugh and cry with my friends and family, able to continue to represent my clients, able to quaff a Commodore Gin martini, straight up with olives, with my brother and sister-in-law. So many who started out on Tuesday,
September 11, with similar aspirations, alas, can no longer enjoy their equivalents.
There, but for the Grace of God, go I.
I am notorious for my "quotes" and my literary allusions, and, acknowledging that propensity, I bid you Good Night, God Speed, and God Bless, as Red Skelton used to say at the end of each and every one of his wonderful televisions shows, by quoting the words that Charles Dickens puts into the mouth of Tiny Tim:
"God bless us, every one!"
Copyright, Teri Noel Towe, 2001
Addendum: Both my prep school classmate Gates and my friend the United States Marshall were among the lucky ones.
Here, for those of you who may be interested are those reports. Please feel free to share them.
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