Working out just now in front of MSNBC's real-time replay of NBC's live coverage on Sept. 11, 2001, I kept fighting off this inappropriate feeling of longing.
As the white-gray smoke drifted across the blue sky off the south tip of Manhattan that morning, Americans may not have known what was going wrong exactly or what was needed—remember, people sent millions of dollars to the Red Cross, which didn't know what to do with it?—but we all agreed that there was a problem and that it was urgent.
People often allow nostalgia to creep into their voice when they remember the JFK funeral, and even Pearl Harbor.
It was terrible; but we were going through it together, and we remember that sense of comfort, too.
For me, of all the 9/11 memories I have, the one that is most poignant is the charred piece of business correspondence that landed in the wisteria bush in my Brooklyn backyard. We were downwind of the site for the 100 days it burned.
Wendi, that’s my cue to add that I doubt this sneaking nostalgia applies to those who were in New York at the time, or in Washington.
Experience elsewhere was all on TV, though I remember my wife calling me from her school, where they couldn’t get a TV up and running.
“We just heard a rumor the Sears Tower is down.”
“Hold on, let me look. No, it’s still up. …”