Wow, that seems like a long time ago — and it was! When the big world — and my small world — were a very different place.
My daughter, Hope, had just entered eighth grade at Hunter College High School — a long subway ride to Manhattan’s Upper East Side from our home in Brooklyn. My husband, Gus, was judging at a courthouse not far from our house. My parents were living at Battery Park City in the closest residential building to the World Trade Center, and I was working downtown on the corner of West Broadway and Canal Street.
When I emerged from the subway that fateful morning, I noticed a small cluster of people gathered at the entrance, all looking up. I consciously decided that I would take a moment to check out what they were looking at. This was totally out of character for me — I am a very busy New Yorker — but it was a beautiful fall day, worthy of taking in.
When I looked up, I saw smoke billowing out of one of the towers. A woman standing next to me started to scream something about a pilot who must have been drunk.
By that time, a young colleague of mine had dismounted her bike and joined me, just as the second building burst into flames. The crowd was growing and now included an acquaintance who was an old girlfriend of a friend of Gus. She had been on her way to her two small children’s day care center, which was located at the World Trade Center, and now they were returning home.
When I mentioned where my parents lived, she responded, “We don’t know how stable those buildings are.” I thought, wow, she is thinking ahead. They could fall?
I ran up to my office to call my mother, who had recently had knee surgery and was walking with a cane. She was aware of what was going on, because the former wife of a cousin of mine had just called her from Mexico when she saw on the news that the buildings had been hit.
My mom informed me that my dad had left early that morning to meet one of his cronies in Queens, where they would get in his buddy’s car and drive to an art gallery in Woodstock, where my father had some business. I told my mother I would come get her.
I left my office and ran into Jim, who insisted on coming with me.
Jim, a former neighbor and at one-time fairly close friend whom I had lost contact with, was now working in an office in our building on the same floor.
There was only one other time I had run into Jim in the intervening years. I had just had a laparoscopy, and no one had warned me that taking a subway back to Brooklyn would be the last thing I would feel capable of doing. I reeled out of the doctor’s office — and there was Jim, with enough cash on him to pay for my taxi home.
We ran the half mile or so downtown, stopped periodically by police at barricades, where I would talk my way through. A very surreal feeling: Two people running one way, and about 100,000 people running the other.
Just as we got to my parents’ building, I had one of those moments when life is so intense that the world becomes eerily quiet and seems to stop. What was happening was the collapse of the first building, which was actually the second one hit.
A year later, when I was reading details of what happened on the anniversary of 9/11, I realized that if the first building had collapsed first, I would no longer be here. I felt my body convulse.
Jim, who was not frozen in the moment, saw the dust thicken, heard the glass breaking all around us, and pulled me to safety into the lobby of my mother’s building, where chaos reigned. I remember thinking how lucky I was that Jim was an artist, because although he hadn’t seen my mother for years, he spotted her right away. She had somehow managed to hobble down 10 flights of stairs.
In the seconds that followed, the doorman had decided we would be safer in the basement, so he herded us all down a very dark, smoky stairway. On the way, Jim, who as a gay male activist had a history of leading AIDS bike rides, began to take charge. We were passing a hose, and he told me to take off my sweater and shirt, soak them, and put one on my mother’s face and one on mine to help us breathe through the smoke. I explained that I wasn’t wearing a bra, and he retorted that this was no time for modesty. (You now have to envision me topless through the rest of this scene.)
We ended up sitting in a narrow stairwell in two rows facing each other. The majority of people were old or very young with nannies — people who weren’t off at work. My mother was now giddy with pleasure that I had come to rescue her and was determined to show me off by introducing me to anyone she knew in the basement.
The crowd was now getting rowdy, and the doorman was clearly over his head. A woman was crying that she wanted to leave. Someone did but returned quickly because it was too smoky. It was getting tense.
Fortunately, someone yelled that the smoke had cleared, and we all made for the exit. Outdoors, the smoke had indeed cleared, and I put my shirt back on.
We headed to the water, with Jim and me arm and arm with my mother, holding her up. The ground was covered with layers of torn strips of paper. Jim later told me it was also covered with body parts, but fortunately I wasn’t looking closely.
We made it to the water, where there were boats pulled alongside the shore and people boarding them. To her great dismay, I put my mother on a boat as she pleaded with me to not separate from her. But now that she was relatively safe, I had one thought on my mind: Get to Hope.
Jim was now helping people board boats. Jim and I finally boarded a boat ourselves. It was a fireboat and took us back to Canal Street, where we had started the morning.
Then we ran to Jim’s apartment, because although all I wanted to do was go to Hope, Jim was determined to take a shower first — we were covered in dust. We had to avoid running by gas stations — they still existed downtown then — because Jim was nervous that they might blow up.
Then we had to stop in the meat market to buy salamis, because Jim is Italian and told me salamis last longer than any other food on the planet. We had no idea what was going on, and he wanted to make sure we were prepared for the long haul.
We arrived at Jim’s apartment, where he took a quick shower, and I called Gus. Turned out Gus never left for work that morning, and because phone service — landline and cell — were screwed up, he had been manning the phones, fielding calls among and between family members.
My mother ended up in New Jersey, where a bus dropped her off at the Liberty Museum. My very funny cousin, then a state senator in New Jersey, had been boarding buses shouting, “Is there a Ruth Meyers from Bialystock here?” and found her.
My dad did make it to Queens but not upstate. A friend of Hope’s dad had checked in saying that, if need be, he would pick up Hope along with his daughter.
Now showered and ready, Jim and I headed uptown. I tried to get a car to stop for us and was amazed that not one did. Then I had an epiphany: I was a middle-aged crazy woman covered from head to toe in dust.
Finally, a car had to stop at a light. I pulled open the passenger door, told Jim to get in the back seat, and asked the driver how far uptown he was going. Never once turning his head to look at me, undoubtedly terrified, he drove us a couple of miles before he turned east.
We got out and I spied a car with a lot of people getting into it. To their surprise, Jim and I piled in with them and got as far as 60-something Street. We ran the next 30 blocks are so. On the way, I was struck by an enormous line that snaked for blocks and then realized it was people volunteering to donate blood at Lenox Hill Hospital.
We finally made it to Hope’s school, where I was greeted by a teacher I knew. She guided me to the auditorium, where all the kids were gathered. There was a woman on stage speaking into a microphone. Feeling like a refugee, I tugged on the woman’s dress saying, “Hope Reichbach” over and over again until she stopped and repeated Hope’s name.
Hope spotted me from across the room, and by the way I looked, she thought Grandma had died.
With Hope in tow, Jim and I, along with Hope’s friend and her dad, walked across Central Park to their home on the West Side. Other than being able to see the smoke continue to billow out from what was left of the World Trade Center, life seemed uncannily normal.
Not long after we got to our destination, Hope’s friend’s mother returned from work and let us know that the A train was running. Hope, Jim and I headed down to the subway, where we heard an announcer saying that, due to an earlier incident, the A train would not be making the following stop: the World Trade Center.
Jim disembarked at West 4th Street to head over to St. Vincent Hospital to volunteer. Hope and I made it home without further incident.
I calculated that I had run seven miles that day in the worst pair of sandals/clogs I had ever bought. Feeling guilty that I had never worn them and because that day promised to have minimal walking — no outside meetings, no lunch date — I had made myself wear them.
They stayed in my closet, dust covered, until I read about the toxins that composed the dust. Then I threw them out.
