September 21, 2007 04:34 pm
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“Sometimes your feelings become your memories.”
Steven Whipple said that’s when he realized his recollection of Sept. 11 was bogus.
Because he lived just two miles from the smoldering, stinking, spewing nightmare of Ground Zero, the former Albion resident reported his Greenwich Village neighborhood was seemingly deserted for weeks.
“It was a ghost town,” he said. “No cars, no horns, no people and the restaurants were all shut down.”
Then he consulted his journal, which told a different story.
“Actually, it says here that it lasted only three days.”
Three days. Three weeks. Or 365.
“You say that you’ll never forget this, but your mind leaves out lots of things.”
I wrote that one year after 9/11, after a trip to Ground Zero to talk with former residents of this area, all of them experiencing that unbelievably searing day so much closer than most.
Six years later, people are talking, though, about the feeling of 9/11 fading.
At the town’s lightly attended remembrance ceremony Tuesday, Supervisor Peter McMahon asked the Island power crowd in attendance to never forget the “anger” we felt after 9/11.
I’m not sure it was anger I felt those Days After, but it was definitely something not good at all. I was in a cloud. And not just my usual one.
At the time, it seemed as thick as that raging wall of particulates that McMahon said is causing an epidemic of lung diseases among those caught in the vicinitous aftermath of 9/11.
My vocation at the time was writing and processing obituaries for these newspapers.
During those days, every keystroke felt like another person who had died en masse just days before.
It’s a terrible cliche bordering on parody, but there was a great disturbance in the force, and it lasted for weeks, months, I think.
I know everyone expresses grief in their own way, but if you couldn’t feel, embrace it, let it wreck you ...
So it’s no surprise the water works opened up during McMahon’s speech.
I don’t know if it was what he said or just the barrage of images that hit me throughout, sunset burning bright in front of us.
Each tear — one left, pause, right, left, right — was like the saddest filmstrip imaginable. I’d blink, and the ViewMaster would advance the next image ... Of that enormous empty grave called Ground Zero or people leaping to their deaths, the dumfounded faces ... as each one fell.
In between, feeling self-conscious at my lack of steely reserve, I kept thinking, “What if I actually knew someone who died there?”
I’d be inconsolable, a mess, a wreck ... but that’s just what I was feeling anyway.
Then and now.
I still know it’s not anger.
But it’s almost as strong.
(And maybe more powerful.)
Joe Kissel covers Grand Island for the Record. E-mail comments to joekissel@roadrunner.com.
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