Paris and New York

Next to New York, Paris is my favorite city. It’s also the home of one of my oldest and dearest friends who’s been living there for the past five years. As luck, or circumstance, would have it, she’s moving back to the States at the end of this week. I’ve known her since we’ve been 15. We met when we were both counselors at a local day camp. We went to different high schools and since we didn’t see one another during the week, often spent weekends together, especially during the summers when spending an entire day on a friend’s boat was our normal routine. She went to college down south and my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, and I visited her there. She was my maid of honor at my wedding and after a short stint in Brooklyn moved with her new husband to a small town in Pennsylvania. I visited her there before she moved to Montreal where her first child was born. I visited her there too. Her husband travels a lot for business and after a number of years in Montreal, was relocated to northern Virginia. I live in Pennsylvania and we’d sometimes meet at Baltimore’s waterfront for lunch.

***

On one beautiful September morning, I went for a walk right after my kids left for school. My husband had left much earlier for his job in New York City. As I walked the neighborhood I remember seeing a fox across the street. There were young rabbits on the lawn of the house I was passing and I scattered them, telling them to run. I felt sorry for the fox too. It deserved to eat, but I thought it could scavenge garbage cans. At any rate, it wasn’t going to eat a baby bunny on this beautiful day. Not if I had anything to do with it.

I walked back to my house feeling somewhat satisfied that I had saved baby bunnies. It was 8:35 a.m. and I turned on the TV to keep me company as I prepared to shower and dress. Minutes later, one of the towers of the World Trade Center was hit. I watched as Katie Couric explained the confusing facts. I called my husband immediately. “Get down,” I said. “Someone bombed the World Trade Center. Get down.” He had no idea what I was talking about. I pleaded with my husband to get down from the high floor of his building and onto the street. In my mind, I thought that someone was targeting landmark NYC buildings and they were going to topple into one another like dominoes. “Get down,” I kept telling him. We lost phone contact during that conversation and I called my mom on Long Island to check up on her and my brothers, one of who works in New York and another who lives there. The news reported that it was, in fact, a plane that had hit the World Trade Center. My phone began to ring like crazy with friends and family calling from all over to check up on my husband. He was fine, but I hadn’t spoken with him in several minutes. It seemed like hours. I spoke with a friend whose daughter lives in New York. We decided to call our children’s school and to have them let our children know that their loved ones were ok, but only if the kids came to them first. “Don’t call them out of class to tell them anything happened,” I told the school secretary. Within minutes my youngest called. She was crying. The school had misunderstood my instructions and called her out of class to tell her there’d been “a serious accident in New York City, but your dad is ok.” My daughter then went through the list of all our family members and asked if each one was ok. I assured her they were and asked if she wanted me to pick her up. She told me she’d be fine. She wanted to stay in school. My older daughter called. She had heard the news in class and had asked her teacher if the World Trade Center was near her dad’s midtown office. He assured her it was not and showed her on a map the distance between the two locations. She told me she wanted to stay in school too. I tried again to contact my husband but still couldn’t get through. A friend called from her office in Queens and as we spoke, she related with horror that the Tower was collapsing. She was able to see it from her office window.

My phone didn’t stop. I had checked on everyone I knew who lived or worked in New York to make sure they were safe. They were. My husband and I communicated via emails. I begged him to come home, but he wanted to stay in New York to see if he and my brother could donate blood to victims. My recollection of the day becomes fuzzy at this point, so much was going on. The second Tower had toppled and the news reported that the Pentagon had been hit by a plane. The United States was under attack. My friend! I called her and she was fine. Her husband and children were fine. I use that word for lack of a better one. No one on that day was fine. We were alive, we were unharmed, but we were far from fine. We were changed forever.

One of my husband’s coworkers’ sons worked in the World Trade Center. My husband stayed with him throughout the day as he searched hospitals for his son.

Whenever I was able to speak with my husband, I begged him to come home. New York City was closed. The trains and subways weren’t running. I think he spoke of taking a ferry to New Jersey, but I’m not certain. I remained glued to my TV as my phone rang off the hook and I assured everyone that my husband and family were fine.

My girls came home from school and I reassured them that their dad was fine as were their grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. They asked about every friend we have in New York and I told them they were fine too. I’m sure they watched the news reports with me. I couldn’t turn away. I didn’t want to watch but couldn’t not watch. I hoped for some sign that the events of the day weren’t real, that this hadn’t happened.

My husband came home hours later. I don’t remember how he got home. His co-worker’s son was never found. He had worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, the company that lost so many people on that horrible day.

I kept in close touch with my friend in northern VA. She and her family were ok, but her kids’ school had lost several parents in the Pentagon attack. She was trying to keep her family calm in northern VA. I was doing the same in PA.

My friend stayed in Virginia for only a few years before her husband’s job took them to Calgary. I never visited her during the years she lived there, but we kept in constant touch. She’d come back to the States to visit her mom and we’d get together as much as we could. Just before her daughter was about to begin school at Princeton, she called to tell me she was moving east and to guess where. I said, “New York”. She laughed and said, “No. Further east.” I’m not good with geography and said the place that I think of as the farthest east. “You’re moving to Japan?” “No, Paris,” she said. I remember screaming and dancing in my bedroom. “You’re moving to Paris! You’re moving to Paris! How wonderful.” She laughed and said, “I do have kids in the states, right?” That stopped me in my tracks as I thought of how I’d hate living that far from my kids.

I didn’t visit my friend when she was in Paris. I had been there the year before she moved and while I’d love to visit Paris yearly, it wasn’t to be. Both of my daughters and their significant others visited her, my oldest when she was there for a wedding and my youngest who was there with her fiance for a pre-honeymoon. My friend took great care of my kids, showing them the city from the perspective of someone who lives there.

***

I had been away from the house for most of this past Friday. And, when I walked in, I turned on the TV as I did on September 11, 2001. The news that Paris had been attacked was just being reported. Memories of 9/11 came flooding back but this time, instead of my husband and family, my thoughts were preoccupied with my friend’s welfare and, of course, of the residents of Paris. I never remember the time difference between here and there and my brain was too addled to figure it out. I dashed off an email asking how she was and then thought, “Screw it. I’m calling.” She answered immediately. “I was just responding to your email. I’m fine.” She explained that the attacks happened far from her apartment, that she had dinner plans with friends but was probably going to cancel and stay closer to home. Once I had ascertained that she was safe, our conversation turned to the sorts of things of which lifelong friends speak. She had taken a photo of a feathered dress in Chanel’s window that morning and had sent it to me. I told her how envious I was that she had the opportunity to walk past Chanel in Paris any day of the week. I told her again and again how relieved I was that she was fine. I said, “It’s such a terrible thing to have happened but since it did, I’m glad that it happened as you’re leaving Paris and not beginning your life there.”

My heart goes out to the people of Paris, the victims and their families and I am certain I am not alone in being reminded of 9/11 by these recent events. I know the fear they must feel, the despair and the sadness of knowing that your life has been irrevocably changed. I offer no solutions, opinions or courses of action. May the powers that be make the best decisions in that regard. I write this, not to dredge up the horrors of 9/11 and the helplessness we felt but because it’s therapeutic for me. I feel helpless once again and don’t know what to do to make the world a safer place for my children, my family and friends.

Paris suffered terrible tragedies and casualties at the hands of madmen, but Paris and the people who live there are not alone. These terrible acts affect us all and we stand with Paris. It will take time to heal, but Paris will heal. We will learn to live with the new, new normal and we will heal.