Passages
by Cathy Fiorello
“Aaron, will you come with me to visit the World Trade Center Memorial?” I asked my grandson. I was calling from San Francisco a week before I would leave for New York for his high school graduation. I knew my bonding time with him was coming to an end; he would soon be setting out to seek his own path in life and there would be little time for chilling with his grandmother.
Aaron is the youngest and most challenging of my four grandchildren. Like all challenging people, he will be heard. It started in the nursery of the maternity ward at the Putnam Hospital Center in New York, where my husband and I met him soon after he was born. The joy in the hospital room that day was palpable. The newborn lay nestled in his mother’s arms, swaddled to his chin, his head covered in the blue cap that announced his gender. Two sets of giddy grandparents stared at him like he was the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. When we visited the next day, we went straight to the nursery to gaze again upon this miracle that was now a part of our lives. We scanned all the blue caps, but couldn’t find ours. “Where’s our grandson?” we asked the nurse.
“Oh, he’s in the Bad Baby Room,” she replied.
“What did he do?” we asked. What could a two-day-old baby do that called for punishment, we wondered.
“His crying disturbs the other babies,” the nurse answered. “We can’t have that now, can we?”
Of course not, I thought. That rarity, a crying infant, simply had to be removed from all those conformists in their pink and blue caps who nursed and burped, then slept until it was time to nurse and burp again. Aaron was having none of it. From day two of his life, he’s been doing his own thing, in his own way, on his own time. As the years passed and Aaron couldn’t find his way out of trouble, I sometimes thought, maybe that nurse was right.
September 11, 2001 started out bright and sunny. I was in a sunny frame of mind, too. I was beginning to feel optimistic after surgery for breast cancer. The prognosis was good; I would live, after all. Life was looking up again. Then the phone rang. “Mom, put the television on. There’s been a terrible accident in the city.”
It was my daughter calling from her suburban New York home to mine. She stayed on the phone and, together, we watched a replay of a plane crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, an image that, fourteen years later, is still vivid in my mind. While trying to grasp the horror of the first crash, we witnessed another plane dive deliberately into the South Tower. We knew for certain that the first crash had not been an accident.
Glued to the television, we watched as a nightmare unfolded. First one tower, then the other crumbled like sandcastles before our eyes. Hordes of traumatized office workers escaping surrounding buildings, their hair, face and clothing covered in ash ran through the narrow lanes of the financial heart of the city seeking safety. Fire engines, police cars and ambulances, their sirens shrieking, poured into those same streets. Every hospital in the area was on full-trauma alert. Medical teams flanking gurneys lined up outside their emergency entrances, waited for the injured to arrive. The heavy toll of life this disaster would take was foretold in the images of doctors and nurses, poised to help and heal, running out to meet ambulances that returned empty. The thousands of victims of the attack were beyond help. They went down with the Towers.
My niece Lisa, the mother of two little girls, Katie and Jessie, was among them.
It was drizzling lightly when Aaron and I left home. The only umbrella in my daughter’s house was child-sized. Playful puppies frolicked over its plastic span. I had bought it for my granddaughter when she entered kindergarten. When we emerged from Grand Central Station, there was a steady downpour and that inappropriate umbrella saved the day. There wasn’t a cab to be had. “Don’t worry, Nana,” Aaron said. “We’ll take the subway.” I hadn’t ridden the New York City subway in many years and had no idea how to get so far downtown.
“I don’t know which line to take,” I said.
“Follow me.”
We descended into an underground teeming with people who knew where they were going and what train to take to get there. They swept past us, poured through the turnstiles, and crushed into already packed cars. Used to San Francisco’s comparatively miniscule Muni system, I was overwhelmed. Aaron took charge. He read the signs, he studied the transit maps, and then he led me to the train that would take us to the Memorial.
There was no way to avoid a drenching when we came out of the subway. It was a two-block walk to the site in torrential rain. On the way, Aaron spotted one of those hotdog carts ubiquitous on the streets of New York. Since he was a toddler, he’d loved what he called “franks in dirty water.” These were hotdogs that had been sitting in greasy water made even less wholesome by the city air, alive with debris and noxious fumes from the gridlocked street traffic. It was hotdog heaven to Aaron when he was a child, and he had to have one now.
“Oh, Aaron, grow up,” I said.
But he insisted, and went off to get one. I ran under a construction awning for shelter from the rain. When I looked back, I noticed the “Sabrett” logo on the vendor’s umbrella. A Sabrett hotdog is one of those foods, like pizza, that ex-New Yorkers yearn for but can’t be replicated anywhere else. It’s a top-of-the-line sidewalk frank. The quality of the water it sits in is simply not an issue. I left the shelter of the awning and ran to the corner, trying to get Aaron’s attention. The wind had its way with my umbrella and I had to close it. Passing cars, swishing through puddles, splashed me all over. But I didn’t care. I was on a nostalgic mission.
“Aaron,” I shouted, “Get me one, too.”
When we arrived at Ground Zero, there was no refuge from the rain. We went through the security checkpoints, standing in long, solemn lines. The Memorial pools are set in the two footprints where the Twin Towers had once dominated the Manhattan skyline. Thirty-foot waterfalls cascade into their centers. The names of all the victims, 2,977 killed in 2001 and six killed in the 1993 attack on the Towers, are etched in bronze around the perimeter of the pools. Our mission this day was to find Lisa’s name.
We were puzzled at first that the names are not arranged alphabetically, but learned that, honoring requests from victims’ families for specific names to be in the same area, they reflect where the victims were on 9-11 and the working relationships they shared with others who were lost on that day. An electronic directory at the site made it easy for us to find Lisa. It told us she had worked in the South Tower and her name was on Panel S-36.
We sloshed our way to the South pool, Aaron taking the lead. My glasses were so beaded with raindrops, I could hardly see ahead, much less read the names. “Don’t worry, Nana,” Aaron said. “I’ll find her.” When he did, we stood silently, two generations removed from each other, equally mesmerized by a name cast in bronze.
Aaron was five years old when Lisa died. Though he’d heard stories of her loss on that terrible day, before this visit to the Memorial, he had little memory of her. The electronic directory that led us to her name also had a picture of her, a young woman in a flowered summer dress, her unruly blond hair framing a pretty smile. “I remember her!” Aaron said, “That’s Katie’s mother.” Lisa had become real for him.
Standing beside him, my mind called up indelible images of the day and its aftermath. I remembered that we went to the city the day after the attack to be with my sister. It was a time when Americans everywhere felt a vulnerability we had never known before. We needed to be with loved ones; we needed to assure each other that we would get through this. Calls were made across the country asking, “Are you all right?” even of those who weren’t in harm’s way during the attack, but whose lives were changed forever because of it. As we drove the West Side Highway, a busload of firefighters on their way to Ground Zero to join in the search for survivors came into view. Every car in its path, pulled to the side of the road to clear the way. We saluted them silently as they went by; they, in turn, pressed the palms of their hands against the windows of the bus to thank us.
The umbrella Aaron held offered no protection in the driving rain, but he held it resolutely over my head. I wept tears of pride for this boy I had hoped for so long would turn a corner. I knew that we had each crossed into another of life’s passages—I was now in his care.
For the first time that day, I wasn’t distressed by the weather. It seemed a fitting backdrop for so sad a journey. The rain, the waterfalls, the tears—it was a wet day all around.
Aaron is the youngest and most challenging of my four grandchildren. Like all challenging people, he will be heard. It started in the nursery of the maternity ward at the Putnam Hospital Center in New York, where my husband and I met him soon after he was born. The joy in the hospital room that day was palpable. The newborn lay nestled in his mother’s arms, swaddled to his chin, his head covered in the blue cap that announced his gender. Two sets of giddy grandparents stared at him like he was the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. When we visited the next day, we went straight to the nursery to gaze again upon this miracle that was now a part of our lives. We scanned all the blue caps, but couldn’t find ours. “Where’s our grandson?” we asked the nurse.
“Oh, he’s in the Bad Baby Room,” she replied.
“What did he do?” we asked. What could a two-day-old baby do that called for punishment, we wondered.
“His crying disturbs the other babies,” the nurse answered. “We can’t have that now, can we?”
Of course not, I thought. That rarity, a crying infant, simply had to be removed from all those conformists in their pink and blue caps who nursed and burped, then slept until it was time to nurse and burp again. Aaron was having none of it. From day two of his life, he’s been doing his own thing, in his own way, on his own time. As the years passed and Aaron couldn’t find his way out of trouble, I sometimes thought, maybe that nurse was right.
September 11, 2001 started out bright and sunny. I was in a sunny frame of mind, too. I was beginning to feel optimistic after surgery for breast cancer. The prognosis was good; I would live, after all. Life was looking up again. Then the phone rang. “Mom, put the television on. There’s been a terrible accident in the city.”
It was my daughter calling from her suburban New York home to mine. She stayed on the phone and, together, we watched a replay of a plane crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, an image that, fourteen years later, is still vivid in my mind. While trying to grasp the horror of the first crash, we witnessed another plane dive deliberately into the South Tower. We knew for certain that the first crash had not been an accident.
Glued to the television, we watched as a nightmare unfolded. First one tower, then the other crumbled like sandcastles before our eyes. Hordes of traumatized office workers escaping surrounding buildings, their hair, face and clothing covered in ash ran through the narrow lanes of the financial heart of the city seeking safety. Fire engines, police cars and ambulances, their sirens shrieking, poured into those same streets. Every hospital in the area was on full-trauma alert. Medical teams flanking gurneys lined up outside their emergency entrances, waited for the injured to arrive. The heavy toll of life this disaster would take was foretold in the images of doctors and nurses, poised to help and heal, running out to meet ambulances that returned empty. The thousands of victims of the attack were beyond help. They went down with the Towers.
My niece Lisa, the mother of two little girls, Katie and Jessie, was among them.
It was drizzling lightly when Aaron and I left home. The only umbrella in my daughter’s house was child-sized. Playful puppies frolicked over its plastic span. I had bought it for my granddaughter when she entered kindergarten. When we emerged from Grand Central Station, there was a steady downpour and that inappropriate umbrella saved the day. There wasn’t a cab to be had. “Don’t worry, Nana,” Aaron said. “We’ll take the subway.” I hadn’t ridden the New York City subway in many years and had no idea how to get so far downtown.
“I don’t know which line to take,” I said.
“Follow me.”
We descended into an underground teeming with people who knew where they were going and what train to take to get there. They swept past us, poured through the turnstiles, and crushed into already packed cars. Used to San Francisco’s comparatively miniscule Muni system, I was overwhelmed. Aaron took charge. He read the signs, he studied the transit maps, and then he led me to the train that would take us to the Memorial.
There was no way to avoid a drenching when we came out of the subway. It was a two-block walk to the site in torrential rain. On the way, Aaron spotted one of those hotdog carts ubiquitous on the streets of New York. Since he was a toddler, he’d loved what he called “franks in dirty water.” These were hotdogs that had been sitting in greasy water made even less wholesome by the city air, alive with debris and noxious fumes from the gridlocked street traffic. It was hotdog heaven to Aaron when he was a child, and he had to have one now.
“Oh, Aaron, grow up,” I said.
But he insisted, and went off to get one. I ran under a construction awning for shelter from the rain. When I looked back, I noticed the “Sabrett” logo on the vendor’s umbrella. A Sabrett hotdog is one of those foods, like pizza, that ex-New Yorkers yearn for but can’t be replicated anywhere else. It’s a top-of-the-line sidewalk frank. The quality of the water it sits in is simply not an issue. I left the shelter of the awning and ran to the corner, trying to get Aaron’s attention. The wind had its way with my umbrella and I had to close it. Passing cars, swishing through puddles, splashed me all over. But I didn’t care. I was on a nostalgic mission.
“Aaron,” I shouted, “Get me one, too.”
When we arrived at Ground Zero, there was no refuge from the rain. We went through the security checkpoints, standing in long, solemn lines. The Memorial pools are set in the two footprints where the Twin Towers had once dominated the Manhattan skyline. Thirty-foot waterfalls cascade into their centers. The names of all the victims, 2,977 killed in 2001 and six killed in the 1993 attack on the Towers, are etched in bronze around the perimeter of the pools. Our mission this day was to find Lisa’s name.
We were puzzled at first that the names are not arranged alphabetically, but learned that, honoring requests from victims’ families for specific names to be in the same area, they reflect where the victims were on 9-11 and the working relationships they shared with others who were lost on that day. An electronic directory at the site made it easy for us to find Lisa. It told us she had worked in the South Tower and her name was on Panel S-36.
We sloshed our way to the South pool, Aaron taking the lead. My glasses were so beaded with raindrops, I could hardly see ahead, much less read the names. “Don’t worry, Nana,” Aaron said. “I’ll find her.” When he did, we stood silently, two generations removed from each other, equally mesmerized by a name cast in bronze.
Aaron was five years old when Lisa died. Though he’d heard stories of her loss on that terrible day, before this visit to the Memorial, he had little memory of her. The electronic directory that led us to her name also had a picture of her, a young woman in a flowered summer dress, her unruly blond hair framing a pretty smile. “I remember her!” Aaron said, “That’s Katie’s mother.” Lisa had become real for him.
Standing beside him, my mind called up indelible images of the day and its aftermath. I remembered that we went to the city the day after the attack to be with my sister. It was a time when Americans everywhere felt a vulnerability we had never known before. We needed to be with loved ones; we needed to assure each other that we would get through this. Calls were made across the country asking, “Are you all right?” even of those who weren’t in harm’s way during the attack, but whose lives were changed forever because of it. As we drove the West Side Highway, a busload of firefighters on their way to Ground Zero to join in the search for survivors came into view. Every car in its path, pulled to the side of the road to clear the way. We saluted them silently as they went by; they, in turn, pressed the palms of their hands against the windows of the bus to thank us.
The umbrella Aaron held offered no protection in the driving rain, but he held it resolutely over my head. I wept tears of pride for this boy I had hoped for so long would turn a corner. I knew that we had each crossed into another of life’s passages—I was now in his care.
For the first time that day, I wasn’t distressed by the weather. It seemed a fitting backdrop for so sad a journey. The rain, the waterfalls, the tears—it was a wet day all around.
