post 9/11

World Trade Center Memorial building budding up through Manhattan

NY Stock Exchange remembers 9/11

View down Wall St. looking towards Trinity Church

Washington watching over NY (Site of his Presidential Inauguration)

"The Sphere," a sculpture by Fritz Koenig which stood at the World Trade Center as a symbol of world peace, was relocated to Battery Park on March 11, 2002, approx. six months after 9/11. The new memorial also includes an eternal flame (lit 9/11/02), "in honor of all those who were lost," says an explanatory plaque, "an icon of hope and the indestructible spirit of this country."

View of the World Trade Center Memorial building from Battery Park, NYC

View of the World Trade Center Memorial building from Battery Park, NYC
I went into the City to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, to eat dumplings, maybe go to a museum, have good coffee; I did most of those things and in the process was overwhelmed by the City, how each time I visit I feel a little less of a stranger, how every time the city seems smaller and more accessible. The day was perfect: a pre-dawn drive to the train station; a 6am train ride into NYC, watching the sunrise over fields and small towns turning into city, listening to Simon & Garfunkel; breakfasting surrounded by skyscrapers; ferrying over to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and being overwhelmed by the importance of these two places; eating dumplings on a borrowed stoop then wandering around East Manhattan; cold beers outside at the end of a humid day; a train ride back, tucked away in anonymity, a sunset ride home. A good day.

I know I already posted a blog about September 11, but I wanted to share these pictures which I took in NYC yesterday. It is impossible to not notice the change in the skyline, the attempt at memorializing the events of 9/11; it was impossible for me to be in NYC this week and not feel the emotional charge of the city, to feel the jump in the pulse of its people, to notice the steps that are still being taken as precautions--armed officers at Grand Central Station, more police than normal patrolling the streets, directing traffic in busy section of the city. I was grateful to be in the city, to be absorbed as one of Her children; it felt good to be taken in and alone in the embrace because sometimes there is too much emotion and too much thinking and remembering for words. I was grateful for that kind of loneliness that you can only get when you are surrounded by thousands and thousands of strangers, striking out for the next destination void of a companion. It felt good to be alone so that I didn't have to feel the need to stifle tears that needed to arise and fall.

Thanks New York, I am still thinking of you today and feeling that amazed feeling I get when I think of the city that never sleeps.

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