Twenty-five years ago this morning.
My daughter Grace lives in a high-rise built near Ground Zero. I went to see her there in the spring. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge talking about her future, and somewhere along the way we stopped and looked up at the Freedom Tower.
She knows what happened there. Of course she does.
But she has no memory of it, and I didn’t understand the difference between those two things until I was standing next to her on that corner. I carry the memories of that morning in my heart. She carries a city in hers.
That’s true of everyone her age, the ones making NYC their home. They have the facts and none of the feeling — they live in what got rebuilt instead of in the dust that was left behind. I don’t think that’s forgetting. I think that’s the whole point of rebuilding it.
Ground Zero
Freedom Tower near completion
We lived in Sandwich then, on Cape Cod.
My son Ben’s best friend growing up was Conner Nash. Conner’s father was one of the two fighter pilots on air defense alert at Otis that morning, a few minutes up the road from our house. The call came in at 8:37. They were airborne by 8:52 and went to New York at supersonic speed, and by the time they could see the smoke, there was nothing left to prevent. Dan later said what he mostly felt was anger—that they hadn't been in a position to stop it.
He was at our house the following weekend. I threw a party for him, and his family and the whole community came, because nobody knew what else to do.
It took me years to understand that the harm done that morning didn’t stop at the towers or on the planes. It went out into houses like mine, and into the lives of people who had only been doing their jobs, and it kept going long after the country decided the day was over.
Our town lost someone too.
Captain Gerald DeConto. He was at Sandwich High School, a good athlete long before he became a Navy captain. He was inside the Pentagon that morning, planning the Navy’s response to New York, when the plane came into his side of the building.
Most of the people near him lived because he had already sent them away from the danger.
Years later I chaired our Community Preservation Committee, and we debated whether to put half a million dollars into a football field and track at the high school that had sat condemned for fifteen years. Not everybody wanted to. Dave DeConto sat on that committee with me — a friend of mine, and Gerald’s brother — and he put his brother’s name forward for it.
With a generous contribution from the DeConto family and funds from our committee, we built it. It carries his name. There is a photograph somewhere of me holding one of those enormous checks for the Cape Cod Times, and I have never been prouder of anything I did in that town.
Kids who weren’t born on September 11th run on that field on Friday nights under his name, and every graduating class is given their diploma on that field. That's the ripple. It's the only kind of answer I've ever found to any of it.
The memorial pools being built in 2013
I was working in finance in those years. John Hancock had offices in the tower and a hundred threads running back into Massachusetts. Two hundred and six people from my home state died that day, and both planes had left from Logan. My agency manager — I had only just started working with him — lost his brother-in-law on one of them.
Everybody I knew was one or two names away from somebody.
Next month my twins fly out of Logan to come and see me in California. Same airport, same route west, and the Freedom Tower now stands on Ground Zero.
Twenty-five years.
It is hard to hold both things at once — what was taken that morning, and everything that has been built since. Grace wasn’t born yet. Now she lives there, twenty-three years old, building a life directly on the site of the worst day this country has had in my lifetime.
My people didn’t fight their way into this country and call themselves Americans without knowing what it cost. Resilience is in the blood. We all carry the scars of battles large and small, and we go on building futures for ourselves and our children anyway. Let’s remember why we do it, and that we once did it together as Americans.
That’s what Ground Zero is now. A place to remember who we are, and a place for new beginnings where somebody’s daughter is building a new life.
— Tim
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