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Images of the Heart Are the Best Memorial

Johnette Howard

September 11, 2002

The first few days after it happened, the image that haunted me most wasn't the sight of the Twin Towers tumbling down one by one, horrific as that was as viewed from my Brooklyn apartment window. It wasn't the memory of that muffled boom I had heard before that as I sat on my sofa last Sept. 11, drinking my morning cup of coffee. "What the heck was that?" I asked a friend sitting next to me, not yet knowing a second plane had just hit the World Trade Center. Had I looked over my left shoulder, I would have seen both Twin Towers sheared open and belching smoke.

No, the waking dream I still have, the image that haunts my nightmares occasionally, was the video footage of that second crash that the TV news stations were soon playing over and over like some sports replay -- the surreal sight of that large plane dipping its left wing just before it plowed into the midsection of the building. Then a huge red fireball bursting out the other side.

The purposeful way the plane banked, there could be no doubt about the pilot's awful ambition, his murderous intent.

Exactly one year later, I feel a mix of civic pride accompanied by grief compounded by ceremony fatigue. No disrespect intended. I'm not consoled anymore by talk of more 9/11 memorials or fighter jet flyovers or home-plate ceremonies. This anniversary is too privately felt, too personal. The past year evoked so many feelings and images I don't want to talk about them today nearly as much as I just want to sit with them all for awhile. By myself.

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If you were in New York City last year or even if you're just from New York, what happened on 9/11 probably left you imprinted with something as unique to you as a fingerprint.

Living through those first frantic hours, not knowing who had lived and who was lost, remains vivid. Navigating what came later -- the eerie silence on the city streets those first few days, or a newly hatched fear of, say, merely going underground to ride the subway again or driving across the George Washington Bridge to get to Yankees Stadium -- is part of your personal history now. It's something you mention about yourself as often as your birthday or your hometown, where you went to college or how many siblings you have.

You tell someone you live in New York, then you reflexively lapse into your 9/11 story. Where you were. What it was like. How it is, still. And 9/11 still encroaches. When I was in London for Wimbledon earlier this summer, I involuntarily flinched when a Concorde jet suddenly screeched overhead and before that, I was angered to find the mailboxes at JFK Airport have all been welded shut as a counter-terrorism measure. At the first game the Mets played at Shea Stadium, a sportswriter told me how he'd actually planned an escape route from the upper-floor press box at Shea just in case. Another friend, a forensic psychologist who did a lot of post-trauma work, told me how she suddenly became hard of hearing, then belatedly realized it was because she simply couldn't absorb even one more 9/11 tale of woe. In sports, like everywhere else, the initial effect was dramatic. In the first few weeks especially, it was as if a state of grace had fallen over sports. For a while, anyway, sport seemed to gain a new function in American life.

Sporting events were one of the few places where we first saw ordinary Americans gathering again in large numbers. And the unvarnished emotions that came pouring out, the fierce shows of re-kindled patriotism, provided a valuable look into our collective consciousness. And it helped.

Back then, even daring to gather again with 50,000 other people in a public place was considered by some people to be a small act of courage, a show of defiance. Remember how President Bush showed up at Yankee Stadium to toss out the first pitch -- an appearance Bush intended to underline how unafraid he was -- and you could see the flak jacket Bush was wearing outlined beneath his clothing as he reared back to throw?

Until 9/11 we weren't really used to seeing big-time athletes pay homage to anyone, save perhaps each other. But a new perspective was demonstrated in sports, not just preached. From now on, we said, the requirements for a hero have skyrocketed immeasurably and can't be met by hitting a home run.

Whether the values shift has lasted is debatable. Mets manager Bobby Valentine is one of the people who spent the year commendably, immersing himself in 9/11-related work.

In a way, if you consider 9/11 along with the glory heaped on the rescue workers who somehow saved those nine trapped miners in Pennsylvania a few months ago, this past year was a time in which so-called "ordinary" men and women eclipsed the demigods that sports or entertainment create.

Cheering about those who lived and mourning those who died has been a reminder of how each of us is precious and irreplaceable. You don't necessarily have to say it out loud today or know every name to feel it. That they had a heartbeat is enough.