Laura Rockefeller and I weren’t close friends, but we were friends, fellow dog moms and relatively near-ish neighbors on the Upper West Side; we used to meet on the uptown bus occasionally, promising to get together for lunch or maybe even with our rescue dogs in the park. It never happened. She was busy, I was busy — and although we’d spent 3 1/2 years together in classes at Syracuse University, Laura was a music theatre major from a big, wealthy high school in Westchester County; I was a plain ol’ theatre major from a K-12 school smaller than in any of my peers’ experience. Forty-eight kids? In the whole graduating class? Yup.
Laura had taken ballet and tap for years; I’d attended a few high school and square dances in the Catskills, drunk off my adolescent arse. Laura’s dad was a New York City-based TV director; her mother ran a children’s theatre. My mother taught Latin and equated the theatre with a form of legalized prostitution; my dad thought NYC was the densely populated urban equivalent to the deepest, darkest jungles of Brazil or the Congo. I was a bit of a unicorn, to be frank, and while Laura was an unfailingly decent human I liked and valued, we didn’t have all that much in common.
Fast forward, Sept. 11, 2001; we all know what happened that day 25 years ago next month. I was downtown — a few blocks below Union Square — in my weekly 7:30 a.m. writing workshop. Nobody else showed up that morning (lazy slobs!) other than myself and our fearless leader, but that was okay; more time for chit-chat and my stuff!
A phone call came in, my instructor’s sister saying a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Oh gosh. How terrible, and on such a gorgeous, clear day! That happened once in the fog during World War II, I said, but it was the Empire State Building. Back to work! We heard the second plane roar over our heads. Wow! That sounded close! The phone rang again; another plane had hit the Twin Towers. Clearly, something was very wrong. Workshop over.
My instructor and I hugged one another out on the street prior to heading in opposite directions; I was going to my part-time job in a building on Union Square, but stood looking south on University Avenue for a few minutes. Both towers were streaming plumes of smoke, while a human stream sped past me on the way to the subway station, oblivious. It was, to say the least, very disconcerting.
It was a long, terrible, beautiful day. Terrible for the fear we all felt, and the profound loss of life. Beautiful because it really was that gorgeous outside that entire week, the kind of weather that makes NYC magical, the stuff of poetry, novels, and rom-coms. It was beautiful, too, because people were uniformly caring, generous to and patient with one another.
The ultimate federal counter to the events of that day was also terrible: an ugly, protracted war of choice. 9/11 was a tragedy, and a wake-up call; wake-up calls often result in responses both beautiful and terrible, an invitation to change potentially ushering in the positive and the negative.
Although the days that followed 9/11 were temperate and sunny, we were filled with hope and dread as well as denial; the city’s air was also filled with fine, yet entirely visible dust that floated up from the site downtown. There was no working that week if you weren’t a first responder, which I was not. Our faint, fading dream that anyone else would be pulled out of the wreckage alive was squashed by weeks 3 and 4.
Laura wasn’t supposed to be there, not really. She didn’t work in either of the buildings, except when she did, stage-managing large corporate meetings once or twice a year, tops, for a company called Risk Waters in the famed restaurant atop the north tower, Windows On the World.
Only Laura’s dog walker knew where she was that day; it was several more days before her family and close friends knew for sure, and years before either they, or her beloved dog — who ran to the door every time a car drove up to her parents’ home for months afterward — accepted it.
We weren’t close friends, and I did not find out about Laura’s death until, walking my dog down a block we rarely visited while out on one of those gorgeous fall afternoons, I saw Laura’s headshot, surrounded by flowers and candles, set up as a casual shrine in front of her building. I fell to my knees. She was one of the kindest, most decent humans I ever knew. Her death accomplished nothing, nothing except pain, more death and more destruction.
When will we ever learn?