9/11

I lived in New York City for 20 years. When I lived there, I had this recurring nightmare. It started with the air growing electric and people starting to panic. Then I would turn to look at a clock that was running quickly backwards to midnight. I would usually wake up in a sweat just before the clock struck 12, which I somehow knew meant that a nuke was about to be dropped in midtown. Occasionally the dream would last long enough for me to see the mushroom cloud.

I suspect most New Yorkers have some version of this dream. They know that their hometown has a big bull's eye on it, and they've known it since long before 9/11. It's part of daily life there, part of what makes the place insane and wonderful. There's something empowering in knowing that you live in a place so important that it--along with Washington DC--is the place our enemies would like to hit most. There's also something ridiculously stressful about it.

That stressfulness is part of what compelled me and Lisa to leave New York in 1999. We were ready to live in a place that was simply a great place to live; we didn't have to be at the center of the cultural universe any more, so it was time for us to cede our spot to someone hungrier for all that the city has to offer. We left a lot of good friends behind, and that was probably the hardest part of leaving.

One of those friends--Lisa's closest--was visiting us in North Carolina on September 11, 2001. That day was a blur, a combination of short spurts of frenzied activity (trying to reach friends and family in the city, rebooking Lisa's friend's trip back to NYC--I even got a call in to work that morning and had an editor describe the scene from her Varrick Street office window in the West Village) with long, dumbfounded stretches in front of the television, watching the crash and the collapses replayed over and over.

By late afternoon we'd made all the calls that were going to get through (not many) and watched as much news as we could stand, so we headed over to our favorite barbecue place for a meal and a break. It was a strange experience. The restaurant was just going about its business as usual: the radio was playing music in the background, folks were eating and laughing… it could have been any day of the year. Americans have made a big show of rallying behind New York and declaring their solidarity with the city since that day, but on 9/11 I got a real sense of how most of the rest of the country views New York City. To them it's practically a foreign location, a city whose allure is incomprehensible and whose misfortunes are remote from their daily lives. Carolinians were concerned and compassionate on 9/11--one of my neighbors, bless her, brought by some homemade muffins to console us on what she knew was an especially trying day--but there was also a general attitude of “That's the sort of thing that could never happen here, and that's why I'm glad I live here and why I'd never live there!”

I realized that day that there's a part of me that thinks exactly like a Carolinian, that you'd have to be nuts to want to live in a place like that. New York City is ridiculously expensive and it smells like baked piss in the summer and in the winter the wind cuts right through you and the people are not exactly what you'd call friendly and you take your life in your hands whenever you cross a street or drive a car or entrust your safety to a taxicab driver…. and on top of all that, some very bad people would like to blow it to smithereens. And still, Lisa and I miss New York a lot. We miss our friends and the long walks through Manhattan and the incredible restaurants and shops and the museums and the parks and the awesome energy of the place and the people who overfill it. There'll always be a part of me that considers New York City home; I lived there too long and have too many close friends there for that to ever change. If we each made six figures, maybe we'd think about moving back.

Then again, I haven't had that nightmare since we left. So maybe not.