10 years ago today I was in New York City.
In a city with more good places to eat than one could get to in a lifetime, Windows on the World atop the North World Trade Center tower was one of my favorites. I tried to make sure my guests who were in town for the first time got there, especially the ones from out of the country. A very nice place to eat, it had a touch of elegance and an almost surrealistic view, sometimes literally in the clouds. There was no other place like it in the world. The food was good, the service attentive and unobtrusive with just the right balance of professionalism and casual friendliness.Our waitress was a personable, somewhat work-worn forty-something plain Jane who had obviously plied her trade for a good many years. She told us she was an abandoned single mom, working two jobs to keep two teenagers fed, housed, clothed, and in school. She liked her job, worked the breakfast-to-lunch shift, leaving her just enough time to get to her other job which ran from two till ten. A killer schedule; but for those kids she would willingly work herself to death.
My guest was Natalia Zdanovych, a young woman educator who is also the Director for Ukraine of the humanitarian foundation I headed. She had come to the U.S. to pursue a Master’s degree at NYU. I helped find her an inexpensive apartment across the river in Jersey City, helped her get settled in and showed her how to get around in the Big Apple. We had lunch at Windows on the World the day before I left. Nat and the waitress chatted, had some things in common. We dawdled over coffee, and the waitress took time to come by the table and say goodbye as she headed for her other job. She made me promise to have lunch at her table next time I was in town.
Nat’s apartment was only a ten-minute subway ride from the Twin Towers. She had only to take the elevator from the top floor restaurant to the subway station a quarter mile straight down. That same WTC subway station was also the one at which she would change trains to get to her university classes every morning.
The breaking TV news five years ago today brought me out of my uncaffeinated stupor about 7:00 am. The first plane had struck the North tower at 8:46 am., 6:46 MST.
Nat!!!
This was about the time she would be changing trains at the WTC station.
Everyone now knows the cell phone frequencies were hopelessly jammed all day. I didn’t know her classes didn’t begin till noon that day; my anxiety was out the roof. She watched, and photographed from her front porch, the historic horror unfolding about five miles away.
The first helicopter photos began coming across the networks. Struggling with gut-churning disbelief I looked through the eye of the circling camera at the ghastly rubble of the room where Nat and I had lunch a few days before, the table at which we ate, the chair I sat in. And that forty-something mother exhausting herself to take care of her kids; her body was probably down there somewhere.
I wonder who’s looking after her kids. I trust God is. After all, their mother was incinerated and crushed to pulp in His name.
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” -- Blasé Pascal
A modified version of this blog was previously published in Jack Wilson’s syndicated column in 2006 and in “Views if a Village Idiot”.
