March 04, 2003

Last week, a friend received a letter from the New York City Property Clerk's Office. The letter was actually delivered to her in-laws, who still have a business at the street address the envelope was mailed to. That address, it turns out, was the address that was on her old driver's license. That license was in the wallet that was in the backpack that she dropped as she turned and fled for her life when the South Tower of the World Trade Center began falling in her general direction on September 11, 2001.

She went to the Property Clerk's Office this morning, and picked up not her backpack, but just an envelope containing her license and a couple of other items from her wallet. The officer there told her that these items had come from the Fresh Kills landfill on Long Island, which is where everything went during the cleanup. They sent over a million tons of concrete, steel, glass and miscellaneous pieces of skyscraper there, by truck and by barge. And out of all that, they found her driver's license.

She told me that there was someone else at the Clerk's Office this morning, a man whose sister was on the 94th floor of the North Tower. He saw the plane go in, and knew immediately that she was dead. He'd been to the Clerk's Office before: first for a credit card, then for a driver's license. Early last year, he attended his sister's funeral, and ten days later he got a phone call telling him that they had found her remains. He told my friend that he just wished the calls would stop. Each recovered fragment of his sister's life must be like a hot wire dragged across a scab. I can't even begin to imagine what that's like.

The property officer at the desk told my friend that she'd been working on the recovery process from "day one." Some weeks, it's nothing but survivors. Then, for days on end, only family members. When my friend asked about her backpack and the other items in it--the wallet, some jewelry, some cash, and a notebook containing poems that were eventually published as a book at the end of 2002--the officer told her to send a letter to the Clerk's Office with a description of the bag and its contents. Apparently, they've been able to return some items based on description alone. That means that, somewhere, there's a storeroom, perhaps with row after row of wire shelves, and every so often, someone who works there will read a letter and think: a blue bag with a silver buckle? I remember that one...I walked right by it last week...it's over on the West wall, somewhere. The officer said they've got another two years' worth of stuff to go through.

One million tons of rubble, from the sixteen-acre Ground Zero site, plus another two or three hundred acres surrounding it that was littered with shoes, purses, and backpacks. A team of workers at a landfill, patiently sifting...finding credit cards...driver's licenses...watches...wedding bands.

Every so often, it hits me anew. Just this morning I walked past Ground Zero, and thought how small it looks. The massive basement-hole is slowly filling up with the structure of the new downtown transportation hub. I saw how they've repaired a lot of the jagged, broken top edges of the bathtub, the massive concrete retaining wall that was the first structure built on the site in the Sixties, and now is all that remains of the 110-story towers and the other buildings in the complex. And I deliberately reminded myself of the numbers: two thousand eight hundred, give or take. I played the images of the fallen and the falling in my mind, so that I would not just walk on by, hurrying to start my day without a thought for the ghosts of the air that linger there.

And now, I am reminded again by circumstance, with no effort on my part, of all that happened on that day. And I thank God that I'm alive, and that Pea is alive and well with me, and that my cat is fat and stupid, and that I've got a little house with a basement that floods when it rains, and that I am so rich and content that I can get angry about installing a dishwasher or bouncing a check. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.