Lughnasa Waning Honey Extraction Moon
BJ came today. She’s a New Yorker and has been since she attended Julliard many years ago. Over lunch today Mark asked her about 9/11.
She told her story and Schecky’s. She was in New Jersey and saw the burning building across the grasslands. At first she and her friends thought it was an accident. Then the news became clear. Schecky was at home at the Beacon Hotel, 74th and Broadway. He’d been asleep, woke up, turned on the TV and thought the scenes he saw were a strange disaster movie. As he clicked the channels, it was the same movie on all of them. Relatives had left messages on his answering machine, “Are you ok?” He thought, why wouldn’t I be?
BJ, who had come to New Jersey by train, found a fellow musician with a car and the two of them spent seven hours trying to get her back to Manhattan, eventually driving far to the north to the Tappan Zee bridge and finding a back way into the Bronx. Her friend lived in Brooklyn and BJ took a subway back.
Over the next six months BJ said folks looked each other in the eyes on the streets and in the subways, trying to connect. She rode a bike in Central Park, she had begun training for a race, and she said the atmosphere there was extraordinary. Like the end of the world might be coming and folks needed to be out with other people.
She spoke of playing music at St. Paul’s Chapel, where many of the rescue workers came for rest and food, part of a volunteer effort by the city’s musicians. She was also angry that no monument was in place and that so little work had been done on the buildings that would replace the Twin Towers.