NEW YORK — The silence hit me first.
New York City is big, sure, with the expected big-city noise. Any city with more than double Oregon’s population will buzz with activity, but New York seems much more muted these days.
Fewer angry taxi drivers honking at angry pedestrians. Less cell phone chatter. Less hustle, less bustle.
I spent a large chunk of December wandering through the injured city. People everywhere — from hot dog vendors to the suit-and-loafer set — said “please” and “thank you” and “you’re welcome” with a frequency and a sincerity that I never saw during previous visits.
Thomas Patterson Emerald
A fence abutting New York Harbor, within sight of Ground Zero, proclaims the might of the ‘facades
of marble and iron’ that make up the ‘proud and passionate, meddlesome, mad extravagant city.’
The good people of New York carry this awful year, this annus horribilis of 2001, like a burden on their backs. Boy, did they cheer the dropping of the ball on tired Times Square. They want to move beyond the painful past, away from strangers from far away encroaching with their cameras.
It’s strange. The babies don’t scream on the rush-hour subway; their big eyes just swivel around in constant awe. You meet their respectful, understanding eyes with yours and a message is received: “I never will have the decades of innocence you took for granted. I will never have that luxury. And the resulting hole, as a silent witness, I don’t know how to fill.”
NYPD Officer Duane White secures the outside perimeter of the World Trade Center site.
Still, they cannot look away, staring up to commuters or out to the scenery. The children of New York have grown up in a hurry, but they seem neither scared nor full of reproach despite the scary, reproachful world — and the charge to rebuild it — they have been handed.
It’s just that all of a sudden they are aware of their surroundings.
E-mail photo editor Thomas Patterson
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