Tall buildings shake

Rightly or wrongly, I cannot listen to this song and not think about 9/11. Talk buildings shake, last cigarette, all of that.

9/11 hit right when I was trying to keep it all together and transition from academia to the for-profit world, from distended adolescence into young parenthood What's more, I was in Manhattan that day and I of course remember vividly going down to 5th Ave from our office at 48th and looking south down at those smoking motherfuckers, which still existed when I did so around 10:15. I remember trudging over to the Hudson around 2:30 in the hopes of getting on a boat to NJ, only to see massive lines of people and realizing that it wasn't all that important that I get home, that I could walk up to Morningside Heights and crash on someone's couch if necessary.

The weeks that followed were far from easy and 9/11 was exacerbated by the fact that the Anthrax letters that followed in its wake were not only being mailed disproportionately to Rockefeller Center where I was working but, it turns out, were being mailed from about a quarter mile away from where we lived in Princeton. And then there was Flight 587 falling out of the sky because of "wake turbulence." Most people have likely forgotten that one. I have not. I also saw that at Rock Center. And then there was the guy driving around the DC suburbs picking people off with a rifle while they filled up their tanks. There was a lot of scary shit going on. Natalie was 16 months old.

So when Natalie and I were riding around in Juneau last week and this song came on I just started crying and hid it as best I could because... that is how I have been trained, Margo Thomas notwithstanding. That is the paternal role. Just suck it all up and act as it's OK. Because, in the end, it is.