May | 2014 | The Backpack Press

The new 9/11 Museum is open now in lower Manhattan. Previews of the museum were offered to 9/11 families and to the workers who spent so many months recovering the remains and clearing the site. I was fortunate to be able to attend as a guest of one of the 9/11 families. My friend and I had agreed in advance that we would just do this somehow, get through it, and focus on getting a nice lunch afterward.

While I was waiting to meet her, I walked around a handful of the neighboring streets adjacent to the memorial and this new museum. It’s funny – she and I both got a little lost getting there. I never had to know where the World Trade Center was before, because I could always look up. I never looked for streets or coordinates the way you do in every other part of the city, I would just look up. Remarkably, the new Freedom Tower was topped in mist and fog yesterday so looking up, even if that building were something I would look for, was futile. There was nothing visible up past the first couple dozen storeys.

You enter the museum and go down. There is a coffee and snack bar and a conference room just up a flight of stairs, but everything else is below ground where you can view the slurry wall that held back the Hudson River, preventing all of lower Manhattan from going under water. And there are exhibits specific to each of the towers, along with photos of each of the nearly 3000 people who died.

The twisted beams and steel supports that were pulled out of the pile are displayed as if they were objets d’art, something better suited to a contemporary art museum. One of the fire trucks that was destroyed is there in a large room that also has the remains of the communication towers that supported the antennas. That’s one of the things I remember from September 11 – those antennas were integral in most cellphone communication in 2001. It’s why telephone calls, in the first few hours of the event, were so difficult.

What struck me, beyond the enormity of the exhibits and the massive amount of painful and painstaking work that went into creating this place, was one small room where they played music. In other rooms, there were recordings of news broadcasts, tapes of the voicemail messages that were left by the people in the towers, and I heard Amazing Grace playing off in the distance when I was about to leave.

But for just this one room, just for a small exhibit, nothing struck me like the recording of a Rimsky-Korsakov excerpt from Scheherazade. How terribly perfect it was. While the photos, the objects, and the collected debris were all so very important, nothing is more important than telling the story. That’s Scheherazade – she lived because her stories held the king in thrall. She was the iconic storyteller, the one whose very existence relied on her ability to tell a story. I was so moved by the selection of that particular piece of music in that tiny room in that vast and sorrowful place that I can’t even remember now what it was accompanying, what part of the story that room was trying to tell.

But that’s what I came away with: the story of 9/11 is how bold and visionary New Yorkers built two tall, arrogant, spectacular, landmark buildings and how a small group of envious, hateful men thought they could bring down those buildings and bring down America at the same time.

And how wrong those men were.

While we might have been thrown off balance and it might have taken us months to mourn the dead and grieve our loss, we’re not down. The Freedom Tower is up, the new transportation hub is nearly ready, and there is so much for us to be thankful for. The twin memorial fountains are lovely with the sound of fresh water running over stone. It’s a gentle place to remember both the people who died and the day that took them from us.

This story is still being written. We will keep telling this 9/11 story, we will tell stories of the courage and the heroism, the lives lost, and how everything changed that one frightfully beautiful day in September, when the clear blue sky was suddenly filled with the smoke from a terrible fire.

We are all storytellers now and it’s what keeps us alive. Just like Scheherazade.

Photos by me!

When Spring arrives – finally – I mark the event by collecting and cataloging a random assortment of my own personal harbingers. I scour the parks for crocus and daffodils, I take my coats to the cleaners and venture out wearing a sweater or a fleece, I listen for birds to wake me up in the morning, and I look for wild chives. For me, it’s the wild chives that spell Spring.

I grew up in a lovely little town. When I was in the eighth grade, my family built a very nice house in a new sub-division called Seven Pines because the street that lined the open space that was about to be filled with homes had seven tall pine trees. The field had been farmed during WWII. They grew onions there that would have been shipped overseas to help feed the American troops. This was before my time and to me, this area was just the vacant field at the end of the street where our first house stood.

I remember my mother talking with the designers about widening a doorway or the height of the counters. She loved really vibrant colors and the house would be painted gold, rose pink, lavender, celery, mint, and yellow. After we had moved into the house, my dad planted chives. They grew right out the back door, next to the stoop and even though he always had a full garden with beautiful tomatoes, the chives grew all alone, close to the house.

On Saturday mornings in the spring, my dad would take my mother’s kitchen shears out back and snip off the chives into long strands, releasing the onion scent into the kitchen. He chopped the chives into tiny bits and beat them into eggs, scrambling them together in the pan. In these few instances my mother relinquished her regular role as breakfast chef to my dad and he would set aside his regular fried eggs and bacon for this masterful concoction of scrambled eggs and chives.

I know now why he planted them there. Chives masquerade as grass, so if you plant them anywhere else, once grass has been mown, the chives will disappear and become barely distinguishable from the rest of the lawn. That’s why I think of them in the Spring – it’s because nobody has had the chance to mow the grass yet. It’s barely warm enough for sweaters and the last thing you think about is mowing the grass so the chives grow tall and fragrant and to enjoy the wonderful scent, you just snap off a blade to release the fresh onion fragrance.

My mother had her own plants growing just out the back door – Lily of the Valley – growing right next to the chives. Tiny white bells on Crayola green stalks, sending out their own wonderful scent every Spring and my mother would collect a small handful of them and put them in a colorful glass vase. Lily of the Valley is not a common scent to me now, but when I was growing up, I could catch that scent every time I went outdoors. The chives were not really fragrant unless I picked them, but the lilies released their scent unaided.

It strikes me now how these plants characterized my parents and it’s probably why I find myself looking for them now that it’s getting warmer out. My dad is practical, a builder, the guy you’d want to call if anything went wrong because he would know how to fix things, what to do next. And my mother was always more of an indoors girl who loved books and music. They were the perfect balance of indoors and outdoors, practice and theory, the world around us and the eternal. And now, it’s the smell of chives growing in parks and fields in New York City that reminds me of home, breakfast, and spring.

All photos by me!