Empty Sky

For reasons we do not understand, we find this day getting harder with each year. We watched some footage last night which prompted...that damn emotional reaction. The footage gets more horrifying every time.

That July Mrs. Stroock and ourselves had just moved to Peapack NJ, about 30 minutes from the Lincoln Tunnel. The town lost four men killed at the World Trade Center.

As previously explained we were in a field hitting baseballs and found out about ten after ten, when we hopped in the shower and turned on the radio to listen the local sports talk about the previous night's Giants game.

We spent the morning tracking down relatives in Manhattan. The phones actually jammed. Our grandfather watched the second plane go in from NYU University Medical Center, where our grandmother was being treated for cancer.

A week later we crossed the Hudson at the mighty Tappan Zee Bridge, about twenty miles upriver from Manhattan. All one could see looking south was a cloud of smoke. It looked like goddamn Hiroshima. A week after that we took the train into Manhattan for the first time, there was a great gap in southern Manhattan.

The towers were used all over the area for advertising. One of our local stations, Channel 11 liked to use them, obviously. Almost every episode of every TV show ever set in NYC had a shot of the towers, every movie too. Now for all time those shots will evoke images of destruction.

Bruce Springsteen captured something here, Empty Sky...empty sky...I woke up this morning, to an empty sky.

The Statue of Liberty w/ Southern Manhattan in the background