Left Bereft

September 11, 2001

I saw this sight myself one cloudy morning in 1980 flying the Eastern Shuttle down the Hudson River from LaGuardia Airport to Washington D.C. / Still from the documentary In the Shadow of the Towers: Stuyvesant High on 9/11, by Amy Schatz

Around the devouring flames, shadows writhe in mortal combat for an instant of time and then as suddenly disappear, and the blind, fingering their eyelids, cry out that this is history.

Albert Camus, The Rebel

Only days earlier, Julia had saved me from death-by-steak in the middle of a Paris, Latin Quarter Café (Le Be Bop), popping a thick slug of viscous beef from my throat like a champagne cork, in celebration of not choking to death on vacation. I thanked her by marching her mercilessly through the streets of the capital – Hemingway’s haunts, cobblestone paths the Terror’s tumbrels followed – ending the final day, after seven hours, at the Arc de Triomphe under a fading sun. She was a game gal but she then told this New York boy, no, he’d have to cl…