In remembrance of today’s 25th anniversary of 9/11, here is my column that originally ran in 2015 following a road trip up and down the Eastern Seaboard…
The Smiling Pool from a series of children’s books by Thornton Burgess is aptly named because its curved shape, when viewed from atop an overlooking hill — as Burgess did often during his boyhood in East Sandwich, Massachusetts — resembles a smile.
Indeed, it remains a happy place to sojourn as I learned during my recent tour of his home-turned-museum.
My emotions were completely polar at the next pool of water I visited. Actually, pools plural: the twin reflecting pools at the National September 11 Memorial in lower Manhattan. The Crying Pools seems apropos.
Each reflecting pool is nearly an acre
square and situated on the footprints where the Twin Towers once majestically stood. Water pours over all four edges of each pool at a rate of 3,000 gallons per minute, forming waterfall curtains, before disappearing down a small square abyss at the bottom.
The symbolism of the flow rate is heartrending because nearly 3,000 lives disappeared in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Feb. 26, 1993. The victims’ names are inscribed on bronze panels on the parapets surrounding the pools. Visitors’ eyes, in turn, often become miniature reflecting pools overflowing with tears.
This was my first return to the site since Tuesday, June 11, 2002, (I still have my “WTC:00 Viewing Platform — 2:00-2:30 pm” ticket), nine months to the day after the World Trade Center became Ground Zero.
I remember very little from those 2002 NBA Finals I covered, other than the Los Angeles Lakers played the New Jersey Nets. But the sight of the steep-sided square hole in the ground remains unforgettable. It looked like a gargantuan grave.
Inside the completed 9/11 Memorial Museum the somberness is even more overwhelming than at the twin reflecting pools. Boxes of tissues are placed liberally throughout and empty quickly. My wife teared up within the first two minutes of entering the exhibition; I did so even sooner.
To tour the museum once is a must, I believe; I believe also I could not bear to do so again.
To describe the experience would require a dozen columns. Instead, I will share a single image that most profoundly punched me in the soul. It is the transcript of a phone call from Brian Sweeney, a 38-year-old passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 175, to his wife. Julie was not home, so he left his last words on their answering machine:
“Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good. Go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you and I’ll see you when you get there. Bye, babe. I’ll try to call you.”
At 9:03 a.m. the plane crashed into the South Tower.
My trip of the Eastern Seaboard had earlier taken on an “author” theme with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Thornton W. Burgess playing roles.
However, I believe Brian Sweeney’s words — composed with no time for writer’s block, no chance to revise and edit and polish — are as potent and poignant as any left behind by the above literary masters.
After telling my son, whom I was visiting, to “do good” and have “a good time” and that I “absolutely love” him, I hugged him goodbye while blinking repeatedly to keep my twin reflecting pools from overflowing, and boarded a jetliner so similar — and so polar — to the one Brian Sweeney took.
Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: On 25th anniversary of 9/11, some reflecting | Woodburn
