If you stand on the street in front of the Baltimore World Trade Center, the first thing you notice won’t be its height. It’ll be the slab of marble with two rusted pieces of metal sticking out of it.
They look like hands, presenting the contorted and twisted wrapping of steel framing atop them. As if, for the amount of time you keep staring, you will see only that—not the Inner Harbor behind the building or the building itself. Not the sea of teens and twenty-somethings in comic book regalia threading in front and around you, but that charred and melted and rusted metal framing that once kept somebody safe.
It is as if the metal tines holding it up are offering it to you, like, “Here, hold this weight with me. Here, have a piece of America’s history.”
It is a chunk of metal framing from one of the World Trade Center towers. I do not know how long it hung in place before collapsing, finally, under the weight of itself. I do not know which tower, which floor, which cubicle it used to shade from the Manhattan Skyline and the summer sunrises.
But it has found it’s way here. To me. To the city that promises to protect me if ever someone should want to crash into my life.
There is something about staring at museum exhibits that never felt quite real. Like it was easy to read the metal engraving listing the scene depicted behind glass and move on, flashing from one projector slide of the past to another.
But there is no glass standing between the marble slab and me. There is no blockade in front of the sundial sculpted from that same steel, which, on each September 11th, aligns the shadows of the sun with the minutes that tore that day to shreds.
And maybe there shouldn’t be. Maybe we were meant to be so deeply engrossed in the awareness that somebody else once took this piece of steel framing for granted. Somebody else once thought concrete was impenetrable.
Somebody else, somebody you knew, once told you all you needed was a house over your head. And you forgot that said house didn’t guarantee you your life. That cars crashed and boats sank and trees landed in your upstairs bathroom. You forgot to take three minutes each morning to say, “This is where I come from. Where do I want to go now?”
That’s how it feels to stare at that hunk of steel. Like we ought to get up tomorrow and pull ourselves from the rubble, turn for just a moment to bask in the reality of it, and then use our strength and our heart to forge forward into a future that looks equally as strong, but ultimately fragile, for the rest of our lives.
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On Friday it was the Olympic Opening Ceremony, 7 years prior the day after it was announced that London would host the Summer Games in 2012, a group of bombers got on various underground trains and blew themselves and innocent people up.
My friend P was on call as a paramedic that day. He was one of the triage people so his job was to walk through the station and through the trains and label people as walking wounded, serious or DOA. I told Our Sidekick on Friday while watching the Opening Ceremony how I’d got a text from my friend to ask if I’d seen the news. I then sat at my parents dining room table and watched the news in my pyjamas all morning. I had my phone in my hand and had texted 3 or 4 friends who I thought might have been in London that day. Thankfully they were all safe – they were either the other side of the city or not in the city at all.
My friend Gareth’s younger brother was doing work experience just up the road from Aldgate tube station. He’d caught an earlier train to London that day and because of that was on an earlier tube to the office. He arrived at his placement and within minutes the bomb went off – if he’d been on his normal train he might not have been here now.
To me the Olympics being in London is like a phoenix rising from the ashes. We could have let them win but we didn’t we carried on and each medal that is taken home to difference places in the world is spreading that achievement and standing up to the terrorists of this world.
The title of this post inspires me to write something “similar.” Lovely storytelling.
Thanks, Sara. I just got so captivated by it, more so than plenty of other monuments and memorials, and felt like I had to write about it. It’s not my typical post, but I’m glad you enjoyed.
Wow, that is scary. I have so many similar stories from 9/11, brushes with almost-loss and actual loss, and it scares me how that stays with you. The Olympics really give you a chance to rise from it, though. It’s beautiful like that.