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Glynnis Eldridge
“This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely more beautifully more devotedly than ever before."
—Leonard Bernstein
I sat speechless in the empty classroom, listening to the blasting talk radio. Out the window millions of army vehicles sped downtown on the barren FDR drive. Countless amounts of bewildered people were running uptown, it looked like a marathon. Behind everything was a thick cloud of pitch black smoke, which suffocated everything.
“Glynnis, is someone coming to pick you up soon?”
“I think so; at least I hope so.” I stared out the window hopefully.
“Glynnis, if you would like, I live at Waterside, and if someone doesn’t come for you soon, you can come to my house and wait for someone there. I can make tea.”
“No, no, I’m fine. I’m sure someone will come very soon.” I glanced out the window again. The cloud of smoke was expanding.
After waiting for what seemed to be hours, my dad finally came to school to pick my brother and me up. He had almost no expression on his face, only a blunt mix of horror and heroism. After clarifying with Ms. Zacharia that he was my father, he took me downstairs to the second floor, where the Junior School was located. We walked quietly to my brother’s fourth grade classroom where Nathaniel and many other fourth graders were staying. The teacher had put on the movie Shrek to entertain the children. No one had told any of the Junior School students what had happened, for fear of unexpected responses.
“Daddy!” Nathaniel squealed, as he saw my Dad turn the corner into his classroom.
“Nathaniel!” Dad knelt down, and Nathaniel ran into his warm fatherly arms.
“Let’s go home.”
As we left the classroom, and turned the corner to the stairwell, I asked Nathaniel if he knew what had happened.
“Well, we had a few classes, and then we watched movies all day. There was a lot of smoke outside. Was there a fire?”
“Nathaniel, the Twin Towers fell down.” Nathaniel stopped, suddenly petrified by my words.
“Wh-wh-what do you mean they fell down? Glynnis you’re a bad liar.” His eyes became glassy suddenly, and filled with tears.
“Dad, what happened? Is she lying?”
“No Nathaniel. I wish she was lying. But she isn’t.” Dad kept walking; each step he took became faster than the last.
“What do you mean they fell down?!”
“They fell down.”
“You mean, they fell over sideways? Did they squish our building?”
“I don’t know Nathaniel. I hope they didn’t squish our building.” I helplessly looked at Dad for help.
“We’re going to my house tonight. So far, that’s all I know.” His quick tone made me nervous. We walked out of the school gates, and up along the FDR Drive. We stopped at the Fast Ferry, almost boarding it to go to New Jersey. The boat was full and we turned around and walked west.
We walked for hours. We walked past pubs and bars stopping to look at the televisions, which played and replayed the horrors of what had happened that morning.
Whenever we walked under the shadow of a tall building, I would pick up my step, for fear that the building I was walking under would topple over any second. We stopped for the public bus after many hours of walking with heavy backpacks. The driver, the passengers all had the same expressions, the same expression everyone had that day: horror and shock. The bus ride was free, and the back doors were open for anyone to board. We stayed on that bus for about half an hour until we neared Columbus Circle, where we departed from the crowded, sweaty, smelly bus.
Grandma Ronnie’s house was, and currently is still on 68th and Broadway, which was walking distance from Columbus Circle. We threw open the door to Ronnie’s modern and very expensive apartment, running to the freezer for handfuls of ice cubes, before doing anything else. I threw an ice cube into my mouth, and sucked on it until it dissolved, which was in a matter of minutes.
I proceeded down her beautiful marble hallway to her bedroom, where she had five people lounging on her queen size bed. “Hi, Ronnie.” My voice was silenced by the earsplitting television.
“Glynnis!” She pushed herself off of her turquoise fleece blanket which she had been sitting on. She brought that fleece blanket everywhere. She hugged me tightly and planted a kiss on top of my head. “Are you alright? When did you get out of school? What did you hear? Do you want some water?” She asked a million questions, and introduced me to her friends. “Glynnis, this is Robert. You remember him, don’t you? He knew you when you were only a baby!”
“Yes, only a beybey,” Robert had a strong New York accent, and I barely recognized him. I didn’t know any of Ronnie’s friends, but somehow, they all knew me.
“Here Glynnis, wait here and watch some TV. and I’ll be back in a few minutes. What do you want to eat? We have ice cream! I know you just love ice cream!” I flashed my “million dollar smile” at her, and at once she ran off to the kitchen to get the food.
I leaned back against the wall of giant pillows, watching the news for what seemed forever. They had only one theme that day, and that was war. They would play the same clips over and over again, purposefully gluing the images of planes crashing into monumental structures, and people half way around the world celebrating immediately afterwards. It was as though they were pushing rewind, and then play hour after hour. That video will remain in my mind forever.
Silently, I sat in horror with my bowl of ice cream slowly melting in my palms. By the time the bowl of ice cream had turned to complete liquid, it was time to leave Ronnie’s house, and go to Dad’s house. I drank the bowl of ice cream, and ran over and hugged Ronnie for almost a whole five minutes. I threw my back pack over my shoulder and followed my Dad and Nathaniel out the door.
I didn’t remember Dad’s house looking the way it did when we got there. There were numerous changes: furniture had been rearranged and removed. In the front room, stacks of paper covered every square inch of space. In the back room, my room, the one I used to sleep in when I stayed over with Lucy and Emily (my aunts), and Michael and Larry (my uncles), nothing had been changed or moved. Nothing in that room had been touched in months, maybe years, and was now covered in dust.
I suddenly broke down. I suddenly understood. The dust, the towers falling, going to Dad’s house. I had told people at school that I would take pictures from my window and bring them in soon. I found out only when I lay down on the dust covered bed that I would never go back to my old apartment. I didn’t know what had happened to my mother, I didn’t know a lot. I wish I had known that I would never go back to my Battery Park City apartment ever again the morning of September 11.
The windowsill had cubby holes big enough for me to sit under. I curled up under the windowsill and fell asleep in the cubby hole, next to the burning radiator. This was going to be a long year.
—Glynnis Eldridge, New York, NY, age 13, 2003
Sophie Vorburger
September 11, 2001
Each morning of the week before 9/11, I would arrive at my beautiful private office on the 44th floor of the Carnegie Hall Tower overlooking the Hudson River. Each morning as I walked into my office I was having a vision of a plane coming straight at me. I am highly intuitive but little did I understand what I was “seeing”.
On the morning of 9/11 I arrived at 8AM like every other morning and went on about my day. My nanny was taking my children to school on the lower East side as she had done many times before. I brought several cups of coffee to my boss who was the CEO of the company. He would usually have the news on and would keep the TV on silent. Then we saw the inconceivable as the first plane hit the first tower. Chills went down my spine. The room felt silent. I broke that silence by saying it was a terrorist attack. I just knew. Being from France, I remember the senseless terrorist attack we had in Paris many years ago and the attack we had a few years before on the twin towers.
My nanny called. She had just getting off the bus and saw the first plane hit the tower. I told her to go home quickly and stay there while I would go get my kids. I called a car service and asked the car to stand by.
Fifteen minutes later the second plane hit and someone who was in the room said that was where his wife worked. He knew at that very moment that she was gone. He would tried to reach her of course, but he knew. We were all devastated for him, his family and the many people who had just lost their lives who were in the planes or in their office at the time.
Then the TV started to show images of people choosing to jump to their death rather than being burn alive. I had never seen such horror in my life.
The school at that point was in lock down mode. I asked for my children to be together as they waited for me to pick them up. The city had just closed all the bridges and public transportation was coming to a complete halt.
I told my boss I was leaving to get my children. No one could have stopped me. I got in the car and the driver told me he was the last car out and had suspended all service after I called. I was lucky. We had to go from West 57th street down to the lower east side. It took us over an hour. There were hordes of people walking up the FDR drive. Some covered in dust. It was like an exodus. It reminded me of the war pictures you see with civilians fleeing the war zones.
I found my kids and got back into the car. The teachers had been very sensitive to the children, letting them know what had happened without giving out too much detail. We could see the smoke rising from the towers as we drove away from the school.
My son who was 6 at the time quipped that he had been at the top of the tower the day before sightseeing. Questions were pouring in as we drove past the people walking on the streets.
After a very long ride we reached our home on the UWS. The nanny was cooking lunch and the TV was on. I received a call from a friend who had her son in school with mine. She said she could not come home in Battery Park and asked if she could come with her son and stayed with us. Her husband would come later and they ended up staying with us for the next 3 months as their apartment was inhabitable.
We were all glued to the TV as we saw the tower collapse. Nothing was making sense. How could this huge building be reduced to rubbles in minutes? What was happening of the firefighters inside and people trying to make their way out? How could such evil be taking place?
We cried as we watched. We were witnessing live the unthinkable and yet there was nothing anyone could do about it. As I was thankful for having my children safe with me, I thought of all the people who had just lost someone that day. A mother, a father, a child, a friend… How do you make sense of the senseless?
Those events will be etched in my mind forever and the memory of all those who died that day will be in my heart forever.
—Sophie Vorburger, New York, NY 2009
Jean McGavin
9/11/2001
The bus was late. It was my daughter Glynnis’s first day of 6th grade. She had missed the first few days because of a fever so she was terribly excited to be heading off to school that day. Nathaniel had already spent a few days in 4th grade but 4th grade is about as fun as school can be so he was equally excited to finally see the bus arrive. We had a succession of dreadful bus drivers. They would get lost, leave the kids at the wrong corner in the rain, sometimes they wouldn’t show up at all. This was a new driver so I was concerned that he might go the wrong way and make the children even more late than they already were. I swallowed my worries, waved bye-bye with a big happy smile and hurried home to complete a deadline for work. I had planned to go to the twice weekly Farmers Market at the base of the Trade Center. I loved the market. In what had been before the bombing in 1993, a parking lot at the base of the Towers, the market offered this wonderful fantasy that I could have a little bit of the best of bucolic farmland while living as close as one could to the epicenter of the financial world. Every Tuesday and Thursday, as long as the weather permitted, farm trucks packed with local produce and baked goods caused 50,000 well-heeled, movers and shakers, masters of the universe, to detour on their way to work at the top of the towers. I found iconoclastic poetry and redemption in that.
I loved Battery Park City, the landfilled waterfront jewel immediately to the west of the Towers. There was no more beautiful neighborhood in the City and certainly no place I had ever known that offered so much free, and exquisite entertainment. Summer was like camp for grownups and kids alike. Every day there were wonderful free performances from the New York City Ballet to Pete Seeger, Norah Jones. There were free programs in the parks including soccer, baseball, art and crafts, chess, basketball and kayaking. There were Swedish festivals, ethnic dance nights, Christmas festivals and fireworks. The fireworks were amazing. Our apartment had huge windows looking out over the Hudson River, the Statue of Liberty and Governor’s Island. So many nights my children would climb into bed and we would watch fireworks before reading a bed-time story.
The World Trade Center was where we shopped, where we ran to catch the subway to go uptown. It was in the Trade Center’s plaza where we enjoyed concerts and picnics and the bustling of thousands of people. For 9 years it was our backyard.
But I have digressed. It is easy to digress now, thinking about how wonderful a place this was to live.
So, after waving a somewhat worried farewell to my children I went to work in my home office. Very shortly after starting to work I felt it. The building shook. I knew that feeling from the 1993 bombing. I had had my blinds down to block the brilliant sun that day. I drew the blinds and looked at the street because this is where the commotion could be seen in 1993. I didn’t think to look up at the Towers. Things on the street didn’t seem wrong although people did seem to be in quite a hurry but I thought that they were just rushing off to work. A few minutes later a neighbor called and told me that a plane had hit the Trade Center. This time I looked up and saw the gaping hole, which in comparison to the size of the Tower looked more like a hole a small plane would have made. Next I received a call from friends in Tokyo who saw the news on TV and wanted to know if we were all right. I assured them that everything was fine. Then my sister called and I assured her that we were fine. I don’t know why I did not think of the implications of even a small plane hitting an office building. Even a small plane would mean certain death for hundreds of people, but somehow, none of that sank in. I did not think about leaving my apartment. I did not think about terrorism until another plane came screaming, right towards me. I was engulfed in the sound. I could not see the plane because the blinds on my south facing windows were down. It was just sound. My back was pressed against a wall and in a completely instinctual state, of panic I was trying to climb the wall to escape. Then the building shook again but I had not been hit. I was safe for the moment. I do not remember if I looked at the Trade Center after that. I know that I decided to call my friend, Nira, who lived on the first floor of our building – I was on the 21st and fully expected other planes to attack and I wanted to be in a place from where I could escape. She told me her mother, who had just arrived from Israel the day before, was there with her son and that I could go and stay with them. I may have taken my purse but nothing else. My friend’s mother was not there. I went to the lobby which was filled with worried people – people wondering how to get their children, people who were supposed to be in the Trade Center for work wondering if they should go, people in a state of shock trying to make sense of their world when none was possible. I was wondering if the tardy school bus had safely delivered my children to school.
I went back to Nira’s hallway and ran into a man emerging from the next apartment. I asked if he had seen anyone from Nira’s apartment and he said no but that he was leaving and advised that I do the same. My new acquaintance, Jack Siler and I headed to the lobby when everything turned black. There was debris flying outside and I assumed that another plane had hit our building. These thoughts happen as normal thoughts. These unthinkable events when you are in them become reality and somehow you continue thinking in somewhat ordinary ways about unthinkable things, even as your adrenaline is surging and you begin to act as though you have stopped thinking. People were scrambling and screaming, trying to get outside. People were running, grabbing their babies, leaving the strollers behind and running from the lobby into the disaster. I don’t know why everyone all of a sudden wanted to get out when it was about as scary outside as it could possibly be. We did not know that a 110 story building had just collapsed and we were immersed in 110 floors of debris from toilets, computers, body parts, walls, paper, chairs, desks, carpeting, fiberglass, pcb’s, dioxins and asbestos. I remember thinking that this was a situation wherein I might actually die but then I decided that I was not going to die. I was going to stay rational and do what I needed to do to stay alive and calm and take care of my children. Jack and I decided that we would go back to his apartment. We closed all the windows, put down wet towels under the doors and at the sills. Then we turned on the TV and saw that the first tower had collapsed. The windows in this apartment faced away from the Trade Center so the only view we had on the disaster was on the tv. As we watched, the second tower began to go and as the antenna fell from the top so did our power and our news. No more tv, radio and no cell phone. Outside our window a man holding a baby running from what we could not see coming, dodged under a domed piece of playground equipment. They disappeared in a blackout cloud of debris engulfing entire city blocks.
We stayed in the building for hours. I didn’t want to leave until I felt that things had calmed down enough so that I could go uptown to get my children. About 2:00pm we decided that things might be safe enough for me to get to my kids. I walked up the 21 flights to get a few things from my apartment. I packed clean underwear and socks for the kids and me, my son's asthma medication, a raincoat and umbrella (to keep off the debris) and I put on shoes instead of sandals. I did not bring the cats or the turtles. Somehow, I thought I would be back in a day or so. Back in the lobby I ran into a young man who had a handful of crumpled dirty papers that he kept shuffling. He was panicked and dazed and kept saying that had to get back to the Market and asked if the stock market would be open tomorrow. I told him I didn’t think so.
Then Jack and I went out into the knee deep debris. We still were unaware of the other planes involved, or that the Pentagon had been attacked. We didn’t know if there had been other attacks in the City and I worried that my children’s school, the United Nations International School, might be attacked. We passed by the pile of smoke and rubble that had been the Trade Center and were quickly approached by a man from a tugboat who told us that Manhattan was being evacuated. I told him that there was no way that would be happening. Manhattan is too big. He told me they were going to try and that we did not have a choice, we had to get on the boat. I would not be picking up my children. The Captain of the tugboat, Rosie, tried to get me to another part of Manhattan so that I could get my children but she was not allowed to go to port on Manhattan. She allowed me to use the tugboat’s phone to call my children’s school but I could not get through. We were being taken to New Jersey. At our first stop, where emergency showers for those caught in the debris had been set up, we were not allowed to disembark because just as were about to, a bomb threat was shouted and Rosie rushed the tug back into the middle of the Hudson. She took us farther upriver to Weehawken where, after thanking Rosie, we climbed off the boat and stood in a huge crowd, like other masses of refugees staring dumbly wondering where we go from here.
—Jean McGavin, 2009
About Jack
This is the other side of my 9/11 story. Everything has its yin and yang, even 9/11. If the chaos of the Towers collapsing was the yin, simultaneously meeting Jack was the yang. He appeared as I was seeking refuge in my friend Nira’s apartment. Jack was calm and elegantly dressed in a lavender linen shirt. Because within a few moments I learned that he had spent many years investigating disasters and I had never known anyone else even remotely versed in disasters, I decided that I would spend the rest of the day with him. Then, as the buildings were coming down, my second decision was that I would not allow myself to die that day. We went back to his apartment for shelter until a time that it would be safe to get to my children. When the second building came down, and, despite huge windows and a brilliantly sunny day, the apartment became pitch dark, Jack reached his hand to mine irrevocably connecting for safety and friendship.
After the Towers fell, we waited. Fire alarms were screaming. I remember holding my ears but I do not remember any sounds that day other than that of the approach of the second plane. I have asked Jack if he remembers the sound of the buildings falling but neither of us remembers any sound, although he does remember the fire alarms. I remember him trying to turn off the alarm in his apartment. We talked about my children, about family, about his life, traveling in Africa, writing, about living in Paris. I felt and continue to feel guilty about enjoying this time. We truly enjoyed the time spent getting to know each other even as we knew that terrible things had happened around us and that I still faced enormous uncertainty about how I would reconnect with my children. I suppose that by enjoying our friendship I was able to keep at bay the reality of the horror and the greater implications of that horror.
We worked seamlessly to make our strategy for the day as though we had known each other for years. We shared no cross words, no flare of temper, no tears. We chatted like old friends in the park. I have no idea if, having met under other circumstances we would be great friends. The special nature of our meeting and the experiences we shared no doubt accelerated our friendship in a singular way. We finally left the building, were hustled onto a tugboat and ferried to New Jersey. We found a diner, for our first meal of the day about 6:00pm, with a TV blaring the only news of the day and we watched the Towers fall and our building disappear in a black cloud in incessant replay. But we had each other and felt enormously lucky to be both alive and in the company of each other. Jack was my life boat. I had not realized at the time what solace I took in his companionship that day. To be anchored to another person through a disaster made the experience more about friendship than horror. We were able to focus on each other and keep our minds away from the world. I had been a single mother for 4 years. I was strong, solitary and stable. But a week later when Jack took his seat in a taxi on his way back to Paris, I crumbled. On a street with lovely trees, no falling buildings, no firehouses draped in black, and for the first time after 9/11, I cried wondering how I could survive now that my life boat was gone.
We have held on to this yin yang balance in our friendship built on horror and luck. Jack still lives in Paris and I still live in the States but we talk at least once a week, he visits at least yearly and my children and I have visited him. There is no question of our friendship. His hand is in mine irrevocably.
—Jean McGavin, October 27, 2009
May 1, 2011. Osama Bin Laden killed in compound in Pakistan by U.S. forces.
I had originally posted this next story as a Memorial Day tribute story. I have been urged to move this to the 9/11/2001 page. Although Carolina was not a soldier, it was my feeling that her death and the deaths of the other vicitims of the terrorist attacks on the 9/11 were the first casualties of the current "War On Terrorism". Currently this story is on both pages and will eventually remain only here.
Elsy Carolina Osorio-Oliva
Carolina called her mother from the burning tower saying, “Mami, I am so scared.” She told her mother that she wanted to leave but that they were told to stay where they were, that they would be safer remaining in their offices. That was the last Chaney heard from her daughter. When I last spoke with Chaney it was shortly after 9/11/2001. She called me in desperation hoping that I might have relatives or friends who could help her locate her daughter who, I was shocked to learn, had worked in the World Trade Center.
Feliciana Oliva-Umanzor, “Chaney”, came to work for me as a housekeeper on the recommendation of a friend. She was sweet, pretty and as gentle a human being as I have ever met. She spoke of her children with palpable pride. She spoke of her fears and the struggles of living in war torn El Salvador. She bravely left family, home, an office job and college to travel to the U.S. where she hoped to find safety for herself and her children. Without contacts or fluency in English, she cleaned houses to provide for her children.
I had known that Carolina had a wonderful new job and that her mother was very proud of her. I believe that Chaney felt that her own hard work was paying off for her children. She could see the value of her struggles to start a new life in the U.S. She could see that she could relax a little bit, that her hard work and determination were all worth the effort. But the pain in her voice on the phone that day in September conveyed more anguish than Chaney had known in El Salvador. This was deep, unfathomable and inconsolable pain. I had no solace for her. My offers of the warmth of friendship and my promise that I would ask friends and family for help in finding her daughter were words and promises and gestures that, we both knew but did not say, would not result in finding Carolina alive.
Jean McGavin
Bethlehem, CT, 2011
The New York Times produced one of the most elegant and moving pieces of journalism relating to 9/11/2001, “A NATION CHALLENGED: PORTRAITS OF GRIEF: THE VICTIMS”. Every day, until all the victims were memorialized, two or three each day, each victim’s brief story was told, from janitors, to CEO’s. Elsy Carolina Orsorio-Oliva’s “Portrait of Grief” is below.
A NATION CHALLENGED: PORTRAITS OF GRIEF: THE VICTIMS
ELSY C. OSORIO-OLIVA
Family Comes First
Elsy C. Osorio-Oliva was the oldest sibling in her Flushing, Queens, household, but she acted like a mother hen. She dotd on her younger brother and sister — Kate and Anthony Umanzor, 10 and 8 — with whom she lived, along with her mother and stepfather. And she doted on her mother, Feliciana Oliva-Umanzor, who left college and a war-ravaged El Salvador in 1983 for a new living in the United States cleaning apartments.
A junior translation engineer with General Telecom on the 83rd floor of 1 World Trade Center, Ms. Osorio-Oliva, 27, spoiled her sister and brother with toys, outings and weekend breakfasts of pancakes and French toast. She paid for her mother to take courses in computer and tax preparation so she could get an enjoyable job. The daughter, who was known by her middle name, Carolina, even lent her mother some clothes for the office, and planned to buyher a car so she could be more independent.
But there was so much independence that Ms. Osorio-Oliva wanted for herself. Engaged for the last two years, her mother said, she wanted to get married and have a house big enough to move in her whole family.
''She said, 'Mami, I can't live without you or the children,' '' her mother said.
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