Scattering

The Stuyvesant Spectator (my high school newspaper), asked me for reflections for the 10-year anniversary of September 11th.   Reprinted without permission. 

***

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

-John Updike

WASHINGTON, D.C. 

I’m not kidding. Like many of my classmates, I no longer live in New York. We’ve traded in our metrocards, discovered wider boulevards, and learned to stop casually ordering Pizza or Bagels. It’s a different world down here. The pace is slower, the buildings lower, and Stuyvesant is a half-street in Upper Chevy Chase. 

I run into other alumni frequently, randomly, and purposefully. They stand on line in the old Marine Terminal at LaGuardia the Saturday after Thanksgiving, hurry outside a law library in Foggy Bottom, even meander on my rooftop. When I find myself in San Francisco or Raleigh-Durham I seek them out as if they were prelates of a secret order.  We examine our expatriate existences, trade updates on our classmates with a combination of pride and competitive interest, and mutter about quality of life.

Sometimes we talk about that day and how it impacted, impacts, might still impact us. Often it hangs perceptibly in the air and we inhale silent, unseen particles of the past. While we have no scientific basis for comparison, there is a theory that our class is special, somehow chosen. We are sown, we scatter. We re-root, we return.

I keep a metrocard in my nightstand