 Looking over the WTC site  |
My brother's comment on a photo V posted recently got me thinking. He said:
If Tori and Nev grow up with the new Trades, they'll become New Yorkers for sure. "How you gonna keep them down on the farm..."
In a sense, Tori and Nev HAVE grown up with Ground Zero. Tori was born just outside Washington, DC on George W. Bush's inauguration day--January 20th, 2001. On September 11th, she was nine months old and we lived in Fairfax, VA. We scanned the horizon that day for smoke rising from the Pentagon, 13 miles away.
Nev was born in December, 2002, just over a year after the terrorist attacks. Tori was diagnosed with autism the following summer. Her diagnosis was our own private 9/11--we felt exactly the same shock, sadness, anger, and desire to DO SOMETHING. In the fall of 2004, our quest to get Tori the most and best help we could led us to New York City--ultimately into an apartment less than half a mile from Ground Zero.
For almost two years, we passed by the site twice weekly on our way to Tori's OT appointments at the sensory gym in Tribeca. Progress was largely imperceptible then, both at the WTC and in our daughter. But I trusted that they--and we--were doing the groundwork, laying the foundations.
We moved away from New York in the summer of 2006. At that point, only 7 WTC, adjacent to the site, was complete. I wondered if construction on the Freedom Tower would ever begin. I questioned if all the interventions Tori had received had helped her at all. Would she succeed in a mainstreamed kindergarten setting?
Now we're headed back to New York, to our old neighborhood, to an apartment on the 35th floor overlooking Ground Zero. My mom thinks the view is morbid, but I feel hopeful about the redevelopment of the WTC.
Tori just turned nine, and the Freedom Tower just reached the 100 foot mark. It's been a long, arduous, agonizingly slow journey back from a dark place for all of us, but the future looks bright and full of promise.
Rise.
.:.
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