Going Back to Where I'm From

A view, a state, and a motto that helps me hang on all these years after 9/11

I still look for them. They’ve been gone nearly twenty-five years now, but I can’t not look for them. When crossing the George Washington Bridge, my eyes dart down the Hudson River to the great skyscrapers of New York City. Amidst the stalagmites of lower Manhattan, I still search for what used to stand above all else: the Twin Towers.

In my childhood, they stood like some giant milemarkers. They were a little more than halfway between our home then in Virginia and our grandparents outside of Boston. We’d drive up I-95 and, when we were on the bridge, you couldn’t miss ’em. I came to associate their presence with proximity to my greater family.

We moved to Rhode Island a year before 9/11. Seeing grandparents then meant an hour’s drive rather than seven, a drive that didn’t pass through New York. I didn’t see the Twin Towers again until they were spewing smoke on 9/11. I was twelve years old.

Now I’m thirty-seven, with a family of my own. In some strange role reversal, I was driving with my wife and kids from our home in Maryland to Rhode Island recently to see our children’s grandparents. We passed through New York to do so.

If the memory of the Twin Towers hangs like a phantom over that portion of the drive for me, the still-standing markers of my childhood provide a welcome tangibility to the memories I associate with them.

Like Hill-Top Creamery on Post Road in East Greenwich, where I had gallons of ice cream as a kid. Despite the new ownership, they still have Kay’s Famous Torch, that triple-decker of cones and soft-serve ice cream that is a distant echo of Lady Liberty’s own light. Further up the road is Del’s Lemonade, as much a Rhode Island staple as coffee milk - and better tasting. It’s frozen lemonade with bits of real lemon in it, served without a straw.

There’s Showcase Cinemas on Quaker Lane, where my older brother talked me out of a military academy with a very simple assertion: You already make your bed. Or the grocery store across the street, Dave’s Marketplace, where I had my first job stocking shelves in the produce department.

There’s the Stop & Shop up the road where, unemployed after graduating college, I ran into a family friend. In the most Rhode Island of scenes, he knew a guy who knew a guy. I got in touch with that guy, had a conversation with him, which led to a series of interviews, which led to a job that would find me working in Pakistan for a crisis response management company. That single interaction led me down a life-changing road out of Rhode Island with implications I couldn’t possibly understand at the time.

There’s also Beavertail State Park in Jamestown. It’s a place of refuge for me, like a natural charging station. I’ve gone back there more times than I can remember, with the distinct memory of going there the evening before I left for a semester abroad in Egypt, itself an outgrowth of the Arabic I studied as a direct consequence of 9/11.

I’ve walked the grounds there countless times, always finding some solace in the meeting of land and sea. The windier the better, the more alive I feel. Whenever I’m there, I always clamber down the rocks and dip my hand into the sea. It’s like some holy water blessed by nature and this place a cathedral in situ.

Now new memories emerge for the presence of my children, of my wife, of my own family. New memories at Hill-Top, new memories with a Del’s in hand, new memories at Beavertail. These new experiences enliven these places for me in more ways than I could imagine. Prior joy associated with places like these pales in comparison to this newfound joy in this new station in life. What came before and what might come next is supplanted by the potent happiness of the moment.

So it was on our drive home, crossing over the GW Bridge on the upper level, with my wife next to me and our kids in the back. As the driver focused on the road, I didn’t have the unbroken view of the city I used to when I was a kid sitting in the backseat.

But I didn’t need it, either.

There’s growth in moving on. It’s not about moving on from the memory, but about moving on from the hold that the memory has on you.

This leads me back to one final note about Rhode Island: its flag.

Against a white background is centered a golden anchor, enwreathed in thirteen stars. (Rhode Island was, after all, one of the original Thirteen Colonies.) Beneath the anchor, a blue ribbon proclaims the state’s motto: HOPE.

The cynics are quick to say that “Hope is not a strategy.” This is true.

But it was never a strategy in the first place.

Hope is an ideal, a characteristic, a principle that animates so much else of what we strive for as individuals. There is no faith without hope, no goodness without hope, no light in the world without it. There is no belief in moving on while never forgetting without the hope that we can do so.

That’s the hope I hang on to.

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Thank you for reading my latest installment of “25 Weeks to 25 Years,” a 25 week series leading up to the 25th anniversary of 9/11 later this year.

Prior installments include:

July 17: Libraries and Terrorism

July 10: Happy Birthday, Charles Laurencin

July 3: An Airshow and Maryland’s 9/11 Rolling Memorial

June 26: Born on 9/11

June 19: Pakistan, Pakistanis, and Pakistani

June 12: Three Months Before 9/11

June 5: D-Day, Pearl Harbor, 9/11

May 29: Pop, The Discoverers, and a Cape You’ve Never Heard Of

May 22: Memory Palace and Four Freedoms

May 15: McCullough and Memory

May 8: Dostoevsky and the Legacy of 9/11

May 1: On the Road to bin Laden’s House

April 24: Here Comes the Hard Part

April 17: The Boston Marathon and the BPL

April 10: A Pilgrimage to Ground Zero

April 3: The Other Twin Towers

March 27: 47 Years On From the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty

March 20: The Iraq War - 23 Years Later

March 17: 25 Weeks to 25 Years