Home

Things We Like

Fertility Center

Experts

Columns & Essays

Feature Articles

Community

I bought them at the World Trade Center.

July of last year, my husband and I were in New York City for a week’s vacation. The whole thing was a fluke, really. He had never really wanted to go. I had lived in the city for several years and always wanted to bring him back with me. He finally decided it wouldn’t be all bad. We put our name on a list with our timeshare, and were told our chances were very slim. Several weeks later we got a call saying we were “in.”

It was such a strange twist of fate that I wondered why I was supposed to go to NYC. I planned on catching up with several old friends – was that it? I had left under stressful personal circumstances (pregnant and single) and would be returning pregnant and married; was there some healing or catharsis in store for me? We must have lucked out on the timeshare for a reason. I waited expectantly for some sort of “aha” realization to present itself to me.

The week started out beautifully. The weather was great. Even though I was seven months pregnant along, we managed to make it to most of the places we had planned.

We bought a CityPass, a tourist thingy with tickets to several NYC attractions. The pass made the price per attraction quite a bit less expensive than buying tickets individually, and it contained many of the things we planned on visiting anyway: Intrepid Sea/Air/Space Museum, Guggenhiem, Museum of Modern Art. And the observatory at the World Trade Center.

The morning of our WTC visit we had scheduled a tour on the floor of the stock exchange. This was more than the regular tour that just overlooks the place; we were going to be on the actual “floor.” We both were working at on online brokerage firm at the time, and my husband used some of his connections to arrange the tour. There’s a dress code for the floor of the exchange, so my husband was in a black suit and I was in a gray pantsuit, and both of us chose sensible shoes.

Of course, sensible in Nebraska, land of the parking lot situated not more than 50 feet from any building entrance, is a little different from sensible in Manhattan, land of the one-mile hike just to get to the subway.

I was a little disoriented when we got off at the WTC stop. I normally would hit Wall Street from the south, heading up on Broadway from Battery Park, just having taken my guests on the first boat of the day over to the Statue of Liberty. (The first boat is the only way to go. The lines are short and you can get out of there in an hour and a half.) So heading toward Wall Street from the west got me a little mixed up. When I looked up the street and saw City Hall several blocks up, I knew we had to head further south.

We arrived a little late. Of course, of all the days during our trip, this one ended up being one of the hottest, so we were glowing and aching. Our tour guide was great, having done a lot of technology work for the exchange he explained some of the whizbangs and gadgetry that both of us are interested in. He walked a little fast, and my feet were already sore (in my sensible shoes), but we enjoyed the tour.

Leaving the exchange, we decided it wasn’t worth traveling back uptown to change clothes since we had our already-purchased WTC observatory tickets with us. So we headed over. Up Wall Street, through the Trinity Church cemetery, and over to the towers.

By the time we got there in our sensible shoes, we both needed to sit down. We both gazed longingly at the New Balance store in the mall on the lower level and headed straight in.

We dropped more money than we had planned on even more sensible shoes, but we could then easily stand the hour wait in line to go up to the observatory. The woman who took the tourist picture (that she would try to sell to us later) before we got into the cattle-corralled line told me I could sneak up to the front (being pregnant and all), but not wanting to use my physical state as an excuse to wimp out, I waited with the rest of the crowd.

The long line surprised me. The observatory at WTC never struck me as much of an attraction. I always preferred the view from the Empire State Building. The building is so much more historic, and being in the center of town as the sun goes down and the city lights go up is pretty cool. The main reason we went to the World Trade Center was because my husband had never been, and we had those tickets.

We finally got to the top. I needed the ladies room (a horrible cliché, but true). I remember it was dirty. Lots of paper towels and water on the floor. We wandered around for quite awhile checking out the view from all sides. I was tempted to get a book at one of the gift stands. Vertical Spaces, I think it was called. All the pictures were long and narrow. I had a queer feeling that if I didn’t get it, I would regret it, but I just couldn’t see buying it. I had no room in my house for any more books.

We looked out all sides of the building, and talked to some other tourists from the Midwest. When we came down we didn’t buy our picture. I was seldom happy with how I looked pregnant, and then with the dress and New Balance shoes, well, I just couldn’t see paying for that image.

Fast forward two months, and I’m sitting in the break room at work, watching smoke plume out of the towers. I felt like I was the only one in the room who realized that the big billow of ash was actually the first tower collapsing – the only one who realized that the second tower collapsing was not a replay of the first.

As I watched, I wondered about the sales person who sold us our shoes. Did he get out? I thought about the tourists in the cattle corrals – they could have been me (I discovered later that the attacks happened before visiting hours at the tower). We hadn’t ended up going to eat at Windows on the World. Now we never will.

So now I have these shoes – my World Trade Center shoes. Every time I put them on I think, “I got these at the World Trade Center.” Thinking about our trip, and then the attacks, strange questions float through my brain. What happened to the person behind the booth selling the Vertical Spaces book. Did she get out? Was she there, Windexing the display cabinets, when it happened? Would I be able to find the book somewhere else? What happened to the holders of the CityPass who never got to go up in the tower? Did they get a refund? How long did it take to get those pass booklets remade?

I want to save the shoes and try not to wear them out, but that seems a little odd. Even so, I have relegated them to indoor workout shoes. Why I worry about holding on to them is beyond me; I still have running shoes from when I lived there over six years ago. God, has it been that long? Shoes that have my old name and my old address written on them, in case something horrible happened to me (“Mom, you know I couldn’t have been the unidentified woman found in the park – my name is in my shoes!”). Shoes that still have some Central Park dirt on them. Shoes that have many NYC miles pounded into them.

My World Trade Center shoes have very few Manhattan miles. They’re mostly gym miles and standing-in-place aerobics miles. I’m sure there’s still a little NYC dirt, but probably not much.

I never did have that “aha.” Instead of some lightening bolt realization, it has been more of a slowly dawning one that isn’t cosmic or profound. I went back to show my husband some of my past. I wanted him to understand why I love my New York history, despite some of the negative experiences, and why I’m saddened that I don’t feel much like a New Yorker anymore. I had a chance to re-establish some sort of connection to that city, however tiny. Although the events of September 11th may have struck me more profoundly because I had made that trip only a few weeks before, I have no regrets.

And now we both feel a little more connected, to the people, to the city, to the events, even if it is just through a pair of shoes.