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...moved to New York on Sept. 1, 2001. I had lived abroad beforeâ????well, for most of my life: New York, London, Pittsburgh, Montreal, and back again to New York. I had always considered myself American. At least, I thought I was American, even though I bore unmistakable signs of an expatriate. I didnâ????t know any of the state capitals. Sometimes, when I wasnâ????t careful, I called my mother...
...week into school, in the ninth grade homeroom, my chorus teacher said, "A plane has hit one of the Twin Towers." She cried. My classmates and I stood there, tried to understand. I walked home after school, right down Madison Avenue. There were no cars in the streetâ????no taxis, even. The sky was blue and brilliant, but thick with smoke. There was dust, too, on sidewalks, and sheets of paper in gutters...
...continually defined by war: from a colony to a united states, from a house divided to a union, from a country to a world power. I choose to study the history and literature of war because I know we can find, there, some fundamental aspects of our nationâ????s character. War, I believe, is an act of self-definition. It reveals not only what a country is, but also what it hopes to be. I learned this in classâ????in "The American Revolution," "The American Civil War," "Art and Thought of the Cold...
After 9/11, my father quit his job at an airplane company in Montreal, and my mother started a job at an off-Broadway theater in New Yorkâ????a few blocks north of Ground Zero. The first play she produced there, "The Guys" by Anne Nelson, was about a journalist who helped a fire captain write eulogies for men lost in the North and South Towers...
...play too many times. These are the lines I remember: "This is my city, too," the journalist says. "I canâ????t just watch it on TV. I want to do something. But this is all I know how to do. Words. I canâ????t think of anything else." The fire captain says, "Thatâ????s okay. Theyâ????re your tools...