My 9/11 Socks

I'm one of those men who have a hundred pairs of socks in the sock drawer, some new, some old, most in various states of disrepair. Most men don't spend more than two seconds thinking about holes in their socks as they put them on… they call them their "Sunday Socks" and they move on because no one’s going to see them through their shoes. When I open my sock drawer, I wonder if the pair I take out is one of my 9/11 socks, and if it is possible that I still have any more of them.

On Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, I was living with my girlfriend in Brooklyn. After three years, my time in NYC was almost done. My relationship was failing, and so was I, for a variety of reasons. Honestly, I'd pretty much given up on everything. I had a job interview at the Museum of Natural History scheduled for 11:30, if I remember correctly, but I wasn't in a rush to get there.

The phone rang, and I sluggishly answered it. It was my girlfriend calling from work. She told me to turn the TV on. One button-click of the remote and everything in existence changed. There it was on the screen, five feet away, as if it were happening in another world, but when I lowered the volume, I realized the sounds from just outside the window were just like what was on TV. Sirens everywhere. Not a single siren, but layers of them from emergency vehicles darting into Manhattan.

I sat down on the couch, moments after the second plane hit, and tried to call my parents in New Hampshire. All circuits were busy. I tried again, and again, and again. Finally, they managed to get through to me, and not a moment after they did, the image on the TV screen showed something none of us will ever forget. Something impossible. The optical illusion – it must be – that there was now only one tower, a raging pillar of grey dust shadowing it. "One of the towers just collapsed," my dad said. I didn’t believe him.

I had visited Windows on the World at the top of the WTC several times… how could one's mind actually believe that it and the nearly quarter mile of building beneath it be gone? With how many human lives?

Shortly thereafter I stepped outside. There was little activity at the firehouse across the street. Engine 226, if memory serves me. The garage door was open, and there was no truck inside. Then my eyes peered upward. There are several indelible images from that day that New Yorkers saw which the rest of America couldn't see on TV. The sky was one. Above Brooklyn was an impossibly giant black streak, with bands of brilliant azure on both sides. Sooty, billowing blackness cutting through the purity of crystal blue. The gorgeous late summer sky was slit by a choking band of darkness pouring from The Battery.

That night, the fire truck from Engine 226 returned. It was still drivable, but terribly battered and caked in a dense gray ash. The men who rode the truck into Manhattan earlier that morning did not accompany it. Then the wives of the missing firemen began arriving, going inside the station for a vigil that really wouldn’t ever end. I closed my eyes and placed my hand on my heart, praying a wordless prayer, swallowing hard, and I turned away, heartbroken, furious, completely unable to help. Passing by the truck in a daze, I ran my finger through the ash, creating a channel of red paint peeking through the powder. I wondered if maybe I should collect a thimbleful of it, so that I would always have something real to show my children in the future, something real to show the people who weren't in NYC that day. Then it occurred to me that the ash wasn’t just pulverized concrete and consumed paper. Everything that was in the World Trade Center when it came down was in that ash. Instantly I was disgusted with myself that I'd considered that notion, and I found myself tearfully apologizing to the truck and to the ash.

The first tributes of flowers, candles, pictures, flags, and stuffed animals were laid on the ground there, near the garage door. By the time we all went back inside to watch more news coverage, 9/11 the day was over.

Indulge me for a moment and let me take you a little further back in time. More than a year earlier, in 2000, on that same street, the five-story apartment complex to the left of my girlfriend's building collapsed. She was coming home walking from the bus stop from work, and a matter of meters away, "the whole building just came down." There had been a gas leak. For the next few weeks, she couldn't stay in or even access her apartment while crews assessed the structural integrity of the building. Firemen and engineers used her windows to get in and out of the structure. When it was finally deemed safe, she returned to her home to find a note on her dining table. One of the firefighters from a ladder house in Brooklyn -- the number of which I have unfortunately forgotten – had written "we're sorry for drinking your soda - we were so thirsty! Thank you." There was a five-dollar bill on the note. The note meant the world to her. She was moved to write a letter to one of the NYC newspapers to express her warm wishes for the firefighters and tell them publicly that she wished she'd had more soda for them.

It was a year later, the week following 9/11/2001, when we baked brownies and made sandwiches for the firefighters across the street. We made trays of each, reserving half for a ladder company about a mile or so away. I can't remember how many men the ladder company had lost on 9/11, but the station across the street lost three men plus one other hero from a different station who had just gone off-duty but still jumped on the truck when the bells called for help. My girlfriend and I as well as her sister walked across the street to that garage door which was still open. The memorial of flowers, notes, and teddy bears was now visible from the other end of State Street.

We were greeted by two firemen, one of them eyeballing our fragrant foil trays, and asked, "brownies?" We could barely respond before ten firefighters joined us in the garage, shaking our hands, welcoming us in, asking us if we'd like some coffee. It was good to hear them laugh and make yummy noises, PBJ sandwiches in one hand, brownies in the other. We told them we needed to deliver the other sandwiches and brownies to the ladder company, and one of the firemen quickly offered a ride. "I’m going past there anyway,” he explained, “and those guys don't get many visitors." We gratefully accepted.

Located in an industrial area, we saw immediately that the fireman was right about the ladder house not getting many visitors. The memorial in front of their door was one spent candle and two small bunches of withered flowers. I felt heartsick.

The kind fireman from 226 who drove us there asked us to wait for a moment so that he could go in and "introduce” us. We were nervous, but when the garage door opened, there were more than a half-dozen enthusiastic men standing there to invite us in. The nervousness disappeared. We felt like family, not strangers. At an open area outside of their kitchen, a semi-circle of seven or eight more men greeted us, voices bright as their expressions. We handed them the tray of sandwiches and then the tray of brownies. I will never forget the face of the man who accepted the brownies: he looked up and exclaimed, “they're still warm!" The happy tone of his voice and the childlike spark in his eyes remain my favorite indelible image.

For those moments the dark times were dismissed. We were surrounded by grown firemen with chocolate smeared on their faces, steaming cups of coffee in their hands, struggling to talk and laugh and chew brownies all at once. Then my girlfriend mentions her experience the year before, that after the collapse of the apartment building on State Street, a fireman had left five dollars on her table for drinking a soda from her refrigerator. One of the firefighters beamed. "Wait! That was you?!" I’ve never seen as many jaws drop, all in nearly perfect synchrony. Bursts of laughter echoed in the garage, and one of the men darted to a large corkboard on a wall nearby and unpinned a slightly yellowed strip of paper from it.

It was a clipping of the letter that she had written to the newspaper.

Still catching their breath from laughter, they informed us that the letter had almost gotten the whole company in trouble… and then there was another peal of laughter. Then one man spoke of how great it was to read that letter in the paper. It was shared and saved, and it meant a great deal to all of them.

Several brownies and sandwiches later, we thanked them and told them we didn't want to take up any more of their time. Instantaneously, we received offers of bottled water to take home with us. When we politely declined, they explained that they had more bottled water than they could ever drink, but we again thanked them and declined. "Would you like any socks? We have a million pairs of socks!" The two young ladies with me again declined, but I hesitated, and the man who offered the socks noticed this. I could see his eyes widening with anticipation. He was legitimately excited that I had hesitated.

"You know,” I said, now looking directly at that man, “I could... I could actually really use some socks." I know I embarrassed the ladies, but the faces of the firemen brightened as if someone had just said "drinks are on the house!"

"You want some socks?" one of them beamed, "hey, you come with me! I'll set you up with some socks!" Again, the men laughed in celebration, clearly sharing an inside joke with the punchline looming. Smiling curiously, we followed a team of fireman and another team followed us. We came to what looked like a closet, but when it was opened, we beheld a large storage room. It was packed from back to front, top to bottom with towers of bottled water cases and stacks of unopened boxes of white tube socks. Nothing else.

After watching so many hours of news coverage, it hadn’t occurred to me that people were responding to all the broadcasted requests from firefighters working at what was now being called "Ground Zero." All the major and local stations were relaying the requests for two things specifically that were needed: bottled water and clean socks. Before us, in this storage room, was but a small sample of the magnitude of the response. New Yorkers heard the requests, and immediately emptied the stores of New York City of all their supplies of bottled water and tube socks. Americans everywhere did. The sight of such stockpiles as in this closet was apparently the same as in just about every firehouse in the city. "If a fireman had been on TV asking for something to read instead of socks and water,” the fireman said, “then every firehouse in the five boroughs would have had more books than The Library of Congress. Within hours."

A tall, smiling fireman handed me two big packages of tube socks. We had to insist that they not give us more, one of the girls explaining that “our apartments are only so big!"

All these years later, I am married, a father, and I again live in my home state of New Hampshire. Life in Brooklyn is a distant memory. There are many terrible sights and memories of 9/11, and whenever I think of that day, I, like millions of others, pray for those who perished, those who lost a loved one or loved ones, those who lost their best friends. I pray for those men and women, those policemen and firefighters, who never did come home. And I pray for those men who welcomed us at that ladder station in Brooklyn for giving me indelible images of joy, for sharing their grace, for their gift of kindness and human brotherhood. They shared the warmest traits of humankind in response to others showing us the very worst traits of the same.

Twenty years later, I still picture their faces bidding us farewell as we left that day, those men gave so much and who lost so much. And when we came to say thank you, all they wanted to do was give more. We shouldn’t be surprised. They’re firefighters. That’s what they do.

Most men don't think twice about their socks, but every time I open my sock drawer, I wonder if one of those pairs are 9/11 socks, if it is possible for me to still have any.

I sure hope so.