The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A lesson in valuing every story
I moved back to New York on Sept. 5, 2001, a few weeks before I was scheduled to start my first job as a full-time reporter.
I was anxious, according to my journal entries at the time. I didn’t like the feeling of being unsettled. I wondered what my new assignment would be at the newspaper and I was ready to get started.
A week later, the deadliest terrorist attacks in the history of this country would take place miles from where I was installed in temporary housing, and suddenly my inner turmoil seemed a lot less pressing.
This was my second time living in New York after a yearlong detour to the West Coast. It was cold that year and on Sept. 11, I woke up obsessed with returning the rental car I had been using since my arrival. When I finally connected with a representative on the phone, she sounded harried.
“I wouldn’t worry about it with everything going on,” she said.
I turned on the television just in time to see United Airlines Flight 175 crash into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. I jumped in the rental car and drove to the office, where I spent the day typing firsthand accounts of reporters who were close to the scene.
I wasn’t officially “working,” none of my new employee paperwork had been processed, but at that moment, I couldn’t imagine not working.
Every journalist, every person, remembers 9/11.
It is etched in our collective memory, and for so many of us, it became a point of change.
For me, the experience altered my career path in ways that would only become clear much later. I had always wanted to tell stories about interesting and remarkable people, but after spending the next few months writing
profiles of the men and women who perished in the tragedy, I emerged with a different understanding of exactly what constitutes a remarkable life.
On Sept. 12, my first assignment was to interview passengers riding the train from Long Island into Manhattan. Most of them were in shock or afraid as they got their first glimpse of the post-9/11 skyline. They felt empty. They didn’t know what to expect.
The subways could not pass Times Square so I exited the station and did something I had never done before and have never been able to do since. I stood in the middle of the street at the intersection of Seventh Avenue, 42nd Street and Broadway, I closed my eyes and I listened. I vowed to use whatever talents I possessed as a writer to help people who were suffering the most.
The next story I wrote was about Ira Zaslow, a financial analyst from Lehman Brothers whose family spent the High Holy Days hoping for his return. It was the most somber Rosh Hashana in recent memory, said a local rabbi, but Zaslow’s family vowed to observe with turkey, brisket and puddings in the freezer, a home in perfect order, an empty setting at the table and prayers that Zaslow would return home safely.
That was the first of many stories I would write about people who went off to work on a regular day that soon turned tragic.
Twenty years later, I remember so many of them — Harold Lizcano, a newlywed who wooed his wife by
bringing her a rose every day at lunch; Elizabeth Farmer, an underappreciated jazz singer who never gave up on her dreams; and Myrna Yaskulka, a clotheshorse whose collection of 100 pairs of sunglasses was legendary.
Writing those stories taught me so many important lessons about journalism and about life. I had started my career wanting to write stories about the famous or the infamous, but my experience during 9/11 would leave me with the well-intentioned belief that I can write a compelling story about anyone.
I learned to never devalue the story of another human being. I learned to look for the quirks and habits that make each of us unique.
Spending time with so many people in such a deep moment of grief was a reminder that no matter how different we are on the outside, on the inside we want for ourselves and those closest to us to live a life with meaning, to connect with others and to be remembered and regarded with love.