Chapter Twelve
After recording all the songs for Love Makes the World, Humberto did a final mix on all the tracks, then we worked on a sequence and created a digital master. I had written the title song with Sam Hollander and Dave Schommer, then collectively known as PopRox. I loved the song then, and I still enjoy performing it. The lyric is a positive message with a snippet of attitude and a hint of a love story. The melody has a sexy groove, a syncopated rhythm, and more than a hint of an urban arrangement. “Love Makes the World” is the first track on the CD, followed by the equally positive “You Can Do Anything,” written by Carole Bayer Sager, Kenny Edmonds (Babyface), and me.
Lorna helped me form a new label, which I named with an anagram of Carole King: Rockingale Records. Our scheduled release date for both the album and the single was September 11, 2001.
I was in an apartment building more than a hundred blocks north of the World Trade Center when I turned on the TV that morning. When NY1, New York’s news channel, came on, I noted the time in the little square on the screen with the time and temperature. It said 9:02. With my mind on other things, I barely registered the import of what the anchor was saying—something about a plane having crashed into a building. I assumed they meant something like a Cessna until they showed the silhouette of the twin towers with smoke coming out of one of the towers. The question “How could a small plane have caused all that smoke?” was just beginning to form in my mind when the digital clock on the nightstand changed to 9:03. I watched in disbelief as the second plane hit and a fireball appeared on the screen. By 9:04 smoke was billowing from both buildings and flames were spreading rapidly.
Clicking to other channels, I saw similar live shots of the Trade Center interspersed with images of journalists trying to understand and explain what was happening. Personal emotions were overcoming the reporters’ usual composure as each correspondent endeavored to interpret the events unfolding in real time. Through a south-facing window I could see smoke blackening a corner of the crystal blue sky. At 9:59, when the South Tower collapsed, my first thought was that someone had placed a bomb in the building with a timer set to go off an hour after the plane hit. The images on the TV showed that people were running now, with papers that had been important the day before wafting down all around them. The morning blue sky of daylight downtown was rapidly giving way to the darkness of ash turning everything black. I don’t remember if I saw images of people jumping out of the buildings that day, but it was as if I were watching the most horrific disaster movie ever made, except that it was happening to real people. At 10:28, the North Tower collapsed. It was almost as if a movie producer had said, “Make it even more horrific!” When I heard that a third plane had hit the Pentagon, I thought, Holy shit! They’re going to destroy every symbolic building in America. Then, when a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania, I was convinced that humanity was doomed. I didn’t think it was God visiting his or her wrath on humankind, nor did I think it an act of nature. Those acts of destruction were too closely timed. They had to have been planned by human beings trying to wreak as much havoc and create as much fear as possible. My imagination ran wild as I envisioned potential targets all around the United States being blown up in one terrifying act of destruction after another. But there would be no more planes that day.
Remarkably, my landline was still working. Molly, now living in Brooklyn, would have been on her way to work near Grand Central Station when the planes hit. She would normally have taken a different subway line than the one that passed under the Trade Center, but I became anxious when I couldn’t reach her. I left a message on her mobile and work voicemails and didn’t stop worrying until she called me back. Though Molly was an exceptionally competent young woman who had heard the news and knew exactly what to do, I couldn’t stop myself from shifting into Jewish-mother command voice.
“Molly. Walk north and keep walking till you get here!”
“Mom. I know.”
All transportation in the city had been suspended. My daughter became part of a massive movement of people traveling north on foot. It took her half an hour to get to my apartment. We joined neighbors in lining up at a nearby hospital to donate blood that, sadly, would never be needed by the victims. The next morning Molly went home to Brooklyn and I began making calls to see how I could help.
It seemed that everyone in New York who wasn’t looking for a loved one or working at an essential job was either already helping in the rescue effort or trying to find a way to help. But New Yorkers had organized themselves so efficiently to get food, water, and clean clothing to rescue workers that we were told additional assistance would put well-meaning people in the way. In between calls, the phone rang. It was my friend Carolyn Maloney, U.S. congresswoman from New York’s 14th District, calling to ask if I would accompany her on rounds while she answered questions and tried to bring comfort to families with a missing loved one. There was little that Carolyn or I or anyone else could do, but family members wanted someone in authority to hear their story, tell them what was being done to find their family member, and join them in praying that their loved one had somehow escaped and wasn’t calling home only because she or he was wandering around the city in a temporary state of amnesia.
Seeing the attacks and the aftereffects of those acts that had been carried out by what we later learned were nineteen human beings with the deliberate intention of hurting as many Americans as possible and disrupting the economic and social fabric of the Western world, it was difficult for me to keep from sinking into despair. I redirected that feeling by resolving to drive myself harder to be a good person and hold on to my belief that love makes the world… what? Go around? A better place? Or, perhaps, simply tolerable.
Some people reacted to the attacks with fear and anger. Others responded with an unprecedented outpouring of love. I saw the latter response on the streets of New York in the days after September 11. I saw it in the selflessness of the first responders and the tireless efforts of the rescue workers. I saw it in the generosity and support of people from every walk of life, from every corner of America, and from countries around the world. And I heard the same heartfelt message of solidarity repeated over and over again by people with dissimilar political views:
“Today we are all New Yorkers.”
Unfortunately the camaraderie didn’t last. People with opposing political views moved apart to stand on opposite sides of a seemingly impassable divide. Fear and anger began to grow along with a sense of hopelessness among those of us who didn’t want to live under that kind of emotional siege. Subsequent efforts to obtain funding for medical services for the first responders and rescue workers who had been digging through the pile in the weeks and months after the attack were met with an appalling level of resistance by enough senators and members of Congress to keep them from getting necessary care for their damaged lungs. Solidarity had given way to, “Yes, I know, we were all New Yorkers, but that was yesterday. Today we have a different agenda.”
With so many things out of my control, one thought brought comfort: when in doubt, give back.