Time Zones

Three hours. That's the time difference between here and New York City. Five years. That's the time difference between here and 2001. Four years is the difference between now and the last time I was in New York City.
When I asked my friend how he felt about going down to visit Ground Zero (ironically it shares the name with a dance club we used to go to in Boulder together), I already knew the answer. He was just blocks from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Like so many people who worked in the financial district, he lost several friends and associates that day. Even better, he knows an even larger group who walked, ran, or were carried away. It's easier to meet survivors.
Back on that summer day, when he asked me what I wanted to do with my family on our one day in Manhattan, I told him I wanted to go down and look at the hole. He shrugged, understanding that my morbid curiosity was a part of that three hour time difference. As I watched the tape delay out on the west coast, hell had opened up back east. I had the vicarious experience, but not the sheer pain of having one's world ripped apart. It was only in the third hour of coverage that it occurred to me that my friend might be somewhere in the midst of all that chaos. That's when everything changed for me. I knew it made no sense to try and call. I knew that he didn't work in the towers. But sometimes he had meetings that took him there. Hopefully not that morning.
He wasn't there. He saw it. He heard it. And it wasn't on tape delay. When I asked him to go back a year later and look with me, into that great big hole. He suggested we take the ferry instead. It turns out he was exactly right. The view from the water was much more dramatic, like a smile missing its two front teeth. In the middle of the world's mightiest skyline there was this great big hole.
As the ferry turned around, we floated back past the Statue of Liberty. I was amazed again at how close everything seemed: the bridges, the buildings, and all those people. We didn't talk about it then. Our kids were up and down the stairs of the ferry, looking at everything and nothing, enjoying one another's company. New York is full of things you've seen in movies and TV, at least that's how I tend to see it. I've seen Ground Zero before and after on big and small screens, and it's still nothing without the context.
Now it's been five years. And three hours.