Voices of the Past
Joshua Wilson: Do you remember…where you where? What you were doing when you found out about the attacks? What your first thoughts were? What you were feeling at the time?
Father Brown: Yeah I do. It was…it was like…like around somewhere between nine, ten in the morning and I was driving my car down Main Street somewhere between…oh I don’t know, somewhere between…uh…the old Clarkson buildings and the police station. I heard on the radio, I think I was just going through the light there…or something…uh…at the fire station…I mean that’s how vivid it is. Uh I’d heard a plane had flown into the uh, one of the towers. And, you know, my initial thought was “oh golly.” You know, some small plane accidentally flew into [laughter] you know, flew into the building. Back in the ‘40s or ‘30s or something some plane flew into the…into the uh…Empire State Building. I had no idea it was a giant airliner that was an intentional act of terrorism. A---------nd um then I guess I must have heard somewhere along…I don’t know, not that it’s a little dim…but…but I um…about half an hour, forty minutes later I talked to Starr on the phone or something, my wife Starr. And she said another plane had flow into the other tower, and the towers were on fire, and then next thing I know one of the buildings had gone down…and I was just, you know, floored because um it was just so, it was so surreal. Living in New York City those, those twin towers were kind of always visible at the bottom of the island, you know, it was almost as if they were the pillars that held the sky up kind of thing. They had that sort of permanence about them. My wife used to work down there, not in one of the tall towers, but in one of the buildings next door.
You know, I’ve been up there any number of times. And…and…and uh, so it was you know, it was not where I was living at the time but it was very much a part of my world and it had such a fixity. And so the whole thing was so…um so surreal, my sort of initial, initial response and um…And I don’t quite remember when it was determined who did it or how it happened. But the next two months were very, the next week, particularly the next couple weeks were very, had an intensity to them. I…I eventually saw the imagery, we don’t have a TV at home and there wasn’t as much kind of video streaming on the internet back then that there is now. But somehow I saw those, maybe it was the neighbor across the street. I just watched the loops again and again of the buildings fall…it was astonishing. But it really affected my kids, I think that was one my strongest impressions: that they were shocked by it. They had some sense that that was their home, particularly my daughter, Amelia. And every night for six weeks in the middle of the night they would wake up…it was very disturbing to them. Starr told me that, the other day, she reminded me that Amelia had said, “does this mean we have a world war?” And uh, so that, you know my children’s anxiety was something that was very much, very much a part of my memory.
We uh, we immediately started having special services…uh you know, Anglicans work everything out liturgically [laughter]. And so we had communion services pretty much every evening. And I remember one of my strongest members, this fellow came to my um, my office one day. He was a very prominent member of the community, in his 40s, very smart. Very, very liberal politically and theologically and often upset with me that I was a little more conservative theologically then he wanted me to be. But he came in, he says, “I’m angry. I’m tired of hearing you talk about forgiveness.” [laughter] You know he just wanted to go get them you know, it was such a funny, such a reverse of roles you know. You know, he always thought I was a little right wing and all of a sudden he was like the militarist, he was just working out his own feelings. And I wasn’t saying you know let bygones be bygones, but I was saying we have enemies but doesn’t Jesus tell us to do something in response to it. We have to deal with this in a way that’s Christian.
