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Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 14:28:49 -0400
From: Ken Ficara
Subject: Checking in

I'm OK, I guess. I work (worked) in the World Financial Center,
across the street from WFC, but I was on my way to our NJ offices
when the planes hit, and I turned around and went home. Most of my
colleagues are accounted, but some friends and fellow musicians who
live/work in the area haven't been heard from.

I was so lucky to not have been downtown yesterday and I cannot stop
thinking about all the people who weren't that lucky and will never
go to work again. And friends who will not be able to go back to
their homes for God knows how long, others who are still agonizing
waiting to hear about the fate of family members. I was glad to see
New Yorkers like Wade checking in but I would love to hear from more
of my NYC musician and other friends.

The world has changed in big and little ways. I can't believe that
the place I walked through to go to work every day is no more. The
firefighters at the Liberty Street firehouse that I said hi to every
morning are probably all dead. I'm sure as always they were the first
to respond. So many times they would race the equipment across the
street to respond to a false alarm or a smoke condition, and you'd
see them outside around the rig, taking pains to reassure attractive
young female tourists. Muhammad from whom I would buy my morning
banana, who was there at 5:30 every morning hauling his cart off the
truck and unpacking the fruit from boxes. Everybody, everything.

The World Trade Center was not a particularly beautiful public space.
In fact, it always seemed to me ugly and depressing. But it was part
of my hometown. I remember my father taking me to see the huge hole
in the ground -- the dirt from which forms the landfill on which my
office is built -- and holding me up to the hole in the fence to
watch the bulldozers working inside. This summer I ate lunch sitting
on a bench in the WTC plaza listening to the wonderful Guy Davis play
a great two hour set on a beautiful day. Lucy Kaplansky did a
wonderful evening set there, and I met my parents only a week or two
ago for John Gorka's concert, although I was too tired -- from work
stresses that mean nothing nothing NOTHING now -- to stay for the
show. I wish I'd known it would be the last music I'd ever have the
opportunity to see there.

The plaza was an ugly forbidding concrete slab, hot as hell in the
summer, and they would pipe in this horrible muzak through outdoor
speakers all day and into the evening. I used to walk across it on my
way to work, or on a lunchtime run to Borders (gone now) or J&R
Music, and grind my teeth at the muzak, and wish the plaza was
greener and less ugly. But I'd give anything to sit on one of those
concrete benches next to the tourists and listen to that muzak again.

Ken
- --
=====================================================================Ken Ficara k~icara.net