December 26, 2025

New York is like a giant magnet. I’ve been making pilgrimages to the city for over 40 years now for many different reasons. I had a speaking engagement there in 2018 and took my four-year old daughter and delighted at her constant wide eyes. (Although I had to tell her the bad news that if the Elmo in Times Square asked for a hug, we’d have to call the police.) So when Cozy, now 11, said what she wanted for Christmas was a trip to the Big Apple, I knew what we had to do.

There were some obligatory stops on the four-day stay in Manhattan, including shopping at Macy’s, the top of the Empire State Building, and the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center. But we were staying downtown, just a few blocks from the New York Stock Exchange, so I mustarded up the courage to suggest that we visit the 9/11 memorial. Born in 2014, my sixth-grader had limited knowledge about the event, other than it was a terrorist attack. When I was 11, I didn’t know much about the events of 1951, 13 years before my birth. The Korean War, that was it. I didn’t want to give her a history lesson, I just wanted to convey to her the weight of that day.

So on Tuesday morning, we walked over to the sacred ground as the rain mixed with snow. My first trip to Ground Zero was the summer of 2002, when the dust of the fallen was still drifting in the downtown air. Now, almost a decade and half later, the area has been completely transformed. “FiDi” is bustling under the new World Trade Center, opened the year Cozy was born. I had been to the memorial before, and it features in my 2015 novel, The Dream Police. But now it was all integrated into life in the city, a tourist destination.

I guided her to the places where the twin towers stood, now two deep fountains, ringed by the names of the thousands of people who died on another Tuesday morning. I told Cozy how, in 1987, when I was managing a band on Island Records, I would sit between the two towers and watch the commuters come out of the WTC subway station, work shoes in hand, and go up into the skyscrapers I first saw in the 1976 version of King Kong. Then I started to choke up and had to step back for a second to collect myself.

There’s no way to convey the horror of that day so I just told her a few details. I told her about the people who chose to jump to their death rather than burn to death and the sound of bodies crashing to the ground. I told her about Fight 93 and the passengers who crashed their own plane to stop it from being used as a missile into the Capitol Building. I told her about the hundreds of firefighters who were buried alive trying to rescue those trapped in the towers. And I sobbed. I’m sobbing as I’m writing this.

Since September 11, 2001, two billion people have been born on this planet. To them, 9/11 is a story from history, like Pearl Harbor is to me. Cozy will study in greater detail. I was 37 on that day. Maybe when she’s 37, in 2051, she’ll have something worse than 9/11 to weld her to history. I hope not. But when she does learn more about it, I want her to picture herself in that spot in Manhattan, filled with real people and two holes in the ground. I want her to remember the sound of my voice as it cracked.

I wonder what her perspective on that day will be in 2051.  Will she remember the pointless wars it produced that took so many more lives? Will she remember the hate crimes that spiked after the attack and the Patriot Act that started to roll back our liberties. Or will she tell a story about how a divided nation found something to bring people together? Both can be true but I think the latter is more of the myth we tell ourselves about 9/11.

After the attacks, I had a recurring nightmare about being in the WTC subway station during the attack. The station begins to fill with water from all the broken water mains above and dead bodies float by me as I try to escape. That area is now the futuristic shopping mall called “Oculus.” We both were amazed at the open design with the subway stops adjacent to the shopping area. Cozy and I stopped by the Apple store where I bought a phone case, replacing my nightmare with some well-lit retail therapy.  It felt strangely healing.

She will learn more about that day; the ugly, the bad, and the good. Maybe, at some point, I’ll be ready to visit the museum and I can tell her more stories of that time, again through tears. I have so many memories, but it’s her story to discover now. I’ll tell her how I flew on 9/10 (with a camping knife in my bag) and, after the attacks, how silent the sky was with no planes above. And she can fold the tenor of my voice in with her own role in witnessing the history she’ll live through.