My personal World Trade Center

I couldn't eat all day last Tuesday, my body ached. I felt as if beaten by a shovel.\nThe six years I lived in New York City, I count among my happiest and most interesting. I was the practice administrator for an orthodontist in Brooklyn Heights, a beautiful neighborhood hugging the East River, one stop into the borough of Brooklyn on the 2 or 3 line from Wall Street. My lunch hour during good weather was usually spent on the Promenade, an urban plaza perched above the non-stop roar of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. There, with French Roast and the best deli sandwiches in the world, the World Trade Center dominated the view center, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island off to the left, and the Empire State Building visible past the Brooklyn Bridge. I can't think of another place in the city to see so much and move so little.\nTed, my orthodontic boss, maintained a city office in the World Trade Center complex, an office-sharing arrangement with a large dental practice. He'd pester me to go with him on office days, but my work focused on the office in Brooklyn -- I usually didn't go. Besides, one lunch hour in the WTC left me wretched on bad cart vendor sushi -- a caveat emptor I should have taken seriously.\nI struggled Tuesday to remember who among our patients worked in or near the towers, but it's been so long now -- five years -- from the time I worked in the city. We knew so many people who worked in that area, but just as you know others in your neighborhood, or just as you know patients or customers. Their names on Tuesday escaped me, but hurt just the same. Six degrees might separate us physically, but not psychologically: we are all New Yorkers -- I certainly am.\nI've rarely grieved as hard over my own terrorist, AIDS, as I did Tuesday. Lacking any real ability to help on the scene, I can't even help here -- I can no longer give blood, and haven't since my first suspicions of possible exposure in the early 1980s. In high school, I was a blood drive volunteer for three years, setting up, tearing down, and of course, giving of my AB positive stock. My mother and I share that blood type, so I wanted to keep the levels up.\nIf you are reading this, and can give blood, please do that -- but not just now, and not just for New York City, but for good, for as long as you are able. Blood supplies have teetered on the edge of the absurd since the beginning of the HIV epidemic in the United States. Healthy people have stayed away, and the habit of giving is lost among many young people. A blood drive was a big event in my high school days -- make it one again.\nChuck and I were in New York a couple of weeks ago, just for a few days. We visited our favorite store, Century 21, right across from the WTC Complex -- the home of many great shoe purchases. We purchased two waters on the corner, by the St. Paul Burying Ground; saw the typical thousands there on a sunny Tuesday mid-morning in Lower Manhattan. God, we love The City. We grieve for them.