Ringing the flag down
Likely like most places today, people were talking at work about where they had been when they heard the news.
Most had been on their way into work at the old newspaper building. One saw the plane thunder over his car. One, in his car, heard a radio report in the thick of things that said smoke was coming from the paper building. He said he doubted the report, but when he crested Wilson Boulevard he understood it. Coming in from Virginia, looking southeast and down into Rosslyn's office canyon, just over the Potomac from Washington, the paper building and its twin corporate tower were just north of the Iwo Jima, just north of Arlington Cemetery, just north of the Pentagon. With the way the towers twisted, aligning themselves with the river bend, the smoke was right behind them.
I hadn't realized until this afternoon then, after hearing that story and coming home, how much of the smoke a person would have seen from my apartment. The building hadn't been so old, but it had been here. Who knew who'd lived here that day. I'd probably returned their mail. Here in my apartment, I'd been looking out my window at the old newspaper building for a year and a half — and hearing stories about the day from more veteran website people, about nerves and temporary evacuations and more — but never put the geography together.
I don't know why except maybe how the day's scenes are still hard to imagine, still hard to really imagine, to place on top, overlay on the real world. There's only a few landmarks on that side of my window, the southern side. The cream Top of the Town apartment complex hulks over Iwo Jima and takes any Washington Monument view for itself. The thick treeline and the sky claim just about the rest. Standing close to the window, you hear Route 50 but you only see the treetops and a handful of roofs as the hill rises to Fort Myer. The fort stretches along the back of the Arlingon Cemetery and down to the Pentagon, where the lights are shining tonight. It's the second night of the spotlight memorial and its 184 beams. The beams are hard to make out as you scan the sky, but you can spot a cloud they hit and trace them down.
