Remember

What do I remember?

I remember the day before.

I was supposed to shoot a television commercial all week, so the same adrenaline that burned every detail of Tuesday into my brain was working in a different way on Monday. I was shooting a promo spot for a new channel called New Americans. It was going to provide foreign news broadcasts, English as a Second Language and job skills programming for the latest huddled masses.

I love shooting. I storyboarded thirty seconds of New York City diversity, Harlem to Hasidim, and set up locations in all five boroughs. I can see Carlos rolling his eyes with the camera slung over his shoulder. In the morning we took pictures of a tiny Indian girl in her tiny Queens home sitting in front of her family's gigantic widescreen television. At noon I had an Arab man meet us on Thirty-fourth Street and Park Ave wearing his native garments and carrying a rug so he could pray towards Mecca. It was one of the first images I thought up; something I had seen all over the city.

On September 10, 2001, at around one o’clock, I was superimposing the Muslim religion with the Empire State Building because I wanted to show their accord.

It poured at dusk. I was going to shoot in the back of a Chinatown kitchen first thing the next morning and I confirmed everything with the owner. I didn’t get two blocks when it just started to come down. I was caught in an old painted-over doorway on Mosco Street between Mulberry and Mott for forty-five minutes. The sloping alley filled with a raging flash flood, a river.

Just as quickly, it was over. All the way home, as I walked back to my office on the 29th floor of One Centre, as I glanced out our tower windows and packed up my things, as I went down into the subway and came back out in Brooklyn, and as I walked to my apartment on Hicks Street overlooking the BQE and lower Manhattan, I was looking up. There was the most spectacular sunset over the Towers. I saw many others before this one. This was a bonfire. The storm clouds broke apart into all the peaks and valleys of a fingerprint and caught every color in the spectrum.

I try to remember to be thankful every day.