Life is Beautiful
Do you remember the 1997 Italian film by Roberto Benigni by the same name? You should, it was a Best Picture nominee and won Best Foreign Film and Best Actor for Benigni, who played the happy-go-lucky Guido, who guides his little son through the horrors of Nazi concentration camp life by making a game of it all. It is a poignant, funny, but ultimately sad movie that has a powerful and lasting message. Life is too beautiful to let the horrors of humanity interfere with seeing and embracing the beauty of it all. That may be the most powerful message any human can give to one another.
Today is September, 11, 2019. It is a bright, sunny and breezy day here in lower Manhattan. The piercing and powerful arc of the twin spotlights pointing upwards towards the heavens was blasting away last night, only several blocks north of where I live and work. As I turned off the lights in the living room, the northwestern sky was brighter than normal from the ambient glow of that ethereal beam that speaks to the immortal symbolism that we all accept as that passageway to a better and safer place. That beam of light that shoots up and out into the Milky Way and beyond is the same as the final smile Benigni gives his boy as he hides him from the Nazi tanks that bear down upon his compressing reality.
I remember 9/11 just as most New Yorkers do, and on this sunny, breezy September day, I am reminded that it was equally pleasant on that day as it began here in lower Manhattan. I was just in the night before from Los Angeles. I had gotten in late, waited longer than normal on the JFK tarmac and gotten home for a faster than normal sleep. I was due to present at an IBM conference on some topic I cannot even recall. I was meeting my old high school friend Brett, who worked for IBM and had arranged the speech. It was planned for the Marriott Hotel that was down in the World Trade Center. I lived at 29th Street then and was picked up by my driver (those were the days of silly indulgences). I had forgotten my cell phone and asked to borrow his while he went back to the apartment after dropping me off, so he could retrieve it. I rushed into the Lobby in WTC#2 at 7:40am only to be told that the venue had been moved to the Marriott Marquis at Times Square. I cursed and went back out into the sunshine and breeze to hail a cab to Times Square.
At 8:46 while I was reviewing my notes at the Marriott Marquis, American Airlines Flight 11, heading from Boston to Los Angeles, crashed into WTC#1. I heard of the plane crash just before I got up to speak at 9:00. I referenced the accident as likely causing a traffic mess downtown for the day if anyone had to go back that way. At 9:03 United Airlines Flight 175, also heading from Boston to Los Angeles, crashed into WTC#2 and all illusions that this might not be a terrorist plot were tossed out the window. At approximately 9:15 an IBM executive interrupted my speech and told the audience about the second plane and that NYC and America were under attack and that all airports had been shut down. At 9:21 NYC closed all bridges and tunnels as we stood around at the Marriott Marquis with people wondering what they should do. Times Square was being reported as a possible secondary target for the terrorists, so people began drifting away. My friend Brett was plotting with great determination how to get a rental car to drive back to his home in L.A. where he felt his down-syndrome son would surely be needing him.
I wandered down the escalators wondering where my driver would likely be and how I would ever find him, if at all, in this mess. When I arrived at the interior car drive-through of the hotel, there he was with my car. He had gotten my messages, sent to my own phone, about where I would be. I jumped in and told him he was due a big bonus and asked if he would prefer to get home to New Jersey to his daughter. He said she was fine and that he preferred to stick with me. We headed off downtown in search of my son, who was in first grade at a private school in the West Village. On the way I told him to stop for gas (there are VERY few stations in Manhattan). While he filled up I hit the cash machine and got $200 and when I went for a second draw the system went down. I had visions of the attackers nuking our financial system to create panic. We jumped in the car and headed across town. I told the driver to stop again at a deli and I ran in and bought as many water bottles and pre-wrapped sandwiches as I could carry and threw them in the back seat, just for added comfort. I then stopped at a Citibank and went in. As I passed an outgoing customer I asked if they were operational inside and he looked at me as though I had three heads. I calmly walked in and withdrew $2,000 while the overhead Muzak played as though nothing was wrong in the world.
There is more to the story of my day and the strange things I saw and did, but the one that reminds me of Roberto Benigni was seeing the five Muslim women, wearing burkas and hijabs, sitting with their baby carriages in the darkened hallway of my son’s school. They had been given refuge due to the hostility of people on the street towards anything that suggested Arab. It made me glad that my son attended a school with enlightened administrators ready to step in that way to help people in need. The look in those women’s eyes was the look of Guido’s son as he peeked through the hiding place towards the Nazis on the street.
When I arrived into the office this morning, I had already decided to write this story and I had already decided that the theme of life is beautiful was the appropriate angle for the story since it was such a lovely day today as it had been that fateful day. My concept was very much about not ignoring the grandeur of life despite what nonsense is going on around you…a very carpe diem view. And then I stepped into my colleague Dale’s office. I have known Dale for forty-six years. She is married to one of my college roommates. She is an HR professional of the highest order and had been head of HR at the New York Stock Exchange on 9/11. Her charges included 150 people who worked in WTC#2. She also had two very smart sons who were attending NYC’s finest public high school, Stuyvesant, practically across the street from WTC#1. She remembers that day as a frantic string of issues executed from an office at the main Exchange building at Broad and Wall Street (certainly a potential target for any of the next terrorists looking for another major symbolic spot in Manhattan). She remembers occasionally wondering if her street-smart boys were managing on their own. She remembers not losing one Exchange employee on that hectic day. She was sitting in her office today, eighteen years since that day, crying about the ways of the world. I told her life is beautiful and she needed to remember that. She happened to go to lunch today with four old high school friends she hadn’t seen in a long time. She finally agreed later in the afternoon that life is, indeed, beautiful.