While visiting the Twin Cities, last weekend I popped down to Northfield to visit my friend Baird, who teaches at Carleton College, along with his delightful family. It was difficult to believe that it had been over a quarter century since we had met in person. So many memories, even just reminiscing about Temagami: how I signed the guest book in ink and he chided me because it wasn’t archival as graphite, how Mookie and Kona feasted on the venison that Georgia’s boyfriend Keith had served at dinner, how shy I felt about singing around the fire in front of an opera singer, how Jesse shot the fireworks that I had brought by holding the tube in his hand like a wand. I’m remembering more that I didn’t even mention: jumping from a high deck into the water, showering with tepid water heated by sunlight, hanging onto a boogie board for dear life as Baird sped the motorboat over the waves.

At one point, I don’t remember why, we talked about the Twin Towers. It wasn’t in the context of 9/11 (the 25th anniversary being today), but simply a statement of fact that he introduced me to the TKTS location there. Yes, he said, it was so much closer to where he grew up in Brooklyn, and much less crowded. We smiled as we remembered going there.

When we remember the World Trade Center these days, we tend to do so on September 11, so we focus on the tragedy of its destruction, the loss of life, and the dissolution of the national assumption that our homeland is untouchable. I remember that too, but that’s not all I remember. I remember entering the vast lobby, the vertical white lines reaching for the sky, designed by the same architect of a Northwestern National Life Building I had seen in Minneapolis just two days prior. I remember visiting the observation deck as an adolescent, returning as a salmon spawn to the city of my birth. I remember as a child in Ohio watching on the TV as a man walked on a tightrope more than a hundred stories above the concrete sidewalk. I remember when I was a little boy growing up in the Bronx, craning my neck as we drove past the construction site, watching it go up, up, up. I remember the building — the building of it. To remember its presence, its life, the marvel, and smile.