I'm sitting here thinking about the World Trade Center, the events of 9/11, what we lost then, and our continuing losses in the years since. I've been working on adapting the image from a now faded color photograph I took at twilight from the Staten Island Ferry in the Bicentennial summer of 1976. My color photo was pretty, but pretty is not what I think of today when I think of the World Trade Center. The twin towers haunt us now, and I was trying to evoke some of that, along with a sense of the way they both loomed and glowed in the night sky over Manhattan, two dark obelisks draped in pearls.

They were not much loved by New Yorkers when they first went up. When T and I lived there in the sixties, the towers were just a dream in the minds of the Rockefeller brothers, and that's what New Yorkers mockingly called them at first -- David and Nelson. We were unhappy about the construction, too -- T had worked not far from there, and she mourned the thriving neighborhood near her former office that was demolished to build these monuments to Rockefeller pride. But by the time of our Bicentennial visit, the transformation was well under way, aided by the tightrope poetry of Philippe Petit and the embattled city's quest for civic pride in the "Ford to New York City: Drop Dead" years of financial crisis. I wrote about it a year ago in " Philippe Petit's walk as symbol for what we lost", reflecting on Petit's walk as a symbol of both the New York spirit and all that we have lost since 9/11.