Not to Turn a Mountain into a Molehill

It started innocently enough: my sister asked if I wanted to see a building implode and I said yes. I mean, who wouldn't? It's all snap, crackle, pop, and tumble. Isn't that really the way you should start any Sunday morning? By blowing everything up and starting new?

What she neglected to tell me were the details: the butt crack of dawn (five freakin' a.m., my people!) that we had to greet in order to see said building implode, the bitter cold we'd have to endure, and the disturbing pop of chargers we'd hear before the building started its inward collapse.

I should've listened to my mother. I should've worn socks.

The building, formerly known as the Montague, was most recently a hotel, available by the hour (if you get my meaning, wink). In addition to playing refuge to those in need of a "quick nap," it also housed a small bat population that I hoped sensed the building's imminent demise and found new digs yesterday. (We didn't see them this morning.)

But more than sunrise, cold, bats in the bellfry, or the jolting, jitterfying pre-show, what we didn't expect was the emotional resonance of watching this building, just 10 or 12 stories really, collapse. It made us both think about watching the Twin Towers fall, which we both only saw on TV, not in person.

Certainly, this event was planned: most of the interior had been gutted, the windows removed, the streets cleared out. In a two words: safe and controlled. But on a very, very (I don't want to underemphasize this), very small scale we could extrapolate to what it must of been like to stand in front such the Two Towers and hear, smell, and witness that destruction, to see such a stalwart icon, something so solid, so part of your experience just vanish in a puff smoke and a pile of rubble, too small and too easily dismissed.