I have spent most of my life around cars. I have bought them, sold them, appraised them, driven them, talked about them on the radio and written about them for more years than I care to admit. To me, a car has always represented movement. It takes us to work, brings us home, carries our children and gives us the freedom to go where we choose. But after September 11, 2001, some cars came to represent something entirely different.
In the days following the attacks, cars remained in commuter parking lots in New Jersey. Their owners had driven there on Tuesday morning, parked, locked the doors and continued into New York, never imagining they would not return. As the hours became days and the days became weeks, most of the other vehicles disappeared. These did not. NJ Transit later described the abandoned cars that remained in station parking lots for weeks as a sad reminder of the people who were not coming home.
Think about how ordinary that morning must have begun. An alarm clock rang. Coffee was poured. Someone hurried out the door, perhaps already thinking about a meeting, a deadline or what needed to be picked up on the way home. They pulled into a familiar parking space, turned off the ignition and walked away. Nothing about that moment announced itself as important. It was simply the beginning of another workday.
We know now that it was not.
I cannot stop thinking about those cars sitting there as darkness fell on September 11. Perhaps they were still warm when the towers came down. By that evening, families everywhere were calling cellphones, hospitals, police departments and anyone who might have seen the person they loved. Meanwhile, the cars waited exactly where they had been left, holding no answers and offering no comfort.
There is something reassuring about the sound of a familiar car arriving home. You recognize the headlights through the window, the engine in the driveway or the garage door beginning to rise. You know who it is before the person walks through the door. It is such an ordinary part of family life that we barely notice it—until it does not happen. On that Tuesday night, thousands of families listened for sounds that never came.
A parked car is among the most ordinary sights in America, but those cars became silent memorials before monuments had been designed and before the names of the dead had been carved in stone. Every one of them represented an empty chair, an unanswered telephone and a front door that would not open. Behind every steering wheel was the absence of someone who had fully expected to make the drive home.
That is what the number 2,977 can never adequately tell us. A number measures the size of a tragedy, but it cannot measure the empty place left in a family. It cannot tell us how many children waited to hear a parent’s key in the door, how many spouses looked through a window when headlights turned onto the street, or how many families would never again hear the familiar sound of a garage door rising at the end of the day.
I have often said that cars become part of our family histories. We remember the one in which we brought a baby home, taught a teenager to drive or took a favorite vacation. Years after a car is gone, one photograph can bring back the person who sat behind its wheel. Perhaps that is why those vehicles affect me so deeply. They were not wrecked or destroyed. They were simply left waiting, looking exactly as they had when their owners expected to return in a few hours.
Eventually, those cars had to be removed. I think about the people who faced that task, especially the family members who may have received a set of keys to a vehicle whose owner no longer needed them. I do not know the individual story of each car, and I would not pretend to. But I can imagine how difficult it must have been to open that door, sit in that familiar seat and see everything exactly where a loved one had left it on the morning the world changed.
For 25 years, we have said we would never forget September 11. Remembering the towers, the Pentagon, Flight 93 and the heroes is essential. But remembering also means seeing the smaller, quieter evidence of what was lost. It means understanding that the victims were not merely names or numbers. They were people in the middle of ordinary lives, expected at meetings, school pickups, dinner tables and homes where somebody was waiting.
The cars eventually left those parking lots. The people who parked them never came home.
May we never forget that behind every one of those 2,977 names was someone expected at a destination—and someone waiting there with love.
Straight Talk and Honest Answers — always.
-Jerry