My Home Town
Ridgewood, New Jersey by Harlan Coben.

An essay on how September 11th devastated Harlan's hometown.

I live in the village of Ridgewood, New Jersey, a tree-lined commuter suburb in northern New Jersey. While the final tally isn't in, we lost more than a dozen neighbours in the recent terrorist attacks.

In our town, we are playing the most hideous game of Six Degrees of Separation My daughter Charlotte is in second grade. Two of her classmates alone lost fathers. Both of these men had five children. I remember meeting one of these men, a father so like me, at a six-year-old boy's birthday party. I remember watching him coach his son in the town soccer league. I knew others who died peripherally. I try to recall their faces, what we said to one another during our brief meetings. It seems important to do that. I don't know why.

During the candlelight vigil in the town square, people begin to call out the names of the missing. It goes on for a long time. There must be thirty or forty names - fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, all ages, all loved and mourned. Each shout is a dagger. We wince in pain.

Every year, I donate a character name to a charity that helps with Huntington's Disease. It's called being “Tuckerized.” The highest bidders gets to have his or her name used in an upcoming novel. The winner for my latest book asked me to use the name of her beloved husband, Farrell Lynch. I look at his name on page 120. Farrell, too, is among the missing. So is his brother. And so it goes.

Like I said, the awful game of Six Degrees.

Ridgewood is beautiful. When I pick up my daughter from school, I drive past the old Victorian homes swathed in the red, white, and blue. Every once in a while, I will see a house - a house like every other house, a house that sheltered dreams and held lives and cherished families - and that house has too many cars parked in front. I slow without thinking. There is a hush in the air. I know why those cars are parked there. And my heart aches.

I try to sift through my own past to understand what it is we are feeling. In the past, I have lost too many family members at too young an age and so I recognize what this is: It is grief. I find that odd. I don't think that I ever truly grieved before for strangers or casual acquaintances. I don't mean that to sound cold. We've all seen airplane crashes or catastrophes, and we are grateful that it is not us. We feel terrible. We move on. Because it is not our family, our loved ones.

This does not feel like that. It feels like grief. The genuine article. We all know the stages of grief - denial, anger, etcetera. There is that, but what I'm mostly feeling, as I did when I lost loved ones, is that nothing will ever be the same again. That's what is different here.

At the candlelight vigil, I am surprised by the outpouring of emotion from the high school students. Those who doubt our young generation - just as every generation has doubted the one after it - should have seen their tears.

But my 4 and 2 year sons are there too. There are antsy. They thought lighting candles would be cool, but it's not. They want to hold the candles even when the wax begins to drip. I blow out the flame so my kids won't singe someone's hair. They pull impatiently on my pant legs. They want to go home. I pick my 2 year old up and clutch him while my hometown tries to keep its collective voice from cracking as we sing God Bless America. My daughter, the one in second grade, looks up at my face and falls silent. I am glad they are here.

The children of Ridgewood are riding their bikes today. They are playing soccer. The sky is blue and sun-kissed. We are going to visit friends now. But when we do, we will drive by a house with too many cars parked in front of it.

Previously published in the Houston Chronicle and Newark Star Ledger.

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