September 11

Every year, and I can't believe it has been 12, since the year that this country was attacked, I have feelings and want to say something. But because nothing really happened to me on that day, other than walking within the panic on the streets in New York and breathing in the vapor of death and devastation for weeks afterward, I have never felt entitled to say much. Other people suffered more. Other people witnessed much worse.

But here are the things that tend to come to mind on this day.

The weather. This year it was hot and humid in DC, nothing like the clear perfect air that absorbed the impacts of those planes. I walk out into the soup and feel a little relieved. It does not feel the same as that day's weather, so perfectly, relentlessly memorable.

I can't believe how in some ways it is almost like nothing happened. People post to social networks about their mundane concerns on this day, where before it would have been unthinkable to have anything but this event at top of mind. Is this progress, or regression? Maybe it's both.

How is it that my eyes still start to sting with tears at the image of the smoking towers, even though I have seen it so many times?

What do children, people who were just babies or not born yet, know about this day?

I don't like abbreviating it as 9/11, like it's a festival, or a thing.  I never will. I still seem to be the only one who finds the opening sequence of  'Mad Men,' much as I love that show, a bit insensitive.

I remember us all looking for ways to contribute. We flooded Red Cross and fire stations with clothes and supplies until they finally had to tell us to stop. The survivors we were hoping to aid did not exist. There was nothing to be done.

Missing posters and candles and flowers on street corners for people who were not to be found.

The smell, the smell.

The panics. Evacuations based on fear, on a new world that no one understood yet. Being herded down a staircase in midtown, crying, not because anything was actually happening, but because of what now was possible.

Bin Laden is dead now. Suck it, Bin Laden. And yet that offers no real satisfaction.

The blessing of my family, ties that endure beyond that moment when we could not reach each other and were confronted with just how important that communication is.

The day is officially passed now. I avoided the memories pretty well, as did (I'm guessing) a lot of people. Is there an unseen price we are paying for that avoidance? Or is it just moving on?

Music: "Letters From the Sky"

Windows on the World.

Normally Saturday mornings are reserved for catching up with magazines and my couch, so it's not as if I would have turned on the TV anyway, but I really wasn't going to turn it on this weekend.

Still, Sept. 11 found me. I picked up my New Yorker and there was the profile of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, conveying all his vainglorious, devastating awfulness. Outside, there was the blue, newly cool sky, almost (but not quite) as clear as it was on the day that acrid, dark smoke blew across it in such a way that I could never look at a vivid September day the same way again (is it possible to gain a sense memory of a very particular set of weather conditions?). There was my mom noting what I know but never manage to fully absorb: that Sept. 11 was always a marked day for her, because it is her beloved, departed father's birthday. And there was a matchbox I found while rummaging through stuff at my parents'.

The first time I went to New York, at age 13, was a surprise. We had gone on a cruise for a family vacation, and my dad notified us that we were staying an extra day in the city where we'd docked. For us Potomac kids, it was EXCITING. We ate dinner at Maxwell's Plum (I saved the psychedelic balloon that was tied to the back of my chair) and watched the rollerskaters and break-dancers in Central Park. That's about all I remember from the visit, and it was enough: I definitely wanted to live in New York City when I grew up.

For my 16th birthday, my parents generously offered to take me on a short trip somewhere. I chose, of course, New York. We stayed in a tiny, stuffy room, but I didn't care, because the room was at the Plaza. We rode in a hansom cab, visited Trump Tower and Tiffany (it was the '80s, OK?), had dinner at Tavern on the Green, saw a revival of 42nd Street on Broadway, and had drinks (non-alc for me, natch) at Windows on the World at the World Trade Center.

It was the best 16th birthday I could ask for. I saved the matchbox from Windows on the World, where it sat in a tin for years and didn't resurface until I happened to pull out a box of stuff yesterday.

In a different box, I found a journal from second grade, stapled together with a construction-paper cover. The third entry, on that paper with alternating dotted lines used to teach handwriting, was carefully lettered:

Monday, Sept. 11 1978
Today we
switched for
reading and math.
Some of us go
to Mrs.
Stalfort.

In future entries, I'd noted the first day of fall, Yom Kippur, Friday the 13th, Election Day, Mickey Mouse's 50th birthday, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas. Made me wonder what schoolchildren today will write in their journals about Sept. 11.