An Unorthodox Remembrance of September 11th

by


          “Where were you when . . .?”
           Such a tired question, so commonly asked that my tongue languishes in the attempt to to say it. Am I really making use of the query? Shame! And on my own husband no less.
          It's the classic, over-chewed filler for when the topic comes around; like commenting on the weather when outdoors, or asking a teenager when they will graduate high school.
        “Where were you when . . .?”
         But you know you've used it before. Who hasn't? This filler is thin and threadbare from ten years of overuse. Like some ancient relic purported to be the shroud of Christ or the veil of Mary, the masses feel obligated to touch the topic again and again, until the original meaning is gradually worn away. Only some sad rag of the former substance remains.
         The event has become nearly cliché. Poor films have already sprung up, featuring the smoke ringing horribly, beautifully, round collapsing towers. And heroic measures being taken by firemen, police forces, and random strangers collectively. The coffee-table book of photo spreads came out in time for Christmas.

***
         Has ever an event, historical or otherwise, been known by merely a number? Nine-eleven. Nine-eleven. You say it, and the world knows.
***
         I want to tell you of the black smoke pouring upward from those thousand foot crematoriums, and of the screams of horror, and the blare of sirens, and the lives forever expired. I want to tell you of bravery, and good-bye phone calls, and children born without fathers. But all I remember are the silent eyes and wordless mouths, open and frozen and shocked. There were no tears here, there were no screams. Only mute disbelief, and the childish excitement that accompanies any singular event.
         Children do not distinguish between horror and wonder easily. Those planes that were executioners, and those towers that were tombs, they were removed and fantastical. There was a sort of romantic beauty in the chaos. Something exciting was happening during my lifetime! The hysteria that stemmed from the television screen was electric, sending currents through brain and limbs, lighting up my eyes; my heart grew wild and frenzied. Abigail, in blue-eyed fright, woke to my yelps of bombs and attacks and America gone. Would it be gone? Were further attacks looming? Were dark men in dark beards, crowned in turbaned glory flying over our painted deserts and blue mountains, prepared to set the Phoenix Hyatt on fire? The compass restaurant spinning slowly, luxuriously, wreathed in flames. A dreamlike quality held the day for me.
        Please do not think that I was a callous child. I was so lost in the fantastical places of faerie tales and fictitious lands that this world was oft exchanged for them. When something so gloriously new and different entered via jet engines and exploded into multifaceted rainbows of steel, I was not terrified. I was charmed.
        Something possessed me that morning to record such events.
       “This is history, right?”
        Something in my childmind recalled Anne Frank. Years from now, some futuristic archeologist might find my purple Pooh Bear journal, and futuristic children might be required to read my memoir in their history classes. I wrote with a no.2 pencil on spiral-bound pages about wicked men and falling planes and a fear that was imagined in some romantic dream. I wrote that paragraph of history on wide-spaced lines, on the page next to an entry about a rabbit, who often visited our backyard, and the trap set to catch him.
       “Carrots. Bunnies like carrots, right?”
       “Mommy, how do you spell 'Muslim'?”

***

           Morning light falls in patches through windows lined with nose-prints. The perpetrators nap in purring ecstasy, and I watch and struggle with a fogged mind and stupid fingers, thanks to a poorly timed cup of coffee yesterday night. Muddled minds are not best for remembering to water the tomato plant, let alone a day ten years ago. Drifting in stupor, I attempt to remember, but all I can wonder is why does it matter?
           Why so commonly referenced is the tale of four planes fallen from the sky, two towers become mass graves? An yet we are nonchalant. I hear casual allusions to the catastrophe daily on the radio. Another hyped up and disappointing film was released a few short months ago. Do we remember the mute mouths and wrenched souls, the momentary unity in anguished cries to God? Or do we remember the coffee-table book spread of photographs and the romantic fears we dreamed?


***

           I am a volunteer Teacher's Aid for first-grade children. While clearing out the bulletin board on which they hang their projects, I recently noticed their tribute to the ten year anniversary of nine-eleven. Although I wasn't there to witness the actual drawing of their posters, I have seen enough of their art-making to imagine it. They are between six and seven years old; small, wide-eyed, determined. The kids color earnestly, recording history with crayons. They look up expectantly for praise over their artwork. The happy firemen, heroically rescuing trapped civilians with ease and a smile. Dead stick-figures lie gently in the streets, cradled by black scrawled asphalt. Smoke is represented by swirling loops of gray. A few birds fly lackadaisically above the chaos.
         And the children are pleased with their artwork.

***

        While driving today, I was obligated to turn around and take a new route. A deep green car sat peacefully on the sidewalk bordering the road, nose softly set into the wall. Palo Verdes surrounded, dripping blooms in yellow serenity.
         I heard the sirens today.
         Fire trucks and police officers gathered, passing cars were thrown off course, and concerned people milled about. After worrying for the passengers momentarily, I was soon more pressed to find an alternate route, and eventually continued on my way down a different road.
         Everything was normal.
         Del Taco's and pawn shops sat quietly in strip malls, and tanned strangers shaded their faces from oppressing heat. A family of immigrants wilted beneath a bus-stop. Maybe someone laughed in the crosswalk. Maybe someone bounced their baby, whose face grew red as he wailed. Maybe a dog pissed on a clump of the dried and yellowed grass that grows between the sidewalk cracks in the less posh areas of Phoenix.
         Normalcy exists for others while our own worlds are crashing down.

***
 
         September 11th, 2001.
        How much is from memory, and how much from T.V. screens and the photo book on our coffee-table? Mom bought it that day in the mall, when we were walking on grimed tiles without stepping on the cracks and suddenly she was no longer beside us, but elsewhere, returning with bag in hand. Dad asked something to the effect of “why did you buy it?” and she replied with something between a want and an absolute need.
      Nine-eleven. The day was normal, besides our T.V. staying on until bedtime came for us, and then probably longer until my parents could no longer worry about futures and keep disillusioned eyes focused on the screen. Television viewing was completely a matter of loyalty that day. Each channel broadcast the same exact footage, and could only give out the same information as soon as they came to know it.
       Our loyalties lay with NBC.
       Matt Lauer and Katie Couric canceled the various segments planned for the day, and shots of burning towers were swapped intermittently with those of smoky streets through lenses of shaky, hand-held cameras. Fluttering walls of missing persons were erected and shown on-screen. Reporters broke down. The screen screamed fear and disbelief. But here, we ate lunch, we ate dinner, we went on with our day. Normalcy reigned.
       After that day of nothingness, we went to cross-country practice. And for some odd reason this is the event most clearly remembered from that day. Why? I do not know. I was not particularly good at cross-country, and being the only non-public-schooled children on the team, we were somewhat set apart, if unconsciously so. Thunderbird mountain is sprawling and of a humble height, though to my young mind it seemed statuesque and brooding under monsoon skies of dark clouds and heavy air. By September the majority of desert summer storms have exhausted themselves, but the evening seems velvety in my memory.
     Tessa was there, with brown eyes and a constellation of freckles that mapped her whole body with stars. While our mothers gathered knowingly in hushed tones and somber nods, we spoke excitedly of the day's events. According to Tessa's teacher, something awful happens in history during every child's tenth year. Her teacher had witnessed the Challenger tragedy when she was ten. Tessa was ten. Today was September 11th. And I was nine and eleven months. We were struck by the anecdotal evidence, and stared at one another in the silence that accompanies one's first profound thought. It didn't occur to me until much later that the logicality of the statement was severely lacking. Who cared? The romantic dreams were alluring in the way that reality was absolutely not. Practice ended and the dark descended. We concluded the evening in the dull hum of buzzing excitement, somewhat less electric than how the day had begun.
***

      When I viewed the nine-eleven photo and video project, a tribute to the ten year anniversary put together by a collaboration of artists and journalists and more, I was at a loss to identify with others' remembrances of that day ten years ago. Other people woke that morning to the startling news broadcast, and did not meet the day with excitement and awe. Other people did cry and break and mourn. Other people lost other people.
     Those towers falling and those snowflake ashes, they were not only a romantic dream? But the Hyatt, it still stands! The Compass still spins! Testament that not all of the dreams were true. But somewhere thousands of miles away, two towers do not stand anymore, and the ashes there are of more than just wood.
     I want to tell you of the tears that day, and the grim nods and shaking heads with disbelief. But I do not know them. They live not in my memory. I can only tell you of photographs that bring realization, and the anniversary stories that beckon tears.
     “I love you, I love you, I love you,” they said, mantra-like, as she recalls. The woman sits before a white background, speaking to the camera about the last time she spoke to her husband. That final phone call that cannot even be described as a conversation, as his plane sailed calmly, so calmly, to earth. And her eyes search upward for a way to stem the tears, and her bleach-blonde styled hair threatens to come undone and reveal that beneath the airbrushed makeup and peachy lips she is only a broken, widowed mess. And I join in her grief, though I have nothing substantial to grieve. Only the imagined fear of losing my own love, and the realization that all we have must be held with an open hand.