Spontaneous Musings

17 year old high school kid from Seattle who has never been to NYC in his life: So what sights should I see?
Me: 9/11 Memorial is amazing.
Kid: I was thinking of seeing it on 9/11
Me: Bad idea. Well unless you want to see it with a million other people.
Kid: It's really that crowded?
Me: Every year they gather to read off all the names at the site. They've been doing it since 2002.
And it's really crowded. Pick an off time. I did, and it was still somewhat crowded. I couldn't get into the museum.

They keep talking about "never forgetting" on social media -- from places far far away from NYC. And I keep thinking, if only I could. But alas, I live in frigging NYC. It's impossible. Every single year we get the reading of the names. There are still people filing lawsuits for being contaminated by the debris which caused various lung ailments and cancer. Lots of New Yorkers in and around the area contracted cancer because of the dust.

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I leave you with photographs...from the 9/11 Memorial:


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I've written about 9/11 off and on in this blog over the years. That day changed my life. My novel "Doing Time on Planet Earth" is specifically about a post 9-11 NYC. The people in my work-place who read it -- strongly identified. If it weren't for 9/11, I'm not sure I'd have gone online and become as obsessed as I did about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I'd been pursuing a separate path before then. Of course a lot of things happened at the same time, which I won't bore you with. This, however, is how I chose to write about it in my novel and put out to the world.

It was hard not to think about the robbery on her way to Essex Temporaries on Friday morning. The weather didn’t aid her mood, brisk and beautiful with a hint of dried leaves - it felt like nine-eleven weather, even though it was late October. Her skin prickled with it, reminding her of how she’d felt after nine-eleven, a number that still held the taint of the lives lost that day. But it was more than just lives, although that in and of itself was pretty major, she thought, just as the robbery was more than just a laptop. It was her sense of security, a shift in perspective, having what she believed to be secure, to be true, be messed with, and to an extent, unraveled. Everyone, she thought, went a little bit numb after nine-eleven. It was either that or become consumed by fear and rage; in some cases, she supposed, numbness was better.

On nine-eleven the earth, or rather Americans’ perception of it, shifted to the right. She wondered if that was how her grandparents and parents felt when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1942. That sudden shift in perspective. That innate sense that all was not right with the world no matter where you were or who, that there was no place that felt safe -- and you’d give anything to change that. Fear ruled you whether or not you wished it to. Everyone had a story about where they were during nine-eleven and what they lost. At first it seemed as if everyone had lost a cousin or a friend of a cousin, or a cousin’s cousins’ friend. Six degrees of separation was the term like that old nineties film of the same name with Will Smith and Stockard Channing that her mother took her to years ago. No matter who you were or what nationality, the events of nine-eleven affected you – to the extent that the number itself entered the international lexicon as shorthand for the events of that day. You didn’t have to elaborate further. Everyone knew. 9/11. Nine-Eleven. Just that week a local business man who’d rung her up on his register had gotten the amount $9.11 and it jolted them both – like a spark of static electricity. He erased the amount and made it eight dollars even. He’d rather lose the dollar and eleven cents than keep that number in his records.

After nine-eleven she became obsessed with shows like Spywitch. She watched it every day, joined internet fan forums on it. Sans laptop she couldn’t do that now. She couldn’t escape to that other world any longer, a world made up of letters printed on a screen and where the bullies, albeit nameless, could be avoided. She’d felt secure in that bubble. And wondered if today was the day Fiske would give her that loaner laptop he kept promising. If she hurried through the interview she might have time, after their lunch with Hope, to jog back to his office and play on the computer there. Fiske had told her to call him after the interview. So had Hope. This was the day for their ambush. Everything scheduled for Monday morning had merely been pushed to Friday. Fitting, Caddy thought, the days bookending each other as they did.

She looked up at the sky one last time before entering the building. It was one of those days… beautiful, shiny, yet Caddy felt as if storm clouds were hovering above her head. Nine-eleven weather with a scent of dead leaves drifting in the air.

If I could erase the date from today, it would be an ordinary September day in New York City. Not too hot and not too cold...a soft wet breeze in the air. The sky as has often been the case these past few weeks the color of a hard boiled egg, a water brushed white. Or dull gray. The streets busy with farmer's markets, and church-goers. Kids rocketing down my sidewalk on scooters, bikes and roller-skates, making me wonder about their parents. The last breath of summer...scenting the air, with just the mildest taste of fall. And traces of last night's block party on stoops and windows, a half filled coke can here, a bit of sprayed sticky thread there.

Any other day.
( personal mood essay on today )

[Before I start this post, two links that moved me today, one about gay rights and one about 9/11, the first was ganked by the wonderful and brave, rozk and the other by the lovely embers_log:

http://takingsteps.blogspot.com/2008/09/sky-is-falling.html

http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=105095}

I deliberately did not post about 9/11 this year. And was not until now planning on posting about it. For a lot of reasons, mostly, because I wanted to put it firmly behind me and focus on positive things. The Comedy Central Link to John Stewart's speech about 9/11 the night it happened, has inspired me to write what follows.]

I'm not going to tell you what happened on 9/11, instead I'm going to tell you about the day after 9/11. 9/12. Today. So many people tell you about 9/11, but I haven't seen many talk about what happened after that. I wonder why? Often it is what happens next, after the event, that defines us and changes us, not the event itself.

September 12, 2001 - The day after 9/11. The day when the sky over my apartment stopped raining dust and debris, which luckily was mostly paper. I don't remember what the weather was like that day, which is odd, since I do remember what it was like the two days before. What I remember is getting up at 7 am that morning and going to the train, like any other day. We'd been told that if we stayed home it would be without pay. Or we could take a vacation day, but I did not want to sit home and think anymore. Or watch the TV - which only showed footage of the event. So, I got up and went to work. Like any other day.
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Via a couple of people on my flist, I found this excellent post, entitled "I remember Townsend" and it is about quality reporting, WWII, and 9/11, but it also re-emphasizes a point that I attempted to make a few posts back that when we decide to write fiction or dramatize real events or real people, we should tread very carefully and make it clear what we are doing to our audience.

http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/206303.html

The ABC TV show the Path to 9/11 reminds me of how the news media was portrayed in the film "V for Vendetta" which is disturbing in of itself.

Several years ago, I had two experiences similar to the experience that liz_marcs remembers in her lj post. The first concerned a former army colonel who had been amongst the first to arrive at the Aushwitz death camps in WWII, the second was my great-uncle who survived The Battle of the Bulge. Neither spoke of their experiences often, in the case of my Uncle - not at all, but something I said, and I can't remember what it was exactly, caused them to relate them to me. Not because I was going to write it down necessarily, but because they needed to tell the story. It had been haunting them and perhaps they'd grown tired of hearing or seeing versions that were not what they remembered.

I remember the former colonel telling me how he entered Aushwitz, how until they saw what was inside they had not believed the reports, thought them exaggerated. They weren't. I remember him telling me that what he saw would never leave him and still haunts his dreams. It changed him. Then he went into detail. My great-uncle, who had been in the Battle of the Bulge, related the account of what it was like to sit in a trench during a firefight in similar detail - again stating how it changed him and how he could not watch films based on the experience, since they were simply not true.

Until 9/11, I did not totally get that. Oh I sympathized with their tales. My heart broke over them. But I did not understand what it is like to experience a traumatic event and how it changes you. How hard it is to watch a fictionalized dramatization of it. Or how it feels when people fabricate portions of what happened to suit their own ends.

I was in New York City during 9/11. ( Read more... )