Nine Years Later

There is always that buffer of about a week between Labor Day weekend —  filled with its mixed emotions and goodbyes to summer, barbecues and extended vacations — and 9/11.  And it seems to sneak up on me every year. 

I work across the street from Ground Zero and am glad that this year 9/11 isn’t on a work day.  I’m glad that I could watch the coverage of the ceremonies as I wanted to, without drifting in and out of a conference room at work, self-aware and surrounded by colleagues.  I was folding laundry in my bedroom and watched for about an hour.  Every year, just the sight of those families gets me.  I look at the towns the victims lived in and their ages that are displayed as their names are read.  Invariably, every year, I hear a name or see a photo of someone I recognize, though none of them well known to me — the brother of a college acquaintance, the husband of a friend, the basketball coach at the college where I used to work.  And I hear the bells signaling the four key moments of that day.  And in my mind, I remember all of the craziness of that morning when I worked in midtown — the huge events but also the details…the cell phones that wouldn’t work, the panic of what was coming next, the weeks of just grave uncertainty that followed, the daily funerals for the firefighters and police officers.

There’s so much more, of course.  But for every detail in my mind, there’s someone who had it so much worse.   So I remember and I think about that blue sky and crisp early autumn air and the guy with the radio in Central Park who was our only source of information as we walked aimlessly, shellshocked, with a sea of other people, just to keep moving.

And we have kept moving. 

Nine years later, the man who was my office boyfriend on 9/11, who walked aimlessly through Central Park with me that day, is now my husband.  We took our kids out tonight for a chocolate shake.  It had been a day of shaky behavior on the part of our 3 year-old, but we had told him if he was good for his hair cut (usually an exercise in terror), the coveted shake would be his.  So we drove to our suburban town center and made our son so very happy with his reward.  I sat there and looked at his face and thought about how he’d think of 9/11 someday the way we think of Pearl Harbor Day — horrible and historic, but not with the raw impact, the generational significance that we’d always know.  I suppose that’s the right thing.  And with all of the memories that this day brings, I felt glad to add the one of the milkshake in the town center to my mind.