I didn’t listen to the radio today; I didn’t watch TV. I was determined not to get caught up in what my colleague referred to as “9/11 porn.” I don’t need images of the fallen towers, and I woke up this morning at 4.29 am hearing a bottomless explosion that was inadequately explained by the beer I drank last night. I had no need to hear world leaders express their thoughts. It was only later this morning that I wanted to write something about today, and I did, below. I was done.
We celebrate half birthdays in our house; today was my 4 year old’s half birthday. We sang at dinner, and then in the bath, my six year old said, “Dad, today’s a good day and a bad day. Want to know why?” I have never spoken with him about 9/11. We haven’t had a compelling reason to. We’re not interested in navigating the complexities of that day and its aftermath with someone who still thinks in terms of heroes and villains, not to mention someone who, thankfully, has no reason yet to know about it. I was relieved that we got through the day without a word because we have a flight coming up soon and I don’t want my kids to worry about airplanes smashing into buildings.
“Yes,” I said. “Why?”
“Well, it’s O’s half birthday, and today’s S’s whole birthday, which are the good things, but it’s also the day that the World Trade Center fell down, right?”
I was soaping up my half birthday child. “That’s right,” I said, and I steeled myself for anything.
But nothing came. They started playing who can hold your breath longest underwater and then argued about who had to climb out of the bath first. While bedtime in our house is anything but peaceful, tonight it was soothingly normal, and finally they were asleep.
My mistake was to go online. But here is what I found, here is what I want to share. Paul Simon, just weeks shy of 70 years old, performing what I think is one of his, or anyone’s, most beautiful songs. But more than that, in his face, his eyes, there is sadness spilling from his skin and fingers. That song means something else today, and while it’s timeless and profound, today it gained a specificity that is rooting.
***
In 2001, I was still working in the restaurant industry, which meant my only available social time was meeting friends after the restaurant closed for the night. On September 10, 2001, my friend Katie was visiting from New York and we met at the Tasting Room on Randolph for their Sunday night half price specials. We sampled goat cheeses and drank wine for a while before heading back to my place.
Early the next morning, my now-wife left for for her teaching job and I fell back into a hangover-ish sleep. Suddenly, Katie was in my room, wrapped in a sheet and shaking me frantically. “Wake up, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center.” I recall thinking she said “planes” were crashing into the World Trade Center and, alarmed by the panic in her voice, I pushed myself out of bed, imagining a group of dizzy single engine planes circling the twin towers and bouncing ineffectively off of them.
At the time, we had an old bulky television set in our second bedroom, which Katie had just turned on. I wasn’t — none of us were — prepared for what met my eyes as the screen flickered into view. I don’t have to describe it to you here. I sat down on the bed next to Katie, and she was wrapped in sobs. Tears were streaming down her face. She was convinced our friend Joanna, who was scheduled to fly from Chicago to New York that morning, was on one of the planes. We didn’t move from the television for hours. We called everyone in New York that we knew and they were safe. Only later would I hear how close some of the stories were, how many people were scheduled to be in the WTC that day and didn’t make it, who missed planes or taxis, or were sick. A friend of mine last minute booked on one of the two flights that crashed into the WTC to go to San Francisco for another friend’s untimely funeral, but at the last second opted for a different, far less expensive flight, and spent three days stranded somewhere in the midwest. Instead of dying ten years ago today.
I visited New York about a month later and saw the twin beams of inspirational light coursing into the sky, the shrines and missing persons’ notices, smelled the death dust near Ground Zero. The city had changed, if for a moment. The pulse was softer, the intensity was subdued, the energy was pulled back. We hadn’t yet seen the national dialogues that would emerge around 9/11, the insidious march into Iraq, the panic and willful shedding of civil liberties, small towns thousands of miles from New York receiving substantial Homeland Security grants. The insanity of eight years of Bush and Cheney, the surrealistic evil of Rumsfeld.
It was impossible not to be affected. I had read about Osama bin Laden in a New Yorker article a year or so before, and remembered President Clinton’s targeted bombing of Afghanistan at the onset of his impeachment hearings. I read every word in the New York Times for weeks, I believed that the age of irony had died, I thought it was true that everything had changed. My work suffered. What could I write that was as important as this? What story could I create that could compete with the story unfolding all around us? Instead, I changed life course, like so many others, and am in a completely different place than I was ten years ago, for better and for worse. But I still remember later that day when I walked to a neighborhood store to buy food (and wine) for dinner, and looked up at the silent sky. I could feel a palpable tension around me, as if the whole facade could rip apart without warning. It didn’t.
It turns out I did know someone who died that day, who I’d remembered, but not known, from little league. He was a baseball star, and I can still hear the kids in the dugout chanting his last name.
everywhere tints childrening 
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