It’s September 11th again. For somewhere around the 4.5 billionth time, but for the 18th time that, waking up, this date has meant something more. It jumps off the calendar. It grabs you when scheduling a dinner, or when signing a form. It means something in a way no other date does. Even “December 25th” doesn’t carry the same weight.
I don’t have much to add right now to all that’s been written and said about 9/11, and all that will be written and said, as it continues to shape the rest of history we can fathom.
I was about to turn seven when it happened, and if my memory’s correct, I was sitting by the back door tying my shoes for another day of second grade when Grandma called and told Mom to turn on the TV. Which she did, probably right after the second plane hit the second tower, because that’s the image I remember. The plane hitting the building. The fireball.
This memory isn’t any more special than the others. I was just one kid out of the millions of kids in the millions of families with similar stories. I don’t have any particular tie to 9/11. But as I’m guessing it is for you, too, it remains one of the most significant days of my life.
We all have our ways of recognizing 9/11 when it comes each year. For me, three Septembers back, it involved a visit to Shanksville for that year’s ceremony. I happened to be close enough to drive. It’s worth visiting, as is the museum in New York at Ground Zero (you may want a whole day, including the time for processing it all afterwards—though you can do the museum to a healthy extent in a few hours). Shanksville, in particular, is inspiring and humbling and soul-shaking. And a place of resolve, where it can still be felt, as Mr. Lincoln said nearly a century and a half earlier, about a hundred miles away, that those dead shall not have died in vain.
I can’t speak for any of the other countless memorials. But they’re out there. All over the place. You stumble upon them now and then, especially in New York. They, like so much from that day, surround us.
But pilgrimages aren’t a normal part of my 9/11. For me, most years, it usually includes watching two videos and reading one essay.
The videos:
One by ESPN on Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana. I believe it was first released around the tenth anniversary of the attacks, but I’m not positive about that. It may have been earlier.
One from a group called Road to Resilience on the remarkable boatlift that evacuated Lower Manhattan. It was released around the attacks’ tenth anniversary.
And the essay:
From the New Yorker, on Rick Rescorla, who saved hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives that day. It first came to my attention when I was in college, eleven or twelve years after it was published.
I don’t know if you have a 9/11 “routine,” or if that’s a normal thing to have. But it is, of course, a day to be remembered, and while it will probably recede into something of a normal day for Generation Z and beyond, just as Pearl Harbor Day became a normal day for post-World War II generations, it isn’t a normal day for the country yet. And most significantly, since this date in 2001, it hasn’t been a normal life for millions of Americans affected much more directly than a nearly-seven-year-old in Illinois.
Remember them. Remember the dead. Feel the weight of the day. It’s all around us, but it only reminds us like this once a year.
