Anniversary reflections

[saxikath]

Today is September 11.

Once, that was just a sentence, the simple answer to the question, "Hey, what's the date?" I suppose it never will be that simple again.

I've been struck, over the past year, how the date itself has been the shorthand for the event and its consequences. "September 11" or "9-11" has become the way we refer to the attack made on this country, and to the reverberations from it that we still feel, and probably will for a long time. It reminds me of cities in Europe, where streets and bridges and the like are often named for the dates of significant events. There's an April 24 Bridge in Lisbon (that may not be the right date, but it's something like that). Perhaps we will start to see September 11 Street or September 11 Park in this country.

Today, I don't want to hear about politics. I don't want to hear about attacks on Iraq or the "war on terrorism," pro or con. I don't want to hear people debate what it all means, "how we've changed," how we haven't changed, or how history will view this event. (How can we possibly know? It's only been a year. Even in this fast-paced, high-tech age, history takes longer than that.) We have to talk about all these things, but not today.

Today is for remembering. Today is for mourning the lost, and thinking back to the day that, whatever its long-term effects may turn out to be, shook those of us who lived through it.

Today is for remembering how people reached out to each other. That, for me, is what I want to remember about September 11 and the days that followed. How I received e-mail from a high school friend on September 12, saying "This is just to make sure you weren't flying to Los Angeles yesterday." How I visited #callahans for the first time in a couple of years, just because I needed that sense of community on a day when I sat alone in my house watching television and sitting in shock. How people set up websites for other people to check in and say "Yes, I'm ok." How I and the people in the office where I started working on September 12 would suddenly start talking, despite the fact that I didn't know any of them yet. How the members of the National Puzzlers' League checked in by e-mail. How cell phones became lifelines, or last links to loved ones before planes crashed. (I can't imagine what it was like to get one of those calls.) How people lined up for blocks to donate blood, or send supplies to exhausted firefighters. How strangers in the maritime provinces of Canada opened their homes to stranded airline passengers, and how someone on Staten Island gave refuge to the kid I grew up across the street from when he took the ferry there to get out of Manhattan after being in the WTC subway station.

It saddens me to think that our sense of community comes to the fore most dramatically only when disaster strikes, but it heartens me to know that it's there. I wish we could hold onto that sense of community, that acknowledgment that we're all in this life together. Maybe then we'd be better able to understand one another.

I feel like I'm being sappier than usual here, but I mean it. To those who lost loved ones a year ago: I cannot fathom your pain, but in some small way I share it, and I offer you my sympathy and whatever strength I can give. To those who worked to save people and to rebuild afterwards, I say thank you.

And to all my friends, I say: keep in touch. I care about you, though I'm not always very good about communicating that or staying in touch myself. I live a very solitary life these days, it sometimes seems, and I need to remember that there are people out there to whom I am connected, and who matter to me. Let's not let it take a disaster to remember those connections.