Thine Alabaster Cities Gleam

I know people who knew people. A family on one of the planes, a restaurant worker in the one of the towers, a cousin at the Pentagon.


I haven't read any of the novels that have been written about that day. I didn't even buy Springsteen's "The Rising" but burned a copy of a friend's. Which is messed up in one place so we hardly ever listen to it.


I don't have the Lego tower anymore, the one The Child built one afternoon and brought to me.

"Do you know what this is?" she asked. She was only 7.


"It looks like one of the towers".


"It is," she said, brightly. "But see? I made a diving board. And down here is a big swimming pool. That way if something ever happens, like, oh, say, a fire or something, the people could just jump away and be safe".


She didn't see any television that day. I wouldn't let her watch. I didn't want her to see the smoke and panic and tears. She was picking up enough of that from us. Because as much as we understood that the point of terrorism is to stop you in your tracks, make you afraid to live life normally, at least on that day, they succeeded. I was good and afraid. Trying to be a big strong mommy was the only thing that kept me going. I still had tiny tremors in my hands in the late afternoon, as I sat blithely waiting for The Child to finish with dance class. It was the one day, in all those years of dance classes, that the moms, who usually just sat in their own little worlds reading magazines or tending smaller sibs, actually talked to each other.


I wasn't going to write about this today but I woke up remembering, woke up to my alarm instead of to the ring of the phone and ChouChou's terse voice saying, "Turn on your TV". That day the phone woke me from a dream wherein the Mariners, in that glorious 2001 season of 118 wins, were simply given the league championship because everyone was tired of losing to them. And then I turned on the TV and understood for the first time what it really meant to feel anguish.


I wasn't going to write about this because it's too easy to veer off into rants about our reckless government, about the thousands upon thousands who have since died in the Middle East for nothing, about generals advising we stay the course in the face of certain defeat. And I don't want to do that. And I won't. Because whatever else this anniversary has come to represent, today it is about remembering. I remember the stunning cloudless September morning, a cloudless morning that stretched from coast to coast. I remember the silent skies. It was so quiet that day that all you heard outside was birdsong. I remember that we ate take-away pizza with the cadre of family and friends who had gathered, searching for the comfort of community in the midst of such a randomly horrible day, I remember that suddenly, out of the silence, there was the roar of jets and I looked up in panic.

"Those are ours," Jim said, very softly.

Then suddenly on top of all my shattered, oogey emotions and untamed thoughts was added the notion of living in a city, on a day, when the military had to fly cover.


I suppose remembering is a pretty human characteristic and today I can't help but remember. I guess I thought writing a blog post about remembering was kinda lame and maybe even corny. Except everyone else in America is remembering today, and not just because of the memorials and moments of silence, but because this anniversary, this date, is burned on us forever.

In the end though, I decided to write for Sandra, Francie and John because I know they woke up remembering, too; remembering the ones they lost. They join thousands of others who lost loved ones, who will wake remembering and probably incredulous that it's been 6 years already. Because however much any of us have "moved on", September 11 isn't just a date. It was an event. And it seems like it was just yesterday.