I realized last night that I let the anniversary pass without any notice. I didn’t even think of it. Three years ago, on September 3rd, my dad ended it on his front porch. I remembered it last year, and the year before, but this year my energies revolved around hurricane Fay, Hanna, and now even Ike, though Ike appears to be no threeat to the east coast of Florida.
It’s somewhat ironic, because my trip to Daytona after my father died coincided with the looming presence of a category 1 hurricane just miles away from my beachfront room at the Thunderbird Motel. You might think I’d remember things just by that coincidence, but I did not. No re-hashing of that day, my incoherent reaction to the news, the subsequent trips to Florida, the happy memory of the impromptu wake which occured when all the residents of my dad’s apartment building came home from work within minutes of each other. That was a nice moment, all of us talking and laughing about the funny things my dad did and said.
That memory offset by the 21 gun salute at the funeral, a military ritual which would have been moving had the crack of gunshot not been the last sound my dad ever heard. The sudden realizatioin that we were about to hear gunshots, I think it scared me. Not for fear of the sound but for fear that maybe the guns were aimed at me, if not that day than at some minutet of some hour on some future day. I didn’t mean to but I turned my head like one would when their assassin entered the room.
I did not light up the twin towers in my kitchen until last night, when I noticed that the anniversary had passed.
I don’t feel anything bad about Missing the anniversary. I am not much for anniversaries, nor for holidays or birthdays. I always remember my mother’s birthday, but rarely did I remember my father’s. Somehow the spark of nostalgia that inspires people to remember birthdays and anniversaries has rarely lit in me, though I am usually charged for New Years. New Years is a arbitrary holiday pretty much everyone can agree on, and I like to imagine the world-wide Y2K festivities as unique in world history.
Another anniversary beckons, too, and I might have forgotten it too save for the retrospective media coverage.
I remember thinking years back that I would never tire of hearing stories from survivors of that day, or stories from people who were around the buildings when it happened. My own direct connection starts with seeing and hearing the grinding engines of the first plane as it flew over my head as I walked up the stairs from the 34th Street subway station. I went with some others to Ground Zero on the following Monday, in what turned into a nearly 24-hours-awake journey through a bizarre patchwork of police, military and media checkpoints that made everything from Chinatown on down look like what I guess it was: a war zone.
My hunger for other people’s stories came from a need to comprehend the incomprehensible not through infinite media scrutiny but through the words of people I know. The stories keep coming, though my hunger for them has abated. Several people I have met this year had their jobs erased by the events of that day, others lost their apartments to dust, many have moved from New York and are unlikely ever to come back. I do not imagine that I will ever find a shortage of these stories, as the tentacles of what happened that day spread only into the future of this region.
I can not walk around lower Manhattan without overhearing talk of that day, and with the anniversary approaching it once again becomes impossible to walk *anywhere* without hearing about it.
There is much I want to say about it, but I will not say it here, and I will probably not say it anywhere. Ever. For risk of falling into the trap of using the events of that day as material for my agendas. I don’t have any agenda, but you can’t talk about some things without sounding like you do. The events of that day have been conspicuously reverse cherry-picked by some.
And fuck if I know what I’m talking about any more. It is suddenly too loud here for me to think.
….
Funny joke I saw in the Times today:
Q: Knock knock
A: Who’s there?
Q: 9/11
A: 9/11 who?
Q: You said you’d never forget.
….
I know what I learned from these events. I learned that the past is gone. Forever. One can spend so much time dwelling on the past that they neglect to have a present, or a future. The past informs the present, but without a proper and diligent regard for the present I think the future is lost.
Holy Christ, I am at a bar typing this, and as I finished the last paragraph I looked to my right and spotted a picture of the fucking World Trade Center. It is actually a picture of the Empire State Building, with the Twin Towers in the background, but still. Yeesh.
….
