For the first time since 9/11 on its anniversary, I found myself thinking deeply about it today. Maybe it was that jawdropping Miracle Mattress ad (no link; it doesn’t need anymore hits), maybe it was because I had been working on an anniversary-themed Wikipedia article over the last few days, maybe it’s because enough time has passed that we can begin to take it all in, and most likely a combination of all three.
Over the past few days, I found myself recalling my movements (or lack thereof) that day: taking our then three-year-old son to preschool, noticing the first thing up that morning when, on the way back, I stopped to collect empty cans for return at one of our local gas stations as was my habit at that time and noticed the Sikh owners standing out front by the pumps looking very concerned, my 10-year-old Honda Accord’s dysfunctional radio suddenly coming back to life on the way home and getting the idea from the DJs’ conversations that something big had happened, something not good, racing home to where my wife was on the computer upstairs and trying to see if we could find anything online; again, it should have told us something when it took ages, even given the dialup connection we had at the time (like about 98% of Americans then) to load a short Yahoo! (Who?) brief about some plane having crashed into the World Trade Center buildings in New York City 70 miles to the south, then deciding to flip the TV on and only being able to get one channel due to the iattack. We now keep our computer downstairs and have effectively merged the living and TV rooms; the old-style CRT we watched the towers collapse on is gone, as is most of the furniture that was in that room at the time. But I can still look over my left shoulder and see the door lintel I was leaning against as I mentally told myself over and over I wasn’t seeing this I wasn’t seeing thousands of people die in seconds. At a building I’d last seen catching the golden light of sunset a couple of weeks before as we descended the Lincoln Tunnel helix in Weehawken to celebrate my mother’s birthday at a Midtown restaurant.
I remember that I had to make my cream-of-wheat breakfast over again a couple of hours later because it had gone cold. I remember how nightmarish it seemed as the crawls on TV told us how New York City had effectively been closed, how all US air traffic had been grounded, how the Pentagon had been attacked and another jet downed in rural PA, and how Bush wasn’t anywhere to be seen in public, flying around the country in Air Force One with a fighter-jet escort while it fell to Rudy Giuliani to have the best day of his political career calming the country down. I went out again only once, for some reason I don’t remember, and saw that our local newspaper had printed a one-page extra on the attacks (probably the last time that will ever happen). I remember looking up at the blue sky and the way the clouds just stayed put in it, a taunting reminder of what a beautiful day it had been. I don’t really remember much about that evening, other than Bush finally getting somewhere where he could give a barely coherent speech. I don’t remember when I finally went to sleep. But I still have the New York Times I went out and bought the next morning. Somewhere up in our attic.
Today I dropped our son, now 18, off at the residential program he attends about 50 miles away from our house around noon, and spent the rest of the day, a September 11 just as beautiful and clear in the Hudson Valley as that one had been, taking photographs and hiking up Stissing Mountain in Dutchess County near where his school is, taking in the stupendous view from its firetower. “It’s a beautiful day … don’t you let it get away,” U2 had reminded us even before then, and given that the days when summer is fading seem to always be the most precious I probably would have taken that advice no matter what the date was. But the fact that it was the 15th 9/11 made me dwell more than usual on how you make the most of these days, because you never know how many of them you have.
I couldn’t help but inject that observation into a few conversations I had later in the day, because it wasn’t getting off my mind. Where I ultimately went was the idea of wanting to say something to that America of 15 years ago this moment, and realizing that before I got to sleep tonight I was going to have to write it and publish it somewhere. Here was the best place I thought of.
As I thought of what to say, I kept coming back to one of last year’s biggest hit songs, Adele’s “Hello” and that line about “hello from the other side”. I listened to it again, several time, and realized how much of it is lyrically appropriate. So, my message is a hypothetical email to every American inbox that night, with the video attached (which of course is going to take a long time to download since everyone only has dialup). I have embedded the video; the idea being that the recipients are intended to listen to the song as they read.
I didn’t want get too much into politics, and giving away spoilers for the future is a very serious breach of Internet etiquette.
FROM: america@91116
TO: america@91101
Hello, it’s us. You, Yourselves, fifteen years after this horrible day. Yes, you made it. Hello from the other side. Yes, there is one. Eventually. You’ll have to decide for yourselves when you’ve got there.
We know you’re there, hunkering down in front of your TVs terrified to leave that little bubble around the couch, wondering why you had to run for shelter with the promise of a brave new world unfurling beneath the clear blue sky. You’re cooped up there, not because you think the terrorists will attack you if you go outside, but because right now it’s the only place where it seems there’s any reality, terrible though it us. When you run down to the convenience store for milk or gas, after all, it seems, you ask yourself, how can this still be here like it was yesterday, like today didn’t happen?
We can tell you that here on September 11, 2016, we had a good day. We remembered all the dead you’re still counting—said their names, saluted, had moments of silence. At the Pentagon. At the World Trade Center. Yes, we didn’t leave them empty places of perpetual morning, though we have built memorials. Lots of them.
And we know you want to read this message. You won’t know this song, but it’s our Long Distance Dedication to you (Cherish that … Casey won’t last forever, as you know).
But at the same time you really don’t want to. You don’t want to think about what kind of people you’d have to have become to survive this and move on.
They say that time’s supposed to heal you, but we haven’t done a lot of healing. It feels to us like we’ve been running ever since, and only now just had the time to catch our breath, turn around, and see how far we’ve gotten. Farther than we thought. And maybe farther than we really wanted to.
Hello, can you hear us? We’re in California/New York/Wisconsin/wherever dreaming of who we used to be.
We’d forgotten how it felt when we were younger. And free.
We’ve forgotten how it felt before the world fell at our feet.
There’s a million miles of difference between us.
So hello from the other side.
You want to know, did this happen again? No, not here, not exactly like this. We can’t go into details. But you haven’t seen the end of things happening here in this country that, as we say, you can’t unsee. You haven’t yet buried the last dead you wonder if you should have had to bury at all.
We must have called a thousand times, to tell you we’re sorry for everything we’ve done. But when we call you never seem to be home.
So hello from the other side ...
Don’t get us wrong; there have been many good things to have happened as well. Again we can’t go into them. But they will be things that you never thought would happen. Just like what just happened today, except with joy rather than sadness.
We’re sorry, it’s so typical of us to talk about ourselves. We hope you’re well; did you ever make it out of that day where all those horrible things happened?
The truth is you’re not alone in worrying about what you might have to become to move on. We’ve been doing that ever since.
And honestly, while you’re not having a good day, our 9/11 was a good day in a bad year. No, nothing like your day has happened again, like we’ve said, but … well, even if we could talk about it we probably wouldn’t want to, and you wouldn’t believe us. And you’re too traumatized at the moment to laugh at us in disbelief. It wouldn’t be right, for either of us.
And it’s not just us, tbh. It’s the world.
Perhaps in some way we actually envy you … you had just one event, one horrible fateful deadly day, to get you used to a world that was never going to be the same, but at least stayed the same never the same for a while. As for us. we seem to feel like we’re going into uncharted territory every other day. Newly uncharted territory that we didn’t even know existed two days before.
We sent this message to help you out, but maybe it occurs to us now we’re looking for some ourselves. Try to keep some of what you can salvage from yesterday and share it when you get here.
Please.
Hello from the other side.