20 years

It's September 10, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the last normal day of American life. Maybe that’s an overstatement, but I don’t think it is. In any case, I think we can agree that 9/11/2001 was the end of the 20th century America that I grew up in, for better or for worse. 

The three-month-old baby who I was nursing on 9/11/2001 is now 20 years old. I used to laugh at him and his friends when they were in middle school and high school, when they’d post their annual 9/11 "Never Forget" social media updates. They were too young to remember in the first place. My younger son wasn’t even born on 9/11. For both of them, that day is American history. They ask us what we remember; where we were when we heard the news, what the rest of the day was like, did everything really completely change? 

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Now it’s September 11. I feel like there were a few years after the last major milestone anniversary when the date September 11 would not automatically prompt a memory of September 11, 2001; when you could look at your calendar and see that you had an appointment or an event on September 11 and you wouldn’t automatically think “9/11.” Maybe it was just the passage of time that made the date less significant. Pearl Harbor was almost 80 years ago, and December 7 is an afterthought now. For some people, young enough not to have had parents or grandparents who fought in WW2, it’s not even that. And maybe September 11 will someday be just another American history milestone day. It will be remembered by teachers and students and historians, but the anniversary will pass mostly unremarked other than with a footnote mention on nightly news shows. 

But maybe it's more than just time elapsed since 9/11/2001 that has caused the anniversary to fade into the current events background. The last few years have been so chaotic that September 11 has just gotten lost in the shuffle of political scandals and international incidents and of course a global pandemic with many times more victims than 9/11. The four years between 2017 and 2021 were a lot. We all know one reason, one person to be specific, why that is. But that one person was not the only reason. The fire had already been built. He was just the match. 

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It’s September 12 now. It’s Sunday morning and I’m not going to Mass. I haven’t been in several weeks. Maybe next week. Maybe I’ll get back to church next week. 

I watched a little bit of TV news yesterday morning. Of course, it was wall-to-wall coverage of the 9/11 anniversary, as expected and fitting. Later, as my son and I were driving to his baseball game, we listened to NPR’s “It’s Been a Minute,” which was also covering the 9/11 20th anniversary, as well as the 20th anniversary of the release of Mariah Carey’s “Glitter,” because why not?

Sam Sanders was interviewing a journalist and devoted Mariah Carey fan whose name I can’t remember. This woman was a senior at Stuyvesant High School on 9/11/2001, and she woke up that morning with plans to rush to the record store as soon as school was dismissed to buy her copy of “Glitter.” Instead, she and her friends spent the morning walking as far uptown as possible, to get away from the burning, soon-to-collapse towers and to try to find a safe place to shelter in the event of another attack. “That is what it was like for a few days,” I told my son. “It wasn’t just the shock. Everyone was afraid, too. Everyone was afraid that there would be another attack.” 

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But we weren’t afraid all the time, either. There was the warm and generous spirit of September 12; a short period of time during which we were all Americans, all united in outrage against the attackers and sympathy for the victims. That was what commentators and editorial writers tried to remind us of in the ensuing months and years, as people began to retreat to their political corners. “The nation is divided,” they said. “The nation is polarized as never before. If only we could remember the spirit of September 12.” Ha ha ha! Little did anyone know that those were the good old days. 

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It's Monday now. Later on Sunday, I read a blistering September 12 takedown, an editorial asserting that the so-called spirit of September 12 was a myth, that it never happened, that fear and anger and Islamophobia were the only post-9/11 public emotions that the writer could remember. Certainly he had a point, but I remember that time,too, and there really was a short season of kindness and generosity. People paid strangers' checks in restaurants. People allowed others to go first in line. People actually cared about their fellow American humans, without regard to party affiliation. It was short-lived, but it was real, and it was nice while it lasted. 

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Now it's Monday afternoon. Lots of things have changed in the last twenty years, but two things never change: Life goes on, and time passes quickly. I worked all morning like I do every Monday and now I'm waiting in the parking lot at the dentist's office. Six months since my last checkup and 20 years since 9/11/2001. Where did the last six months go? Where did the last 20 years go? It’s later than we think. It’s always later than anyone thinks.