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Remembering September 11
By Sam Harper '78
I
was driving my 13-year-old son to school. It was overcast. I was wearing
blue jeans. His shoes were untied. My knee was sore from hiking the day
before. The car smelled faintly of spearmint gum. At 7:45 a.m., Pacific
Standard Time, I turned on the radio. I have no memory of the rest of our
drive, until we arrived at school. My son was crying. I snapped off the
radio, hugged him and said, “We’re going to be okay.” I wasn’t sure
that was true.
Pieces
of memories crowd the tragic days in my life. When John F. Kennedy was shot,
I was in a second grade classroom. My teacher made the announcement. She had
dark tearstains on her brown shirt. It was cloudy for the rest of the day.
Physical education was cancelled. My father didn’t drink that night.
When
a “Special Report” interrupted the game show I was watching to announce
that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot, I was eating a TV dinner. The
pork was mealy. It was raining. There was tin foil on the antennae.
I
was losing at “Monopoly” when I heard that my grandfather had died. I
was playing with the top hat. The rug was orange.
Our
lives are punctuated by tragedy, each event challenging our faith, our
identity, and our relationship to reality. When a loved one is taken
prematurely by cancer, or never emerges from a foggy stretch of Interstate,
or is forced to choose between burning to death or jumping into space 107
floors above New York City, the assumptions that define our daily lives come
into question. Suddenly, even the words we use for comfort -- “We’re
going to be okay,” “I’ll see you later,” “Everything’s going to
be alright”-- seem unreliable.
So,
an accounting takes place. I remember the things I can count on, the things
I know are real -- My son’s untied shoes, the smell of the car. I suppose
these details provide a framework for the emotion that accompanied my
horror, something to believe in, a place to start again, a foundation for
rebuilding.
I
returned to my daily tasks on September 11th, doing the dishes, taking out
the garbage, reading to the children, hoping they’d provide some relief
from sadness. Routine heals, I thought. But this tragedy was unlike any
other. A woman who was aboard Flight 11 lived across the street from my
son’s best friend. A man to whom we sold a sailboat over the summer was
killed in the south tower. There were husbands left without wives, children
left without fathers, cities left without fireman and policemen, the unsung
heroes of our daily lives were dead, wounded or at risk. It shook me deeply.
I looked at their faces in the newspapers for an explanation. Why were they
taken? Where did they go? Who would be next?
There
is no rational explanation for a tragedy of this scale. There is only the
kind of helplessness that causes great pieces of self-definition to fall
away. Things that we thought were true, things that we thought important
were gone by mid-day. Baseball, movies, restaurant food, that little extra
roll of fat that we’ve been trying to get rid of it, none of it mattered.
“Family,” “priorities,” “caring for one another,” “love,”
and “perspective” were the words I heard most among my fellow bereaved.
Like the rescue workers, we were all digging for evidence that things were
going to be all right.
In
that search for meaning, an entire nation has gathered together as family,
one people, nakedly heartbroken, expressing love, grief, concern for the
wounded, for the dead, and for each other. Ground Zero is us. We aren’t
just standing in the ruins, we are the ruins. We are a living memory of that
day. All we have left is each other and the last reliable word -- Love.
And
that’s all we need to rebuild.
© Sam Harper. A writer who lives in California with his wife and
three sons, Sam can be reached at samharper@earthlink.net
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