9/11

Back at the old homestead

A quiet day at home, mostly finishing up a few chores and some cleaning, and watching more episodes of The Office. (I’m making good headway into Season 3.) I toyed with the idea of going to see The American, but didn’t, just hung around the house.

Nor did I go up the block to join the neighborhood block party. A few weeks ago, they sent around a somewhat passive-aggressive flier for the party, notifying us that because “some people” had disapproved, only the other end of the block would be closed off to traffic. I guess at this end, we’re just fun-hating spoilsports. Block parties around here have always been kind of an other-end-of-the-block thing anyway, and nowadays, with only a few exceptions, that’s where all the families with young children live.

I don’t know if they intentionally picked September 11 as the day of the party. It does seem a little weird. Though I also ran into a local “harvest festival” that had roads blocked today, and only one small gathering at the local flagpole commemorating the day. To be honest, aside from a few posts on Twitter, and the fact that they had some of the memorial services on TV at the deli when I went to buy lunch, I might not even have known today was September 11.

Actually, that’s not true. As Thud points out, those who most angrily declare that we’ve “forgotten 9/11” do so simply “because we don’t agree with them,” or because they’ve forgotten what actually happened that day, or learned the wrong lesson from it. (Like, oh, that all Islam is evil, or that burning Korans is a good idea.) I actually started this weblog a couple of days after the attacks. I have family and friends who were in Manhattan at the time, though thankfully no one who has hurt. Even as it’s become a day that, nine years later, I don’t dwell on for every moment, it’s also a day I’m not likely to forget.

Though it occurs to me now, a lot of the kids I saw up and down the block, headed to or from the block party? Plenty of them weren’t alive that day, or were too young to really remember it. That seems a little weird to me.

Anyway, after dinner this evening, I drove to the airport to pick up my parents. I may have mentioned, they were in London for the week. There was a little confusion about which terminal they were in — I was waiting around in Terminal 2 for about an hour, then I got a call saying they were waiting in Terminal 3 — but everybody’s home now safe. Our dog has already ripped up the stuffed Beefeater dog they bought him. Which is, of course, what he does to pretty much all his toys.

And that’s it. Tomorrow’s my last day off before heading back to work. On the one hand, I’m looking forward to it. On the other, I was just starting to get the hang of this “vacation” thing.

(Actually, I think the next time I take a vacation, I need to go somewhere.)

Falling Man

Now I’m calling all citizens from all over the world
This is Captain America calling
I bailed you out when you were down on your knees
So will you catch me now I’m falling — The Kinks, “Catch Me Now I’m Falling”

It’s not like I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about September 11. We live in a world so permeated by what happened that day — and moreover by the less fortunate aftershocks — that not thinking about it is all but impossible. (Though even Rudy “a Noun, a Verb, 9/11” Giuliani seems to be trying.) It’s just that I haven’t gone out of my way to relive those events, the way it felt that morning and in the immediate aftermath. I haven’t watched the documentaries or the interviews with survivors, or read any of the countless books written about the attacks. (The closest I’ve come is recently watching Spike Lee’s masterful 25th Hour, in which, as Roger Ebert notes, “the shadow of 9/11 hangs over [everything].”) I haven’t avoided it, but it occurs to me I also haven’t sought it out.

I wasn’t in New York at the time. In fact, it wasn’t until after noon that I learned that anything had happened. I wandered into a now defunct arcade in downtown State College, PA, and heard about the attacks on the radio. In retrospect, it seems incredible that I remained unaware for those first few hours, especially since the rest of the day was spent in frantic phone calls and watching the news. I remember being overwhelmed by it all, not knowing what to say or how to say it, and being just blindsided with grief*.

It’s maybe no wonder that I’ve avoided those movies and books.

Still, last week I read (and I’d say largely enjoyed) Don DeLillo’s 2007 book Falling Man, which right off the bat throws you back into that bright September morning:

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under the cars.

The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.

The “he” there is Keith Neudecker, and the rest of the story plays out over the next few years against the backdrop of his estranged marriage to Lianne. It’s in many respects a modest, day-to-day domestic drama, and I think it bothered some critics — notably Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times — that it wasn’t a more ambitious, more definitive 9/11 book. But is such a thing even possible? That day, and more importantly our fumbling and failed attempts to make sense of it, are never far from the center of DeLillo’s book. It’s not as panoramic or expansive as his novel Underworld, it’s true, but I think the sheer enormity and immediacy of the 9/11 attacks would make that kind of book difficult to write, much less read.

So this isn’t the definitive book on the subject, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t full of some terrific writing:

She wanted to disbelieve. She was an infidel in current geopolitical parlance. She remembered how her father, how Jack’s face went bright and hot, appearing to buzz with electric current after a day in the sun. Look around us, out there, up there, ocean, sky, night, and she thought about this, over coffee and toast, how he believed that God infused time and space with pure being, made stars give light. Jack was an architect, an artist, a sad man, she thought, for much of his life, and it was the kind of sadness that yearns for something intangible and vast, the one solace that might dissolve his paltry misfortune.

I think my pleasure in the book came precisely because it isn’t the definitive book on the subject, because instead of trying to make sense of it all, it simply lets us watch others trying to make sense of it all. And that, in the end, may be the best any of us can do.

* None of it personal, thankfully. None of the family or friends I had in New York were at the World Trade Center that morning.