untitled

So I’m going to tell you something embarassing. Every year since 2002, I’ve stifled this ludicrous impulse to say “Happy September 11th”, although I never seem to catch myself in time before saying it inside my head. Seconds later I always think, sheesh but that’s inappropriate.
It’s inappropriate but it stems from something true, I think. That’s how we commemorate holidays, you know? Happy Halloween, Happy Fourth of July, Happy President’s Day. I mean, why is it a happy President’s Day? You start to think of the word Happy as a meaningless addition to a named holiday, simply a way to say “It’s ____ Day!” My President’s Days and Memorial Days aren’t any Happier than other days except usually I’m off work, which is swell. So what does this word Happy mean and why does it spring so undesired to my mind in the morning every year, usually when I’m pouring the water into my tea cup and realize the date? It’s definitely not a Happy day in September, but what else do you say? Solemn September 11th, perhaps?
Every year, too, I try and think of the right way to mark the day, since tagging it with Happy isn’t really winning awards. I didn’t lose anyone personally close to me in the attacks. I had some friends who were running away from downtown but they are all physically fine. In 2002, I celebrated (see? can’t say that either), well, commemorated by taking the day off, doing things that brought me pleasure. When I was still working in the city, with a view downtown, I’d always stare out my window at nothingness, at the absence of what I was noting, perhaps even grieving if that’s not too dramatic a word. I’ve never been to the World Trade Center site (I still can’t call it Ground Zero) except to walk past in on my way to that stupidly inconvenient movie theatre in Battery Park.
Most years, I’ve simply let the day pass, noting it in the morning over tea by watching the reading of the names. I like the reading of the names. I think there couldn’t be a more simple, powerful way for us to remember what really happened on September 11th – a lot of people lost their lives. I like hearing the names of strangers because in hearing it, I am honoring them without any unnecessarily dramatic show of grief. There is power in words and names, and there always has been. I switch off the television when people start eulogizing but I always listen to the names.
Odd, too, is that I never cry on September 11th. Odd, I mean, for someone as highly, almost excessively emotional as I am. I mean, I cried in Hocus Pocus, people. I cry at McDonald’s commercials. But somehow I am left sombre and dry-eyed on 9/11.
Perhaps because I am actually pretty contrary by nature and things that are supposed to evoke a very specific type of emotion usually find me resisting. Or perhaps because I feel like there are enough legitimately heartrending tears flowing in the world, even six years later, as terrible fallout from that day, and mine aren’t needed – only my attention and my awareness is required. Or perhaps because I am just not moved to cry, I think every year, and that makes me feel heartless when I know I’m not.
So I don’t cry, I don’t have a tradition – every year I approach it differently but always with the same reservations, the same conflicting reactions. I suspect that other New Yorkers are in this boat with me. I say New Yorkers not because I am a 9/11 snob (and they are out there, people who think you can’t have any grief for the occasion if you were not physically here) but because for us, it wasn’t just the horror of the lives lost but also the horror of the gash left on our landscape. The air pollution and the fear and the jarring change in people’s days and lives were these almost insulting aftereffects of all that grief. Aftereffects which even in the shadow of the larger tragedy had their own consequences.
I think, too, well, I suspect, that a lot of New Yorkers have gleaned this sense of perverse pride after 9/11, pride in the way people bonded and strengthened, pride to see all those stereotypes about our unfeelingness shattered once and for all, pride even to see the rest of the country stop berating us and start rejoicing us. It’s a dirty sort of pride, perhaps we wish we could have had all that camaraderie without the towers’ collapse, but it is nonetheless pride.
So we are left with no Hallmark phrase to recognize the day, the sense that 9/11′s aftershocks have not stopped yet, and this weird perverse pride and possessiveness about our town/our tragedy. Well, I know that’s where I’m left. How do you neatly package bedfellows like grief, resentment, defiance, disconnectedness? They don’t fit together neatly. I feel every year as though I have been given an extra hand and I need to use it for something but I don’t know what. I already had two hands! What am I supposed to do with this other one?
And I think maybe a lot of New Yorkers who are here every year and passing through and by the city’s shows of remembrance, also are a little bewildered at what, if anything, is asked of them. It isn’t often that I feel heartless, or feel as though I am not engaging enough in the world around me. But today always leaves me a little disconnected from everything but the immediacy of my fellow subway travelers, to whom I’d never say Happy September 11th anymore than I’d say Merry Christmas. I see people around me and all I can think is that at some point today we’re all thinking about the same thing. Is that a commemoration?
I guess that’s my answer. I don’t need to say anything or do anything, since everyone knows it’s there. Maybe that’s the only way I’ve found to mark the day – just riding on the subway and knowing it’s there.
[Edited to note, after inspection: this is all bullshit! Well, no, it's not, but apparently, I do commemorate the day some years, unsurprisingly, by writing about it.]