September 11, 2011
I did not intend to be drawn into today’s ceremonies. Over the last few days, I’ve done my remembering: how I first heard that something inexplicable was happening; what I first saw on television; what I did, not just on September 11 but in the days that followed. I have counted the degrees of separation—a friendly acquaintance who worked as a bond trader and went to more than 30 funerals, a woman I knew who lost her fiancé and sang “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places” at his funeral—and each degree was a blessing and a source of guilt. I remember finding it so hard to take in, that airplanes had crashed into buildings, that I watched the film footage over and over until it finally became real and I couldn’t bear to see it again. If it took 100 watchings, I doubt I’ve seen it the 101st time. I turn away now when I know it’s coming.
I’ve remembered all of that and all of the details and tears, and I told myself I did not need to—did not want to—watch or listen today.
But here I am. You too?
This morning, I fed the dogs early and went back to bed. I dreamed I had a houseful of people and I wanted nothing more than to serve them tea. I made pot after pot, and then couldn’t find them, wanted to use my grandmother’s hand-painted tea cups, and couldn’t find them.
When I woke, I turned on the radio to NPR. I heard the first moment of silence, the second moment of silence. As so many have in years since, I wondered how we got from there to here.
Our common humanity is a stone soup, made of strange and unlikely and contradictory ingredients. One of the common ingredients must be a desire or need to know a thing and its rightness, and then to possess that rightness. Once we’ve got it, individually, we find as if by magnetism other individuals who possess the same rightness. Then the barriers go up. If those of us on the inside of our barriers have the Right with us, then you on the outside can only have the Wrong.
I have strong opinions on politics and government and how our country should be shaped, and I’ve been inside the barrier. Still am, I must admit. In recent years, I’ve tried to open my understanding. I try to get it, that people inside the other barriers feel and believe and care as deeply as I do. They aren’t stupid, or ignorant, or thick. It’s not always easy to remember that—wouldn’t Forrest Gump’s mother say, thick is as thick does?—but I do try.
The sweetest ingredient in our stone soup is generosity of spirit, and it must be most easily absorbed and spread throughout our bodies, too, because we spark so fast to another’s woe and sorrow. We feel it, and share it, and that is our humanity. Every day as on September 11, 2001.
Will you have green tea, or black? I do have herbal.
Tower Two
slits skin
or glass
and steel
the same.
heartbeat
pumps blood
paper
and flame.
(Nora Gaskin Esthimer, September 2001)
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