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A Clear
Day The memorials that sprung up happened overnight: First some candles, then flowers, letters, photocopied missing person signs, art by kids. Soon Union Square was a patchwork of offerings, and people congregated like reverent churchgoers to pay their respects.
Even visiting dignitaries came: Jacques Chirac arrived, a few days after the attacks. My husband was sitting on the steps in the park and saw him get out of his car, walk regally to the display, kneel, and say a silent prayer. Now as I somnambulate through this unfamiliar Monday, as clear and crisp as that one five years ago, as I move through my usual family discourses — over pools of syrup and Cheerios, presiding over which shoes are OK for the first day of preschool and other pertinent negotiations — puttering through the suburban errands I invent for myself and my petty concerns, today, I'm bothered. Memory has been like a bird pecking at my shoulder all week, reclaiming the past, reminding me of loss suffered, and people not forgotten. Union Square, a few days later: A young person has colored a picture of two towers, with smoke rising, all pinks and purples, into the sky. An adult, presumably, has written, the way we adults take dictation from the young, "This is the magic dust that carries people to the stars." I'm five months pregnant with my daughter. "I'm sure your baby will be beautiful", says a woman next to me. Guarded New Yorkers both, safe and tough, we hold each other. Five years. Smoke, rubble, teapots and diamonds covered with dust, for days and weeks. A whole city lying in mourning, a whole people lost. And I didn't see today coming. Do you ever do that? Feel a sense encroaching as an anniversary mounts, as your body remembers, and worries, doubts, gnashes over some undefined concerns? And then the day arrives, and maybe you think, "Oh, of course." If I were in New York, this would make sense. Other people would be talking, remembering. People here like to talk about where they were when it happened, to process the moment as a defining one for their culture, their society, themselves. The front-fold of the local paper told me last week, "How 9/11 changed us." I didn't know that could be defined. For New Yorkers, "The Events of 9/11" carried on for months. If you were there, you smelled the fires that burned until January. If you were there, you changed everything about your day-to-day, and in the months that accrued, you were happy if just one more little thing came back into normalcy. People changed their routes to and from work and home, lost their apartments, lost their jobs. Rescuers re-tooled as finders of remains, and they sifted endlessly for bits of people and things, exposing themselves to physical and environmental hazards every day. Funerals followed funerals, and the dead kept speaking, revealing little threads of unraveled conversation, a tapestry, tethered together, stretched, the city — I'll borrow from Sexton — "with a hole in its cheek left open." Today, I say a prayer for Tom, and send love to his wife and their son. Today, I say a prayer for Billy, and send love to his sister and his family. Today, I say a prayer for Jane, and send love to her mother, who lives alone now. Today, I say thank you to God that Richie wasn't scheduled to work that day. Today, I say thank you to God that Rocco called in sick. Today, I say thank you to God that my beautiful husband was not in the subway underneath the towers any earlier or any later. I thank God that my husband made his way home that day, tired, scared, searching, but he made it home. For comfort, I retreat to my role as a wife and a mother and worker. And I live my life and I suppose I should say something pleasing like how grateful I feel that I'm OK and my family is fine. But I'm still tender from the bruising my adoptive city took. As the NYC memorials came down, after just a week or so, I remember feeling that it was somehow wrong to remove it all — that we were still grieving, that we couldn't possibly move on yet. The items were boxed up, preserved for posterity, I suppose. But the weight of that spontaneous expression of collective grief meant more to me than any bureaucratized architecture or public planning ever could. It's an everyday experience for far too many people in the world, to live with fear. Today I'm not grateful to be alive, or to have my family safe. On this day, I say a prayer for the families who suffer. God grant us peace. Rachael Carnes is a Eugene freelance writer.
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