9/11 ephemera

Fifteen years, and yet ... of course the shock has dulled over time, but the events are still impossible to accept. How do you ever wrap your mind around something like that?

The previous evening, I had laid down on my bed and put my son to sleep. I was exhausted, and fell asleep in my clothes, on top of the bedcovers, with the television on. So the next morning, the sound of a woman's voice on the television speaking urgently is what woke me, and I rose into wakefulness, eventually aware that a building with a smoking hole was on the television screen. The time was just before 6 AM PST, three hours difference from the East to West Coast, about fifteen minutes before I had to wake my son because he was catching a very early bus to school in those days, and as it turned out, I drove him to school because we were late because as I was bringing him his breakfast, the bowl in my hand, and I crossed in front of the television in the living room, I saw the second plane go into the other tower.

Then the third plane into the Pentagon: people may or may not know that San Diego is the largest naval seaport in the world, there are every variety of ship and boat anchored in our bay, where at the time I lived literally two blocks away from the Naval Station. So the next day when I got on the freeway in the morning, the traffic was bottled up everywhere, because there are military installations all over San Diego, and they had raised their security levels to the maximum so the cars I was stalled behind in the traffic all bore some sort of sticker ID, and the people inside those cars were reporting in, to the various locations from Imperial Beach to Coronado where the SEALS are to La Jolla, to their ships, to the medical center, to the Marine Depot, to the submarine base, and I could look into those cars and see people who I knew before everybody else in America knew would be going to fight the people who had done this, and I knew and they knew that some of them, a lot of them, would not come home, these people alive as I was then in that moment. And there were people dead in the Pentagon that these people knew and maybe I knew, and surely lots of people in San Diego knew. So even though we were way over here all the way across the country on the West Coast, yeah, it was personal. There were lots of changes, and events, and ceremonies, and memorials in the following days and months and years. The items in the picture above are things I happened to collect and still keep in a folder.

Life goes on. People live and die, babies are born, teenagers rule, the world slowly turns from day to night to day, from season to season, year to year. Those of us alive that day who witnessed those events are the ones who bear the remembering and the forgetting, and sometimes it's like Rossetti's sonnet, sad when you remember, smile when you forget.

Ephemera. What a strange word.