An Anniversary, Quietly Noted

The anniversary of September 11th came on a Saturday this year and, as with most Saturdays, I was at Claverack Cottage. It was a day of sleeping late, reading, doing errands, buying fruit at a roadside stand. It was a day of playing cd?s in the car, not listening to the radio.

It was a day of specifically closing out the world. The media was full of reports following the Memorial Services that were happening in New York. AndD.C. And Pennsylvania.

In New York there was frustration because heavy rains had flooded the hole and forced the Services to adjust. Grandparents and parents were reading the names of the thousands that were dead.

I did not listen because I did not want to listen. I did not watch because I did not want to watch.

Standing on the deck, watching the creek flow by, I bowed my head and prayed for the souls of all who had died that day and prayed also for all who had survived. Listening or watching would not have made me feel more than I felt. 9/11 is alive inside me.

It takes only a moment when I close my eyes to take myself back to standing on the corner of Spring and West Broadway watching the first Tower burn in the last few minutes of innocence left to all of us: a terrible, terrible accident had happened.

But it was not an accident. Not it, not the second tower, not the Pentagon, not the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.

This was the day that the world changed, for all of us. A pre-meditated act of mass assassination changed the shape of history. It was a moment like the killing of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, a moment that launched a new direction for the world, a violent one.

Since then, there has been much talk by neo-cons and conservatives and historians ? Patrick Buchanan being the most recent -- about 9/11 as the day the direction of America turned, forever, irrevocably.

It does not matter whether you agree or not with the actions our government has taken in response to that event. It was that event that caused reaction.

That event?

Everything in our world is now pre 9/11 or post 9/11.

Recently I was asked if we had purchased Claverack Cottage as a result of 9/11?

We love our home and are grateful that it came into our lives unfettered by the fear that followed, a place to be embraced and not as a place to literally escape.

We all live with the aftereffects.

Tripp, who saw the second plane hit the second building, has yet to fly again though we are now planning a trip that will require flying. He, who used to be asleep before the door was closed, has armed himself with good drugs.

We live with it in the fear that is felt every time a subway is held for unknown reasons or there is too LOUD a sound that pierces through the cacophony that is New York.

We live with it in the pause that happens when a plane seems to fly too low.

It is woven into the fabric of our lives, this event, and it seems that no new friendship is completely shaped until the experience of that day is shared.

We live it in the memories we do not dwell upon and the clear, determined way we walk past ?the hole,? attempting, like true New Yorkers, to be able to absorb anything and keep on going.

It is with us in the constant memory of the heroics of the many that day and the thousands upon thousands who committed acts of spontaneous kindness while knowing all the time the losses would be, as Giuliani said, ?unbearable.?

The city is different. It is humbler, it is kinder. No one can tell me differently, even as it attempts to return to its swaggering ways of yore. But behind the swagger there is fear and behind the fear is the event.

The legacy of 9/11 is this: the unthinkable is now thinkable.