nine_eleven raze maybe this is our generation's version of the jfk assassination. you remember where you were and what you were doing and who you were with when you heard about it. don't you? i do. i was folding socks and listening to bono's crumbling cavern of a voice croon about the ground giving way. my bed was my laundry basket. i was wearing jeans and this shiny beige button-up shirt i don't think i have anymore, even though it was hot enough outside to make me think summer might never end. i wouldn't wear shorts. i didn't want anyone to see that much of me. i was a few months out of high_school. i walked across the street when i knew they were done for the day and made myself run into a few people i knew who hadn't graduated yet. i didn't want to be alone. evan and dave asked me if i heard what happened. "it's crazy," they said. that was the word everyone kept using all day. the woman who interviewed me for the first job i had that made me feel a little like a grownup said it was crazy. one of the supervisors came into her office before we were finished and said it was crazy. cashiers and door-to-door salespeople who promised they weren't selling anything and even the pizza delivery guy said it was crazy. the only person who said anything different was pete. "you been watching any tv?" he asked me. "they keep showing the same movie on every channel. i gotta say, the plot's pretty thin. good special effects, though." he made a joke out of it. because it didn't matter that all of it was so far away it would never touch us. it was too horrifying to look at without flinching. twenty_one years later, i think it still is. 220911 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Grade eight. Cedar_Christian_Academy. It was after recess, and I was sitting at my desk reading a book called Erica by Eileen Pollinger instead of doing my school work, a deception facilitated by the fact that all the desks faced the wall. Ashley, the teacher's daughter, came in. She was working as a monitor for one of the elementary classes, if I remember right. I thought she said that a plane had crashed into the White House. An accident. I thought that was unfortunate, but not a reason to stop reading. But then everyone started to get up to go to the library room - part of the church, not the school, but the pastor let students read there when we were with teachers (I sneaked in unaccompanied once and when he asked my name, I said "Jennifer"). This time the TV was the desired object. I think we watched the news until lunchtime, and I'm pretty sure the channel was CNN because it had a running line of text at the bottom. I looked this up later, and it turned out that Sept. 11, 2001 was the first day CNN did this regularly. I didn't like it, because the writing was different than the reporters' words, which made focusing difficult. At some point, the upper elementary school kids were allowed in. The school, being so small, had four classes: kindergarten, grades 1-3, grades 4-6, and grades 7-11 (high school in Quebec). The new boy, an 11-year-old named Jonathan, two years my junior, made a big deal about his father having worked in the World Trade Centre...which he had, but around a year ago. So, Jonathan exclaimed, it was a miracle his family had moved to Canada! Not for the other kids. They were tired of hearing his homesick patriotism, hearing him boast of American-ness, so maybe they lumped this revelation into the same category. I did, even though I thought it was cool he was from New York. But *I* wasn't cool at school, even though I wasn't new anymore; factors like my hyper behaviour, little-kid appearance, and secondhand clothes had made me unpopular, so I'd retreated into shyness. Jonathan was loudmouthed and he'd gotten into a cultural clash with Javier early on. Jonathan said that Javier had made fun of him for being Latino and that this was racist. Javier (Canadian, with a Caribbean mother): "I can't be racist against YOU. I'm black and you're white." "Puerto Rican! American!" I don't know if Javier actually said in return, "In Canada, Spanish people are white!" but I put that line into fictional Carol Winter's mouth. (Nobody in my novel is based entirely on a real person, but Pedro was inspired by my memories of Jonathan...aaand Dominic, the kid who had a crush on me. But this isn't about him.) I also witnessed Jonathan and Javier's "dissing contest," which began as Harmless Fun. But ritual disses like "You're so ugly, your mom puts a bag on your head before kissing you goodnight" led to actual vitriol. I thought the whole thing funny: trading insults would make people mad at each other? Who'd-a thought? I wasn't immune to making fun of people. The next year, I wrote Jonathan a note on September 11 wishing him a happy birthday. Luckily, the reference to an unhappy anniversary seemed too oblique to wound him. Corey, another of that group of boys (white, freckled, read The_Lord_of_the_Rings at eleven), was blunter once: "I wish your father had died in the World Trade Centre!" Even I thought that was wrong. But as the Bible says, "Judge not, lest ye go off topic." (And clearly a lot of this is ill-remembered, which is why my other accounts of this day are fiction and not autobiography.) 220911 ... ovenbird A quarter of a century ago. My journals from that time are now historical artifacts, outlining my thoughts and fears in the wake of unbelievable tragedy. I was afraid. As we all were. On September 11, 2001 I wrote, in blue ballpoint pen on a loose leaf sheet of lined paper: “The smoke from the trade center could be seen from space; so huge was the cloud of debris. It is a dark day for all on this planet and will no doubt be placed in all the history books, provided we get the chance to write it there.” I was eighteen years old and I believed that I might die in World War III. My first instinct was to tell a man who meant the world to me that I loved him. We’d been friends for years and I’d always had feelings bigger than that, but was afraid to say them out loud. In the midst of all the death and terror and confusion all I wanted was for him to know my heart. But I didn’t call him. In my journal I wrote: “Even death does not give me the courage to face his rejection and I think how sad that is.” Two days later I wrote down the details of a nightmare: “I was swimming in a pool with all these other people and I was looking out from under the water. Someone said, ‘It’s like shooting fish in a barrel!’ and they started shooting these long arrows into the pool. One of the arrows hit an old man in the back of the neck and he was decapitated. I managed to get away and I ran and ran until I came to a house. I didn’t know the people who lived there but they let me come in and eat dinner. They were serving shrimp. Later my brother showed up and I knew that he was one of the people who had been shooting at us in the pool. I was afraid of him. We ate a chicken together but it wasn’t really cooked. The meat was still bloody and the breast that I was holding still had the heart attached.” I was so young and scared, my own heart exposed and dripping. I was mourning the state of the world, and worried that I would die before anyone ever loved me. On September 14th I sang at the Red Cross with a bunch of kids from my high school music class to entertain the people lined up to donate blood in the wake of the terror attacks. In my journal I wrote about Bush’s declaration of a “war on terror.” I wrote, “there is going to be more bloodshed, more tears, more anger, more pain. Perhaps our world will never be the same again.” I was young, but I was right about that. My journal shows a person on the brink of adulthood hyperfixated on death in the weeks after I watched the towers come down on the television in my basement. On September 18th I wrote: “I fear death like I fear nothing else. I fear the loss of memory. Why do I even bother to write this journal of my life when I will just die and be forgotten? Perhaps it is in a desperate attempt to become immortal that I commit my thoughts and actions to paper.” My entry from September 20th includes a print out of Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress. In my own written thoughts I wondered “how many disasters will occur over the years that will be needed to conclude what has begun?” Then I wrote: “THIS is the historical event of my time. THIS is what will shape history from this point on and the thought that I am living it sends chills down my spine. There is hope for a unified planet and there is fear of mass destruction.” I wrote more in my journal that year than in any year prior. I suspect my fear of nuclear war drove my words onto the page. I don’t think I’ve re-read them in all the twenty-five years that have passed. So here I am. So far away from the teenager I was, though it hardly feels that way. And I’m still afraid of all the ways this deeply flawed world might go up in flames. And I’m still spilling myself onto the pages of my journals and onto the walls of this Red realm, and in light of my fear my first instinct is still to speak the depths of my love. So I will: I love you all. You who have given your voices to these hidden halls, who have grown and floundered and flailed and sung, who let me in and allowed my words to mix with yours. It’s so hard to find places of belonging. And this has been one. 260911 ... e_o_i Thank you for that last paragraph. I feel like crying but in a good way. The tone and sentiment mark such a difference from some of the comments I was reading on a video today. "Chris Reacts" (the channel name) to a compilation of videos from that day; he looks too young to have been born then, but he says he remembers that day from Germany. Anyway, I could have written my comment about where approximately I lived and what I did that day without going through other comments. But I get curious. Curious about people's stories. And so I read things. Some are sad, but it's the few that anger me that are the most upsetting, the ones about how it's bad that New York's mayor is Muslim. A few branching-off thoughts: passive_aggressive_replies and allison_hanes (the name of a Montreal Gazette reporter) 260914 ... e_o_i And about the day itself, and the few days after. I wasn't too scared at first. I was thirteen and my concerns circled in impossibly large and laughably small orbits, say 1) existential dread of the eternal life that Christianity presented as a comfort and 2) worry that my shoes weren't "cool enough." But I wasn't new to news. In grade 6 or 7, I'd done the school-based "Gazette Challenge" that involved reading a few newspaper articles each week. I liked reading anyway, so I'd look at my parents' papers at least for the comics and culture features. In the days immediately following the attack, I feared living so close to an airport. I had nightmares. The one I remember: a small airplane crashed into a gas station pavilion and turned it to rubble. Large to small. I read later how 9/11 affected people who were closer to the events. zeke on blather, for instance. He always seemed calm and composed to me, if sometimes frustratingly laconic. It was a surprise to hear how near he'd been to the disaster. One blathe was World War 3. I mean, it was titled that. I only saw it as an older teenager or twenty-something. But how do you know what the effects of something will be right when it happens? 260914 what's it to you? who go blather from