In Remembrance

Today I'm wearing my little American flag pin (and a matching belly button ring, but I digress...). Not because I'm particularly patriotic, but because a friend gave it to me not long after 9/11 and I've worn it every year since.

It's not that I need a reminder, because I still remember that day, and those that followed it, very vividly. I remember getting into my truck on my way to a class that I was taking and punching the radio station presets looking for music. I changed stations as I drove, quickly at first, then more slowly, going from being annoyed to puzzled to horrified to blocking traffic. And then the second tower fell, and I pulled onto a side street and called my then-husband. "Is this real?" I asked, changing stations quickly once again in the hopes that someone might say it wasn't.

I remember parking in the mud and walking to class, certain that it would be canceled. Surely the whole world must be stopping... But not here, and I sat through class making a list of all of the people that I wanted to track down from wherever I had lost touch with them. At the end of class one of the other students was talking about a relative that he'd managed to contact, and the horror of what he'd been told. The girl sitting behind me had no idea what he was talking about, and I had to explain to her that the world had changed forever while she was putting on her makeup.

I remember sending emails and making calls, then waiting to see if they'd let me give blood (still didn't weigh enough). A man kept persistently asking if his blood would go to New York, as if the people here who might need it weren't deserving enough. The nurse patiently explained, repeatedly, that she could not personally put his blood on a plane and send it to New York because there were no planes flying at the moment, but she would put it to good use somewhere.

In the days that followed, I spent a lot of time online, talked to my high school boyfriend, and helped pack trucks of supplies that went to New York. I remember thinking how quiet it was in Memphis (home of FedEx) when planes didn't fly, and how inexplicably emotional it was, standing in line to get into my favorite bar, to watch a plane fly low overhead with a deafening roar. And I remember the punch-to-the-gut-like-feeling when I found out that I had lost a college classmate.

Bob wasn't someone that I knew very well, but I had met him at summer-before-freshman -year "getting-to-know-you" events because we both lived in the Philly 'burbs. He was someone I remembered instantly by both name and face (and I'm notoriously bad at not being able to put faces with names), someone I remembered as being quiet and friendly and maybe just as slightly overwhelmed as I was.

I went to New York with a firefighter friend that December, the first time for both of us. We stayed away from downtown by unspoken agreement. It was over a year later before I went to Ground Zero, walked along the fences, looked for Bob's name and others that I remembered hearing or reading. I tried to figure out where I had once bought tickets at TKTS or emerged from the PATH train trying to look like I knew where I was going. I wished that I'd given in to the temptation to stop and stare upward and be awestruck instead of worrying so much that someone might think that I was lost.

Back in Philly last November, I decided to do just that: to stop and stare and openly read my tourist map to find things I'd never seen in the city that I claim as home (though after yesterday I'm fixin' to disown the football team). I found my way to the new Constitution Center and, after a long afternoon touring the permanent exhibits, to 9/11: A Nation Remembers. A hundred photographs by Jonathan Hyman depicted memorials of every shape, size, and material: from honorary street signs to custom Harleys. In his photos, colorful murals covered walls and elaborate tattoos covered bodies of friends and relatives. And in one photo, Bob's name and face surprised me with that punch-in-the-gut-feeling once again.

If I had read the caption before looking at the photo, had known that the mural it showed came from a wall in Philly, I would have been prepared, would have known what I was looking for, as I did that day at Ground Zero. Even walking through the exhibit that day, I'd hoped to see a name that I recognized, to make a connection. But somehow I wasn't at all prepared when it happened.

I was thinking about writing this post yesterday afternoon (if I did as much actual writing as I do thinking about writing, this blog wouldn't look nearly as neglected) when I got a text message from a friend. The gist of the message was "At some point in your life you see who really matters. Send this message to those people. I just did." And now I am, too.