Thursday, September 11, 2008

Another September 11th

I suppose every generation has their moment. Their "where were you when...?" question. I was 20 on this day seven years ago , standing in my room at the sorority house, wearing my new camel-colored sweater and rolling my hair. My roommate, Christina, had already left for class and I was watching a rerun of Designing Women when the program was interrupted for that first message. I thought perhaps the pilot was drunk, and I was angry at him. How could he be so careless, so cruel?

I kept watching, of course, and I remember hearing televisions in other rooms, and knew other girls were watching the same thing. But nobody knocked on my door. I didn't hear any cries of, "hey guys, are you watching this?!" Perhaps we were all waiting for the explanation, the acknowledgment of incompetence or drugs. And then the second plane hit and I heard someone somewhere cry out. Did I cry out, too? I don't remember. I kept watching, and at some point I called my Mom.

I tried to call a dear friend, Francis, who was living in New York at the time. In my mind, all of NYC was burning. Hordes of demon planes were crashing everywhere and surely Francis would be hit. But nobody could get through to New York that day. I wandered across campus to the library to find Christina and by the time I arrived the Pentagon smoke was flying. Or was it the White House? I forget what we thought at first. Was the White House gone? No, that plane crashed. But the Pentagon...

I don't remember much of what followed, besides the candlelight vigil, the prayers, the worry that maybe this changed everything. I didn't realize, of course, that Sept.11 would set in motion the political moves that would eventually lead to my evacuation from Peace Corps. When I left for my service in Morocco months after the 11th, my dad mentioned a concern about Sadaam Hussein, Afghanistan, but I had no sense of the threat. Looking back, my parents must have been more than a little nervous to watch their wholly naive firstborn jaunt off to an Arab country less than a year after the news blasted Arab faces across the screen and called them murderers. I wasn't afraid in that context. And I had no cause to be. My villagers, my host families, my Moroccan friends, they were all some of the kindest, warmest people I've ever met. Some of them were angry, maybe mean, but no more so than any angry American. And I loved Morocco more than I've loved any other place on earth, save one, save New Orleans.

A week or so after the U.S. invaded Iraq, I was riding a taxi, alone, with a police escort, from my village east of Esfi to join my fellow volunteers at a hotel in Marrakech, where we watched the news and waited for the end.

Seven years is a long time. I've heard a million times that Sept. 11 changed America forever. America lost her innocence. America will never be the same. I would agree with that sentiment, but it's fairly obvious and painfully cliche. I don't think America is worse off due to Sept. 11, anymore than she is worse off due to other tragedies, other natural disasters, other wars. Losing innocents, burying those that should not have died, that is a pain that inspires broken hearts and vehemently powerful brotherhood. If there is anything Sept. 11 says about America today, it is that we own our history, we hold it and treasure it, and then we walk on. We build. We grow. We fight. We potentially elect the first black president or the first female vice president. We have things to be proud of and we are not quiet in our pride. And I think that says something about the backbone that was not broken on the 11th. There is something to be said of our blood, of a country built on the shoulders of men and women who largely came here with nothing and built something out of the dirt. Of men and women who were shackled here against their will and who broke free, rose up, and became as much a source of success of this country as the descendants of those who owned them. We, as a country, are used to rising from ashes, we have built and rebuilt a country on the graves of innocents, honoring their lives by building, growing, and building again.

Autumn, Anyone?

I loathe winter. I hate feeling cold, hate shivering, hate the grey of Minnesota from November-April (sometimes May). And I miss the long, lazy autumn in Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri, where you have three solid months of beautiful colors and above freezing evenings.

But, short as it is, Minnesota's autumn is worth loving. Perhaps people love it here because they know how quick it fades, how fast that first heavy snow can fall. And I think there's something lovely about being able to smell the snow in the air. That snow smell reminds me, vaguely, of that ozone aroma that lingered in New Orleans after hard summer storms, the smell of lightening and non-hurricanes. Completely different smells, different feelings, but echoes of each other in that your nose remembers and acknowledges snowstorms and slanted rains before the rest of your body. Memory is so tied to visuals and sounds, it's nice to give the nose a chance to paint its own picture.

And today, in the middle of a warm, autumn rain, in the three drops that hit my face through the crack in the bus window, I smelled snow.