Today we set aside the usual crash and thud of daily life in the Springs to remember the victims of 9-11, which, incredibly, happened twenty-four years ago today. Both myself and my friend and site co-Editor (no ranks here, we are both co-Editors) Dale have thoughts to share on this occasion. And we certainly invite everyone inclined to do so to contribute their own memories in the comments’ section.
(I took the image at Evergreen Rotary Park in Bremerton, Washington USA on the morning of 10 September. Those are actual pieces of the WTC. Below this article is a picture that stands as proof that there is beauty in the world, if you know where to seek it.)
I happened to be at work for fifteen minutes when reports of the first plane striking the WTC came over the radio. For twenty minutes we, like most others, were hoping that it was an extremely unlucky accident since the sky in New York was as clear and empty as the mind of Paris Hilton, but knew better. Only the very dullest clung to immense false hopes when the second plane struck. In fact there is tape of a somewhat vacuous Fox reporter cautioning people against using the “T-word” after the second plane struck. (One thing that morning did was expose what terrible “journalists” morning show people are–save for Katie Couric, who had news experience. For the most part, it was a relief when the real news people soon took over.)
I also just happened to be working at The Seattle Times. Ha! Not as a reporter, but as the grill cook in the cafeteria (I am, after all, a writer). Still, I was chummy with many of the reporters, therefore I was ahead of the curve information and misinformation wise. I recall the false reports of the “car bomb” in D.C. and a few other falsehoods that slowly withered away as the real events unfolded. Little thisses and thats that still exist on the sound tracks of the day.
People have filled reams and reels about the day. My most vivid in person memory (since I lived and still live three thousand miles from NYC and DC and Pennsylvania) was coming home on the ferry that night and clearly seeing heavily armed military police along the fence at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. For a day or two we looked like everyday in Bosnia. And since the tenth anniversary the image in the header (of two pieces of the towers) has stood in a park about a mile from where I type this.
Regardless, I think it is our duty to remember 9-11 and Pearl Harbor and the murders of JFK, Dr. King and RFK as well as the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the good things that still sometimes happen in the world. Instead of thinking “Oh, yeah, it’s 9-11” then return to googling Paris Hilton to see what middle age has done to her, it might be better to think about the victims and even send a prayer on their behalf, regardless of your personal feelings about doing such.
Leila
I now give the virtual mic to our friend The Drifter….
The Song “On That Day” by Leonard Cohen
The song brings me to tears almost every time I revisit it.
This song is just over two minutes long, from Leonard Cohen’s 2004 album Dear Heather, an album that got slammed by many misunderstanding critics when it came out, but which for me is one of Leonard’s best works, something that proved Leonard was still at the very top of his artistic game at the age of 70 and which also presaged his amazing “comeback” that was still in the offing at that point, his epic, immortal late-years world tour of 2008 to 2013.
(I saw Leonard live at the very beginning of that tour in Chicago in 2008, and again at the very end of that tour in Milwaukee in 2013, without knowing it would be the end. Both shows were equally stunning and one-of-a-kind Leonard.)
“On That Day” by Leonard Cohen is a work against war.
Within the brief and compressed time frame of just over two minutes, Leonard creates an eternal-seeming, apolitical poem against all war told in his ancient voice, lifted up by angelic background singers, and taken aloft by the sounds of his timeless Wandering Jew’s harp.
Leonard’s specific motive in creating this song was the memorializing of September 11, 2001, New York City.
9/11 is a scar within us all; even if we think it’s old news by now (and in America that is often the way we do think), we are wrong. Even those of us who weren’t alive at the time have been marked “forever” by that fateful day.
At the time, a woman I was deeply in love with had recently informed me that we were over “forever” because she was pregnant with another man’s child.
My wife and I (who I also loved) were separated.
Another woman (who I also loved) and I were also separated, by 2,000 miles.
My mother had just been diagnosed with (incurable of course) dementia.
And a novel I’d spent years creating had been bombed out by every single agent and publisher it was sent to, even though it was sent under the recommendation/s of people who knew those agents and/or those publishers personally. (The number was around twenty.)
And then the Towers were taken down.
So for me, my love of women, my love for my mother, and my love for literature, somehow all connected, are connected in my mind, too, to this day.
Memorializing a public event should always have, within ourselves, a private element, a very personal and private element as strong, for us, as the public event itself.
It’s like how it used to be when everyone remembered where they were the day Kennedy was assassinated.
Remembering “where you were” is more than just what your physical location was.
It should also be about where you were mentally, emotionally, and spiritually in your life.
You don’t need to go anywhere to do this; all you need is to become quiet within yourself wherever you are.
In In Memoriam A.H.H., Alfred, Lord Tennyson said, “In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er, / Like coarsest clothes against the cold: / But that large grief which these enfold / Is given in outline and no more.”
(This image of beauty is of my Assistant at the park photo shoot. By name, Puck)
Leila and Dale and Puck
Saragun Springs 
Beautifully done by both of you. thank you. Hard to believe it is so long ago because it seems like it happened just recently. I know that there are a myriad recordings of what went on that day and I can’t listen. Not because I don’t care but because, I know, anything I hear will stay with me forever. There is an argument that it should be that way and I get that but I don’t need reminders. When I close my eyes now I can see the images and it’s still as unbearable as it was then. With the deepest of sympathy I remember. dd
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Thank you, Diane. Always a joy to hear from you! Dale
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Hi Diane
The US has always been a bit spoiled because of the oceans. Not after that. Pearl Harbor was horrific of course, but that was before TV could bring it into homes. My mother was too young to remember Pearl but my father was eight or nine and he always said that it and the War itself felt like a nightly radio show and you had to go see news reels at the movies to understand it. Sure wish I could say things are better, but I guess a draw is the best we can claim.
Thank you!
Leila
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Thanks, Leila and Dale, for the sober reminder. As a pensioner, who more often than not, doesn’t know what day’s date it is, I was initially shocked to read that it was Sept 11th today, and that it was 24 years since it happened. I was working away from home that day and was puzzled by my then teenage daughter’s upset. I went in search of a tv set and saw the horrific images for myself.
I dont think it’s an exaggeration to say that the world mourned. You do us all a service by posting this reminder.
Just listened to Tennyson’s In Memoriam on Youtube. By all accounts, Tennyson seems to have been an ordinary, conventional sort of guy with a great lyric gift. An ordinary guy who could convey the feelings of awful, enduring grief.
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Hi Mick
THAT IS WILD that you just listened to In Memorium A.H.H.
Tennyson is such a great writer he’s one of the best – ever. He sometimes gets bad press for being old-fashioned when he is anything but, at every level.
Some parts of In Memoriam match Milton and Shakespeare in how good they are.
That’s how good Tennyson is!
He was also a chain smoker, who used to wander around alone hiding his various pipes and tobacco in old stone walls, under rocks, in holes in trees, etc., and finding them again.
The Queen said he looked strange, striking, and weird – in a good way. She was afraid to approach him.
Thank you!
Dale
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Thanks, Dale. Been away and still catching up, but I did get round to reading your excellent ‘Then they walked along by the riverside.’
Didn’t know about Tennyson’s pipe fetish. William Morris turned down the Poet Laureateship after Tennyson’s death: got to wonder what Queen Victoria would’ve thought about Morris. bw mick
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Hi Mick
Thank you. And I liked Tennyson’s stuff; will have to check that out. I bet that lots of our Esteemed Writers were just regular people with a gift. The snobbish Baconites needed superior classes; God help Will if he had happened to be Arabic or Jewish. Now, some, saw an opportunity and helped build their own myths–(I think Bukowski liked his mythology–which was true–but later on he was for helping it, because it became expected of him), but for the most part they were sensitive human beings.
Funny thing about big historical moments–they have a way of feeling much more recent. 9-11 feels way closer than many later politics pushed stupid events, like the so called “Jan 6th” or Bill and Monica thing–that galls the would be ruling class to know that many do not give a shit about such things.
Leila
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Leila
Thank you for putting this whole thing together, including the gorgeous pictures of the monument and the brilliantly beautiful squirrel, Puck, and your wonderful and fascinating micro-memoir.
Dale
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“Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men / Who come with the dust, and are gone with the wind.” – Dylan
Bob said “men” here because it slant-rhymed, but he also meant ALL HUMANS.
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Hi Dale
You know the best quotes! And Puck is grateful to be noticed. All the Park Squirells are remarkable little characters. Shakespeare and Dickens remain great names sources. I do notwant wish to be wrongly cheerful on the occasion of over three thousand lives being ended by inexcusable actions, but I side with the Monty Python ceremony–the way they said farewell to Chapman.
I do hope that the only after laughter isn’t in hell!
Leila
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Hi Leila and Dale
I remember sitting in the halfway house with an incredibly strong black guy named Sam. Arms like a body builder, but a good dude. It was just the two of us that morning in the living room. Sam had a bowl of cereal in his giant hand, a spoon up to his mouth, standing-hulking in dismay watching the Tower burning. I sat there mesmerized by the smoke billowing up into the sky–“The horror”–lost as everyone at that point.
Then the second plane hit on live TV! Sam said, “Goddamn!” or “Jesus Christ!” Seeing such a big guy like Sam react like that drove it into my mind. The magnitude of it! And the odd sharing of the event with Sam forged a sort of unbreakable memory of him. I will never forget him. I witnessed 9/11 with Sam.
He served in the Army, too. I eventually lost touch with him and everyone else. That’s how it goes in transient places. Like “The House,” as it was called. Sam may have ended up back in the service and into the fight.
Christopher
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We were with a group of hikers at Stehekin Ranch in North Washington close to Canada. People were stuck at the border. Our news was very patchy, mostly we were out of range of news. We didn’t know how bad it was for several days.
My (now late) mother was doom watching TV (earlier form of doom scrolling).
Recently hundreds of thousands have died due to Trump’s incompetence. Not as dramatic because it happened slower, and it was done by someone who was supposed to be working for us.
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Hi Doug
I know a couple who were camping at Lake Cushman that week and knew nothing of the event for three days. They told me that they were happier minus the knowledge and wished they could move deep into the woods. Of course, there are problems there too, but rarely do they involve hijacking and 24/7 Wolf “I Lost on Jeopardy” Blitzer.
Take care both you and the Ed.
Leila
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