numbered days in life stuff and misc.

Who am I to say? I saw it on the television same as anyone, same as everyone who wasn’t really there. The woman I was dating at the time had personal connections, her brother working on the Wall Street floor had ended up taking refuge behind a bar nearby, covered head-to-toe in the dust of fallen towers. Her father was a copier repairman who’d worked lower Manhattan but had been laid off the day before, had been sulking in his home in Bayside Queens, didn’t even know what happened nineteen miles away until she called, trying to find out if he’d lived or died. But those tales weren’t mine even then and, a handful of lost relationships later, they are even less so now.

Who am I to say? I was living in a small town a five-hour drive away, trying to figure out what my life was going to look like after college ended. Even though I grew up being able to quote ads from New York City stations chapter-and-verse (I knew all the Carvel ice-cream cake monsters, I knew well as anyone that Goya was oh-boya) I had only been there three times in all my life: twice on bus tours to Mets games and once on the sixth-grade field trip. Paragon Cable wanted me to believe that I knew it well through WWOR, WNYW and WPIX, but even then I understood I couldn’t really understand it, not that equally beautiful and terrifying city’s truths.

Who am I to say? I did not live in New York City until my early thirties and even then under two years split between Rockaway Beach then Hipster Brooklyn. I loved everything about that place other than how hard it was to get a job there and how everything smelled like sickly-sweet burnt street-cart peanuts. I was in my eight-hundred-foot fourteen-hundred dollars a month apartment in Bushwick when they said they’d killed bin Laden, in a Pakistani city smaller than Rochester.

Who am I to say? I’ve never been a first responder. Down the road in my failed attempt to have the emotional fortitude to be a 9-11 (the number, not the day) operator, on one of that tragedy’s anniversaries, a McDonalds clerk saw my uniform and refused to let me pay. I felt so damnable awful, that wasn’t my valor I worked in an air-conditioned cube in Herkimer and not well either.

Who am I to say? I didn’t watch my father get killed by a missile in Baghdad for reasons that had nothing to do with anything, never had a brother mowed down with bullets in Kabul because the Americans were searching for some rich guy who did terrible things that he’d never even met. I certainly was not some kid from West Virginia who joined the Marines to pay his student loans, only to see his best friend blown away by an IED for the benefit of a billionaire from a mansion outside of Houston? What right could I possibly have to speak for either side, any of the sides?

I can only speak for myself, for my own experience. Like most people born in the late Seventies, one of my first memories is watching the Challenger explode because of an o-ring sourced from the lowest bid, the idea of a shining future in the stars similarly burning away upon re-entry. Like most people living within the range of the Syracuse CBS, I watched wall-to-wall coverage of the Lockerbie bombing, the murder of college co-eds from where I’d end up going to school myself.

Again, I can only speak for myself. Like most people lucky enough to live into the middle-ages, I have lost people I loved, tragically, in ways and for reasons I will never truly understand but I’ve never had to do it on the world’s stage. I never had cameras waved in my face while I mourned, never had my heartbreak tossed around by culture’s vultures, a football heading toward the goal line to score political points. I have hurt like anyone but I never had to lose someone twice, the once to tragedy then again to someone trying to win Emmys with some misguided hagiography.

I was going to school in Syracuse (Lord knows, I still owe them money) when the story broke about Columbine and I thought about when I was in high school and the only reason we did not die was because the kid building the bombs to kill us accidentally blew himself up in the process instead. Could we have died that autumn instead, our town’s name forever echoing in dry hushed tones, ten thousand pundits dragging our bloodied corpses right and left again to make whatever points they thought might get another notch into their Nielsen rating belts?

Who am I to say? I’m just a slightly-educated man from some tiny place only the neighbors have ever heard of. And maybe that’s the one blessing that we get, when at least we got to grieve our losses in relative silence, not plastered in cheap newsprint everywhere from the soot of subway walls all the way to tenement halls. We’re allowed to forge our peace without the microphones.

Imagine the worst thing that ever happened to you. Now imagine everyone asking you about that awful day every day for the rest of your life and five-hundred times each anniversary of the loss. Imagine you weren’t the one watching on the screen but were instead the one screaming in pain in Manhattan or Abbottabad or Belfast or Beirut or Sandy Hook. Imagine twenty years later, the cameras return again to squeeze another handful of nickels out of the stone your heart was made.

That’s what they went through, what they’ve gone through for twenty years, what they’ll keep going through for whatever number of days the fates will allow them. You’ve been allowed the grace that all these awful things are just places on a television chyron but for every person who lost someone that day, all they see is that one face, the one name. There but for that grace, that’s about all that I can fairly say. I see the newsfeed and all I can do is feel my heart bleed.

Last updated August 28, 2021