Benchmarks (Grimm)

Yesterday morning, minutes after I woke up, I was reminded by social media that it was the anniversary of 9/11, thinking first, in my just-waked-up mental fog, that it was nine years ago, and then correcting it to nineteen. #NeverForget was trending on Twitter.

A friend put up a post on Facebook: “Where were you on this day?” and within minutes, twenty-plus people had responded. In history class. At work. In the kitchen making lunches. On the bus. Attending an orientation at the Pentagon. Dropping a child off at school. Gathered with co-workers around a TV set. At home with the baby who was learning to crawl. Within two hours, there were eighty-two responses, and the number kept climbing all day.

I heard about it first when a friend called me up and told me. When he called, it was usually just to ramble, the kind of phone conversation you’d have while doing other things and wanting to find an excuse to hang up. He was the kind of friend who says odd things, makes odd jokes, and for a minute, I thought that his announcement that a plane had flown into a building in New York was the beginning of a joke or of one of his magnificent and tiring rants.

I was home, a not-teaching day. I spent a long time in my younger daughter’s old bedroom, where the TV was kept, trying to make sense of it, not sure how to feel or what it meant. I lay on my daughter’s bed, watching the news and talking to people on the phone, worrying about my nephew who was going to college in NYC. (He was OK.)

I felt yesterday that if I went into that room (which is used for another purpose now) I might enter the past, the formerly innocent, disbelieving past, (we were always losing our innocence in those days), but the door remained closed, and I passed it by.

This year, this 9/11 anniversary, instead of comparing it to other days when something significant happened – the days every minute of which stands out, where you were when you heard, what you felt – the string of assassinations in the 1960s, Pearl Harbor – I put it next to the pandemic. We were all changed by 9/11, seemingly in an instant. Our lives are different because of it, in big and small ways (the Iraq war on the one hand and airport behaviors on the other). The pandemic is changing us, too, but not in the instant. We’re infected or fear it, we’re sick, we’re dying, we’re recovering. We’re sending our children to schools that may not be safe. We wear masks or refuse to. We’re leery of crowds (a movie showing a group of people in close contact makes us cringe). We’re not sure even of the air, and all this is grinding us, transmuting us, pushing us into an altered future which is still taking shape.

Who will we be in six months or a year, or nineteen years? How will we have been changed?

Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection). Currently, she is working on a novel set in 1930s Cleveland. She teaches fiction writing at Case Western Reserve University.