The photo above is an afterthought.
This is from our recent walk around Manhattan, as we were making our way from the High Line over to Madison Square Park to get an outdoor lunch. We were stuck waiting for a light at one of the avenues, and I took a picture of the kids and Kate waiting. Then I noticed the really tall building at the end of the shot, and said “Oh, hey, that’s the replacement World Trade Center, I should probably get a picture of that…”
For a long time, I maintained a tradition of blanking out my blog on September 11. I would put up a post that was just 110 blank lines, and set the front page to display only one post. It was my way of marking the anniversary of the attacks, while also acknowledging that I had nothing worthwhile to say about them.
I stopped doing that in 2014, when the anniversary coincided with SteelyKid’s first day of kindergarten, and I realized that it no longer mattered quite so much; certainly not as much as a milestone event for my kid. In September 2001, I was living in a second-floor railroad flat in Schenectady, just beginning to realize that the landlord downstairs chain-smoked cigars, and had just started my job at Union. The recitation section I taught that eventful Tuesday morning was my sixth time ever teaching a class on my own; I wrapped it up, went back to my office, and loaded up the Washington Post website to find the headline was the impact of the first plane to hit the Towers. By 2014, I was married, tenured, living in a nice house, and the father of two kids. One of whom was starting school.
The world had moved on, and I realized I had moved on, too. The shadow cast by the 9/11 attacks hadn’t gone away, but looking back at the darkness wasn’t nearly as important as looking toward the future with my family. So I dropped the anniversary tradition, and mostly haven’t thought about it since.
The one thing that hasn’t changed, though, is that I still don’t have anything to say. Well, OK, two things haven’t changed: I don’t have anything to say about the anniversary, and I’m really, intensely, passionately interested in not hearing anything anybody else has to say about it. That’s going to be harder to manage than usual, though, because this year is the 20th anniversary, and arbitrary round numbers have a powerful hold on our culture. I’ve avoided it to this point, but the trickle of long-lead-time anniversary thinkpieces is undoubtedly going to become a deluge of bloviating about What It All Means, particularly in light of the collapse of Afghanistan and the lingering pandemic. And I don’t need that in my life.
So I’ll be checking out for the day, and probably most of the weekend. It helps that tomorrow will be a very busy day for The Pip— he’s got the return of rec soccer early Saturday morning, followed by “sandlot” baseball in the afternoon. If you feel a burning need for anniversary content, I’ll direct you to the late, great John M. Ford’s 110 Stories which remains better than anything I’m likely to come up with.
For myself, I’ll be going to the park with my DSLR and my kids. The world has changed, and I’ve got new pictures to take.
Here are some buttons if you’re interested:
Regular service will resume Sunday or Monday.