One Year After

The thought has been with me for a while--almost exactly a year, in fact--to write something about the events of 9/11/01. I've sat down to do it at least a dozen times, and I even have a partially completed draft of such sitting at home somewhere in the bowels of poor Polly Jean. But I've never finished it, much less posted it here.

Maybe it's because my account of that day is strictly peripheral--after all, I was in Chicago, where nothing really happened except the fear and panic and sadness that the rest of the nation felt. Maybe it's because there are so many other accounts that covered it better, most especially Sarah Bunting's tale of actually seeing the WTC come down in person. Or maybe I'm just too lazy to sit down and peck out what would surely be my longest essay to date.

And perhaps, some day, I will post that essay here, and you'll get to read about the uneasy feeling of trying to get out a crowded downtown with Red Secretary under an alarmingly clear blue sky; about the epic meeting between RS and my mom; about the fear of hearing planes overhead when none were supposed to flying anymore (turned out to be F-16s patrolling Chicago's airspace); about getting home and watching the footage of the attacks over and over again. But not this week, when everybody is doing some piece on 9/11. As if we could forget what happened. As if we ever will.