9-12

Ten years later I still remember that it was a Tuesday morning. I remember that I was watching it all in real time on one of those old tube televisions. I didn’t have a flat screen. But on 9-12-11 I stand before kids who range in age from 11-13 and they genuinely don’t remember what is so vivid to me. Suddenly I’m like the contemporaries of Dr. King on April 4, 1968, the enamored American admirers of the Kennedy administration on November 22, 1963 or the generation of my grandparents who knew the visceral nausea of December 7, 1941. I’m that guy trying desperately to communicate the ghastly reality of an event that is purely historical to the unaffected under age 25.

As objective as I am, I couldn’t shake this burden I felt to try and give kids a chance to ask questions, to feel, to offer their own insights. So I did. And I was amped on the notion. Shoot, they’re lucky we don’t have school on Sundays because I could’ve rambled for hours or at least listened to them for equally as long. Such an incalculable deluge of emotion for me arises each year this time, probably more so now that my sister is a New York resident. I’m big on context, seeing the backdrop and foreground of a lifetime. What events shape your life? How do you ever allow the images of people jumping from 80 story windows, or the freakish scenario of a commercial aircraft loaded with jet fuel being thrust into a stationary structure and not coming out of the other side? Best believe I’ll never forget. That was never the issue. It’s about 9-12 and how you live with 9-11 etched.  What perspective does something like this yield, knowing that worldwide atrocities have shaped and unraveled lives? All I know is that I can’t wait to visit the footprints at ground zero and pay my own respects. For real…I feel linked to the millions throughout history who wanted me to witness the “real life” in context.