Allegedly, it’s the 25th anniversary of 9/11 this week. Which is weird. Because it’s only 2012 in my mind. Not even late 2012. Early 2012. The kind of 2012 where I still think I should probably get around to seeing “The Avengers” and if I wait much longer, someone might spoil it for me. It’s so 2012 in my mind, I keep waiting for the Royals to finally get over the hump and I’m hoping their pitching doesn’t crumble every game.
Then I look up and the calendar says 2026, which sounds like the year a DeLorean would time travel to with some squeaky-voiced kid telling us about the dangers of eating contaminated lettuce. Twenty-five years. A quarter of a century. That’s how long it’s been since 9/11. I know this because people on television keep saying it in solemn voices over piano music while showing footage that, somehow, already looks older than the moon landing.
That’s the part that gets me.
I’ll watch a documentary and there are the towers, the smoke, the crowds, the paper in the streets — and the video looks ancient. Grainy. Boxy. Slightly washed out. Everyone’s wearing pleated khakis and big shirts and those tiny sunglasses that made every adult man look like he was about to sell you a used jet ski. The cellphones look like suitcases. The news graphics look like they were designed on a toaster. I don’t remember women’s hair ever being that big. Well, it was in the ‘90s, which was also only 20 years ago.
And my brain says, “Ah yes, archival footage from the olden times. Possibly filmed by a camera where you had to get under a black hood and explode some gunpowder to make a flash.”
But another part of my brain says, “Olden times? I was there.” I remember 9/11 because it was yesterday for me. I remember hearing the news through my Motorola news beeper (actual thing). I remember traveling up to the 42nd floor in One Kansas City Place (the tallest building west of St. Louis and east of Denver if you happened to be flying a 747). I remember walking into a meeting of lawyers and IT executives who didn’t have smartphones and didn’t know what had happened and saying, “You need to get to a television immediately.” That image wasn’t in black and white. It happened just as clearly as I remember going to Hy-Vee yesterday and paying $200 a pound for ground beef.
It’s a strange thing when your own memories begin to look like World War II newsreels. I half expect the narrator to come on in that booming 1940s telegraph voice: “MISTER AND MISSUS AMERICA AND ALL THE SHIPS AT SEA. AMERICA ATTACKED. STOP. CHECK YOUR AOL MAIL FOR DETAILS. STOP.”
It doesn’t feel like history when you remember what you had for lunch and you still know your ICQ Chat number.
There are things from 2001 that feel as if they happened this morning. The shock. The silence. The weird blue of the sky. The way everyone talked softer for a while, as if the whole country had moved into a hospital waiting room. You remember where you were, who told you, what television you were watching. You remember the helpless choreography of everyone gathering around screens, looking for information and finding only more disbelief.
And yet, try explaining the rest of 2001 to someone now. Well, we didn’t really have phones that did things. We had phones that made calls, sometimes, if you were standing in the right corner of the room and stood on one leg. If you wanted to know something, you either had to be near a computer or ask a guy named Steve who confidently knew many wrong facts. (I guess that part is still the same.) We had the internet, but you couldn’t be on the phone at the same time you wanted to be on the internet. We had Wolf Blitzer and SportsCenter.
And yet, here we are, 25 years later. I have the computing power of the space shuttle in my pocket. Sept. 11 has become a meme to a generation that wasn’t there. And the site is an aging museum now.
Yet, I still hold true to the phrase that came out of the ashes of ground zero in New York. No matter how fast time flies, I will still “never forget.”
