A longer remembering

A longer reach of memory

September 11, 1949
A Commentary

[9-11-02]

by Barbara Kellam-Scott

September 4, 2002

September 11 has always been a notable date in my family. It was celebrated almost like a birthday, except that, instead of baking cake and preparing the dinner of choice, Mother spent the afternoon on herself: bathing dressing, preening. Only the highest-echelon business dinners, when her role was as asset to Dad's career, could claim greater intensity. For them, there was always a day to buy the new dress. Tonight she would wear the one she already had that Dad liked best. For tonight was the celebration of the pinnacle and foundation of her own career: the anniversary of her wedding.

It was my separate privilege as her only daughter to observe the preparations intimately. I would send her signals to choose the gold brocade, though any one of the sheaths in her closet could thrill me. But I especially loved the subtleties of shading, the way the weave changed with the angle of light as Mother turned to pull the ridiculous zipper under the arm. I would look on in awestruck admiration and longing as she pulled up the rubber girdle that turned my good Mother into Paul's bride, molding everyday softness into firm, glamorous sensuality, but somehow without obscuring the honor and beauty that softness held on its own. I could play in her box of jewelry, laying out my own favorites of her big clip-on earrings, and she would graciously choose one of the pairs I had presented for her approval. She might even let me wear the rhinestones on my own little lobes for a while, blissfully and willfully ignorant of their heaviness and pinch. My brothers and I would be long asleep before Mother and Dad returned from all we knew of their celebration. But in the morning there would be sugar cubes from the restaurant for me to distribute at the breakfast table, and the dilemma of whether to let them melt on our tongues and dissolve into powdery mounds or to preserve them in their starchy little blocks, to admire the elegant scripts and miniature art on their paper wrappers, knowing the sweet dissolution would be available as long as we were able to wait for it.

Although Mother died the May before her 49th anniversary, it had still been a special day in our family's life for three years. I already had the thought in my head, rising just a little before 9 AM on my truest day off from work, to call Dad, who would especially need to share a remembrance of her that day. My plan got lost in the shock waves that followed, as I sat open-mouthed before the BBC and later the television set. When I did think of calling, I'd heard that the phone lines all around New York were jammed and needed by those who had been or might have been directly affected. In the evening, my brother, who lives nearer to Dad in Florida, called to report news of almost all of ours and to promise to relay my security to Dad.

It was not a day for nuance. It is not yet a year later. But we are not a people that loves nuance. We want certainty. We want swiftness. We want resolution. We still can't seem to speak of the culture of wealth that stood in and was symbolized by those twin towers. We still do not acknowledge that it may be that culture that the villains hate, what they sought to strike. The culture of violence sweeps away everything in its path, and we revel with clenched fists at columns of smoke over Afghan hillsides, where they belong, and we look around for the next place to direct their rage.

Yet what happened last September 11 relieved the sharpness of many dividing lines among us. Busboy and CEO were coated in the same ash and dust. Their loved ones wept on each others' necks as they searched, resigned, faced the paperwork of death. BMW and Geo were crushed together, indistinguishable with their paint singed off and their upholstery burned out. The same acts that made nuance impossible left us with nothing more substantial for landmarks. In our panic and rage and resolve, we swept past the nuances that remained. We're afraid they'll trip us up, rob us of our shining certainties, demand that we consider quietly. And that in the quiet we may see shadows that demand different kinds of outrage, more complicated responses.

We are a people that loves symbolism, but we want the symbols to be unequivocal. There's no time to talk about what one or another of us may mean by the flag on our car or chest, and we haven't quite figured out when to take the flags down, when to move on.

September 11 has become a day that will be remarked and remembered far beyond my family. But I hope the world's note has not completely robbed us of our subtle, wistful joy in the more gradual changes that happen across five decades of a marriage. The first time I talked to Dad at any length after the disaster, he told me of one particular September 11, after we kids were grown, when he was working for a publishing company in northeastern New Jersey and had an undemanding morning appointment in the city. "Instead of dinner this year," he recalls suggesting to Mother, "why don't you come with me to New York? You can shop or something during my meeting, and then we'll go someplace spectacular for lunch."

What place could have been more spectacular than Windows on the World, at the top of the World Trade Center? Dad tells me they lunched and luxuriated, and Mother was breathless, a girl from the coal fields of southeastern Ohio with the world at her feet. There was no subtlety or nuance in what she saw and felt, no more than the rubber girdle or the button earrings had held for an aspiring daughter on earlier September 11ths. Dad said he would never forget the view of his wife before that panorama, flushed with memory, joy, and wine and the vicarious power of an expensively rented table in an incredibly expensive dab of real estate.

My mother owned the world that day. She probably deserved to. But she also had to come down out of the sky, return from soaring symbols to the concrete realities of breakfast tables that she laid and cleared herself. She had to deal with a world of subtleties and smaller dramas. But her world would be different for the experience of power and wealth.

We still hear how the world has changed since last September 11. But it's not the world that has changed; it's us. What's changed is our awareness of the world and, most significantly, our place in it. We can no longer ignore the kinds of risks in everyday events that others in the world have known all along. We must know that when we go to work or out to shop, we could be saying goodbye forever to our loved ones. We must know that the most welcome letter can bring the mechanism of our death. We must complete the panorama from 110 stories in the air with the realization that an aggressively tall building is vulnerable as a target. Perhaps what we need to do most is to appreciate the moments we have, savor them as much for their fragility as for their actual joys. It's time to unwrap the sugar cubes and enjoy the sweetness now.