September 11 is my birthday.
I turned twenty-three that Tuesday. Two years out of Northwestern State, working for a small weekly paper, engaged to a girl I’d talked into marrying me.
For twenty-five years I’ve watched people’s faces when I’m asked my birthday. There’s a pause. A small intake of breath. Then an apology I never asked for and don’t need. Oh. Oh, honey, I’m sorry. That’s a hard one to have.
Waitresses. DMV clerks. Folks I’d met at church. Students even. Twenty-five years of that little flinch.
Then the conversation moves on. Nobody has ever asked me what the day was actually like. And I’ve never told them.
So here it is.
We were driving east on I-20 that morning, the two of us, headed toward Monroe from Claiborne Parish. The sun came up hard in my face the way it does on that stretch. We’d shut the radio off because we were talking, and I don’t remember about what. Something that mattered to two people who were twenty-three and twenty-two and about to get married. Nothing that mattered at all.
I dropped her off at her first real job, at Wells Fargo, which she hated with a purity I’ve rarely seen in a human being since. Then I drove on to the office.
The receptionist was screaming when I came through the door. They’re gonna kill us all, Josh. That’s what she said. Word for word, twenty-five years later.
I had no idea what she was talking about. She was a nice lady. And just now while I type this, I’ve realized she’s probably no longer with us. Mrs. Polly, I hope the world was good to you after I left in January 2002.
Back to it. Pardon the digression. Understand what a small weekly paper was in 2001. We didn’t have a television. There was no reason to. We weren’t the daily. We came out once a week and we covered school boards and ribbon cuttings and whose grandmother turned ninety. So I stood there while people told me what they’d heard, and I went to my desk, and I read the thinnest wire copy you can imagine.
I knew something terrible was happening. I did not know what it was.
And then I went to work on it anyway.
That’s the part I’ve never been able to explain to anybody. I spent that entire day reporting a story I had not seen. I called around about how this was going to hit local industry. I called the Army recruiter and asked whether he expected enlistments to jump. I called my father. I wrote sentences about the worst day in modern American history using nothing but other people’s words, secondhand, with the towers still standing in my head because I had never watched them come down.
That night I covered a West Monroe city council meeting.
Some fellow got up with a grievance. Police, firefighters, something about pay. I couldn’t tell you now. What I remember is the mayor telling him it wasn’t appropriate to bring that up, not today, not considering what had happened.
The mayor didn’t want to give the raises. That was the whole of it. He’d found a way to use three thousand dead people to end a conversation he didn’t want to have, and he’d found it inside of twelve hours.
Dudes and dudettes reading, that mayor is likely passed on now as well. Wow. Nothing like a middle aged (I hope) birthday to remind you of the finite nature of our existence.
Sorry. Digression number 2.
Anyway. The man didn’t sit down. He said he thought today was more appropriate than any other day, since we were all coming together.
I wrote that down in a reporter’s notebook and I’ve carried it ever since.
Afterward we did what we did twice a week to keep from driving those seventy miles twice in a day. We rented a room at the Motel 6 for nineteen dollars and we lived in sin, as the local Baptists would have put it, and we turned on the television.
Peter Jennings was still on the air. He’d been on the air all day.
That was the first time I saw it. Fifteen hours after it happened.
The planes. The towers going down floor over floor. The smoke coming out of the Pentagon. The black scar in a field in Pennsylvania where Flight 93 came to rest and where ordinary people had fought back and died doing it. I sat on the end of a nineteen dollar bed on my twenty-third birthday and watched the day I’d been writing about since eight that morning.
It broke something open in me. I don’t have a better way to say it.
The coverage never stopped. A week straight, every channel. Even the sports networks quit pretending anything else was worth airing.
Here’s why I’m telling you all this.
For a long time I believed I was one of the people who remembered. Born on the date, in the business, close enough to it professionally that I got to carry it around like a credential.
But I spent the day itself not knowing. Fifteen hours inside the biggest thing that ever happened to this country, filing copy about it, and I didn’t feel a single true thing until a television set in a cheap motel showed me what my own words had been describing.
I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t callous. I just couldn’t see it yet.
Which is why I’ve gotten quieter lately about the young ones.
I teach now. My students hear the date and say happy birthday and mean nothing else by it. No pause. No apology. To them it is real but distant, the same way December 7 was real but distant to me. The same way November 22 in Dallas was a thing that happened to other people in another decade.
I never flinched at those dates either. I said the words and I moved on to the next thing.
So I cannot stand over anybody about this. I was late to my own birthday.
I had twenty-two birthdays that were just birthdays. Cake and a card and nothing else attached to them. Today is the twenty-fifth one that came with the other thing built in. The marked ones outnumber the clean ones now, and I could not tell you which year that happened. Nobody announces it when it does.
But I have come to think of that flinch as a kind of measurement. As long as somebody’s face still changes when I say the date out loud, the day is alive in this country. When nobody’s face changes anymore, we’ll have finished forgetting.
That’s how it goes, I believe. Not with malice. It goes quiet. It goes soft. It becomes a date in a textbook. Well wait. We don’t have textbooks anymore.
That’s a whole nother argument.
Digression number 3.
Twenty-five years on, the families of the nearly three thousand still go to bed knowing their husbands and wives and sons and daughters will not be walking through the door. The empty seat at the table. The child who ages a year without a mother, and then another year, and then twenty-five of them.
And they’re still being taken. The dust in Lower Manhattan didn’t quit killing people in 2001. The New York fire department has now lost more of its own to the illnesses that came out of that pile than it lost on the morning itself. The casualty list is not a closed document. It’s still being written, quietly, in hospital rooms, one name at a time.
In that great time of need, our pettiness was forgotten. Our politics and prejudices cast aside. We offered our neighbors a hand and we offered the wounded aid and succor. No matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race we claimed, united as one American family we were.
Except we weren’t, not entirely, and I know it because I sat in a folding chair in West Monroe and watched a mayor use the dead to win an argument about money before the fires were even out.
But a man in that room stood up and said the opposite. He said today of all days is when we ought to be able to talk to each other.
He was right. He was right then and he’s right now, a quarter century out, with this country arguing about everything and agreeing on nothing and getting more practiced at the fighting every year.
So perhaps for a brief time we can stop. Perhaps for a brief time, a single day is all, we can remember our loss and the way it bound us together on that dark morning and through the uncertain ones that followed.
Perhaps we can remember those lives instead of being consumed by all our other faults.
Just for a day.
The day isn’t mine. It stopped being mine when I was twenty-three, and it belongs to three thousand families who would give anything to have a reason to celebrate on it.
But I’ll take the flinch. I hope somebody still has one to give me.
Because what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, remains one of the most significant and tragic events in American history.
It must be respected. It must be remembered.
By everyone.
At least for a solitary day.
Josh Beavers is an award-winning columnist who earned four Best Columnist awards from the Louisiana Press Association. He traded the newsroom for the classroom in 2013, convinced that teaching young people to write, to think, and to become productive members of their community was the more important work.