Friday, September 19, 2008
In Commemoration, with Two Sugars
The fell anniversary has come and gone but I grant myself the latitude and grace to make this a catch-up post.
Anniversaries recall to our ears the lingering resonance of events that habituation has trained us no longer to notice. And thus it was with the towers and our continuing outrage, authentic at its core regardless of having been cynically co-opted by those in a position to do so. The real impact of the events of that day fell well below the interests of those who chose our path of response; its weight came down squarely upon people so low as to be my brethren. It was in their faces that the attacks of September 11 most obstinately persisted for me on a daily basis. And now, this 9/11 of aught-eight, seven years on from the day of reckoning, they have taken down the union memorial pamphlet. I am now responsible for remembering them on my own.
There’s a bulletin board in each of the coffee rooms my organization maintains on each floor that it occupies in our building. On these boards are pinned seniority charts, job listings, and other random employment-related items. This includes union materials. The union is a big national with many members who worked in the twin towers on 9/11/01. More than sixty of them did not make it out of the wreckage alive. In commemoration of the good each of them had wrought before being senselessly snuffed out, the union created an obituary booklet of photos and bios. This booklet was distributed to all the locals, where rank and file members and everybody else were all galvanized by grief and outrage. The shock of the viper’s strike consumed us with a a desire to do something - anything - in response. And to symbolize that resolve, we pinned that booklet to our bulletin boards.
The individuals who comprised the hero’s gallery that was this book, took my attention for some time. If I happened to reach the coffee decanter too late to pour myself a full cup of joe, I’d refill the basket with fresh grounds and then, instead of scurrying back to my cube to be productive for an extra 45 seconds, I’d stay there in the coffee room and learn something about my fallen union brothers and sisters. The immigrant. The national reservist. The dedicated mom. There was a panoply of us, regular people, good people, martyered to the triumph of the American way that each of them posthumously embodied.
And I got to know them - their hopes, their lives, their dreams. The ones at the front of the book, anyway. The first dozen or so. By the time I got that far into the booklet, though, my coffee would be ready and I’d go back to my cube, properly outraged, respectfully saddened. We lost good people. We’d get those bastards. Eventually. But first, I was going to have some coffee. Revenge may best be served cold, but a hot cup of coffee accompanies it very nicely.
As time went on I had more and more misgivings about what had happened the day of the attacks, and how we’d responded to it. I endorsed a bombing of Kabul, and then was mortified when it was carried out. When we turned our attention to Iraq I had to disown my government. And yet those booklets remained, pinned up in every coffee room like butterflies on exhibition to remind me of what stil lay at the bottom of it all - a dismemberment of our common corporate being, no less galling for having been repaid many times over with the blood of foreign innocents. We’d somehow contrived to declare war in their names, against an incohate foe and for increasinglhy attenuated reasons. I became an opponent of war, even as I strove to remember those in whose name it was allegedly being waged. They were not forgotten. Of course not. We had a pamphlet in the coffee room with their photos in it.
Then came more years. A war became a different war. A mission became a justification. We got new coffeemakers, and still the pamphlet hung on the bulletin board but it began to fade and pucker from humidity and age. I stopped reading the bios. I stopped looking at the collage of faces on the front cover. Even more years passed and I stopped noticing that the pamphlet was even up there. September 11 would roll up each year like a howitzer and roll away like a storm surge, leaving me feeling gunshy, drowned and dirty every time. I began to have trouble connecting my conflicted emotions to the cheerful faces that endured on the glossy little pages of that booklet. The seniority chart hadn’t been updated for 18 months. The union memorial booklet barely registered anymore.
What I noticed, finally, was blank space. The bulletin board was cleaner. Some old ads were gone, and some outdated circulars had been updated. And my sixty-odd transcontinental colleagues who had perished in fire and smoke had perished again, but quietly this time, with nary a wisp of fog from the hot-water spigot to mark their passing. Someone had taken down the booklets, unceremoniously, as a housekeeping task like clearing out the coffee grounds or replacing the herbal tea supply. I took a moment to contemplate the patterns in the corkboard, a simple flat panel from a distance but impossibly complex when examined up close, dark brown spots and swirls in a light brown matrix. Then I filled my coffee cup and took it back to my desk. I would try to remember. It was September 11, for God’s sake. Of all days, I could remember this one, and through it I could remember those strangers in the book. Then, of course, I took my coffee back to my desk. Comemoration is all well and good, I supposed, but those people worked for a living. I chose to honor their memory by doing the same.
