I work two blocks away from what used to be the World Trade Center. Every day, as I pass the site, I see a new batch of tourists lined up against the gate. Families from Europe, buses of school kids from Texas... And in pondering what it could possibly mean to them, I can't not reflect, somewhere, on what it means to me.
It blows my mind that, of all the people in my life, precious few knew me when the towers still stood. Jay and I walked among the concourse's huge wintertime "PEACE ON EARTH" debating high school philosophies, but that's about the only note of continuity. My life as I know it now started the day we all walked down from school to 14th Street, the furthest south we could go, and started loading trucks with equipment for rescue workers. September 13th. That day starts the long list of defining days of my adult life.
When I pass the site where the buildings once stood, I continue to feel a sense of loss. But the life that had them in it is a life that no longer feels like mine. And so the loss is vague. Nondescript.
And if that's what goes through my head, then what are those tourists thinking?
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Leah and I talked briefly the other day about the importance of keeping ties with people who knew older versions of ourselves; there's an accountability that comes from that. An insistence on continuity, on the reality of the past.
Which...now I'm thinking of Bri's history/sacred space. Because I too liked that immediately. But thinking about how sacredness doesn't have to mean being set aside; or set apart perhaps in that it's factually unalterable, but keeping it accessible to storytelling and -changing. But there must be ways of controlling what one changes, or where does the sacred aspect go? Hum. This thinking not ready for public consumption.
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