I remembered the anniversary on the day, but was a bit too dragged under to write about it.
Rather like 25 years ago, as it happens. I went to check my journals of the time, and I'd written nothing in September 2001. I hadn't written much that year. We had just finished our first year in Hades, had lived in our house for barely eleven months. Elder daughter had been designated as "gifted" during the previous school year, and younger daughter had been "identified" as being "at risk"; her developmental challenges hadn't been officially tied to autism -- likely because she was a girl, and girls on the spectrum present differently.
With the new school year just started, we were trying to adjust to our new realities. Because I'd read Ira Progroff's book on journalling, I did managed a yearly rundown, which I'd write in patches in the opening months of the new year, so my record of September 200l was set down some six or seven months after the facts. Re-reading it this morning, I was struck by how many details I'd forgotten. Memory is a nebulous thing:
"I walk to Rideau Street from the nursery school, where I have dropped off younger daughter on a sunny September morning, and remember the Rideau branch of the library won't open until 10. It is 9:15.
"I decide to have breakfast at the Ale House* at the entrance to the Byward Market, arriving at William Street about 9:30.
"Whitney Houston is playing, and the recently-installed large TV screens are tuned to CNN. The American news has been full of Condit and the missing intern**, so I ignore it. The subtitles say something about a highjacking.
"Suddenly, the music is turned off, and the sound from the screen is on. I think I'm witnessing the aftermath of a terrible accident, until the waitress tells me two planes have hit the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.
"'Two??' I gasp, my mind reeling with the implications, as my eyes take in the images. Before I can grasp anything, we're told that a plane has hit the Pentagon, then that another plane has crashed.
"My food arrives; I wonder whether to eat. People are coming in off the street, clutching cell phones. One young idiot laughs abrasively: 'They're going to WAR!!'
"We watch, transfixed, as one tower melts away, then the other.
"I stagger to the library, and learn that there's been a bomb threat at the Parliament buildings.
"The Resident Fan Boy is home when I get there; his office is right next to the American Embassy. I don't recall picking up younger daughter, but I must have. We spend the day tuned to the CBC.
"The events have hit Ottawa hard; lots of Americans live here, and with the high tech industries centred here, lots of links with New York. In the evening, I climb the long hill to my elder daughter's school for a meeting, only to find the building locked and dark. Several pupils are the children of embassy employees.
"Flowers, stuffed animals, poems, pictures line the fence at the American Embassy that week, along with scores of candles."
* Became the Highlander Pub a year later, now an eatery called "Pure Kitchen".
** Chandra Levy, a young intern working in Washington, DC, had disappeared the previous May. Her remains was found in an urban park a year later. There had been a media frenzy for much of the summer, mainly focussing on her alleged affair with California Congressman Gary Condit - who apparently had nothing to do with her murder, but the incident ended his political career.
The sidewalk and curb by the American Embassy were, within days, blocked by huge concrete blocks, later replaced by bollards. It took a little longer for passports to be required to travel into the States, but airline trips anywhere, even within Canada were soon transformed into slow-moving, drab queues, complicated by new rules administered by antsy airline security employees.
People continued to die in acts of genocide and terrorism around the world, but the States were now permanently scarred and suspicious, hugging their grief and rage like talismans.
And here we are.
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