It is the first disaster I remember connecting with in any meaningful way. It affected people I knew. There was no continuous news coverage of anything in 1980, so my knowledge of what happened mostly came from friends and family.

What I have come to remember most is that the date, May 9^th, would be spoken of as something more than just the calendar day on which the Skyway disaster happened. "May 9^th" became a day of reckoning for the city and the region. You didn't just say "May 9^th." You announced it. And when you said it people reacted. Some made a sign of the cross. Others lowered their eyes. One way or another, most everyone somehow acknowledged the date's significance.

To me that date was invoked as a token of understanding that at any moment, at any time, you may be left with just a few seconds to make peace with yourself before dying. This image of a Buick at the precipice of the suddenly ended bridge did not simply depict one lucky driver's brush with death. To me it expressed that precipice which is every second of every day.

Is May 9^th still spoken of with such ominousness? I have not lived in the area for over 18 years, so I do not know.

While I don't remember having much perspective on things at the time I would guess that the space shuttle Challenger blowing up in the sky before us on January 28, 1986, put the Sunshine Skyway disaster of 1980 into that category of things which suddenly seemed to have happened a lifetime ago.

How long will it be before the words "September Eleventh" lose whatever impact they have today? What new disaster will put that day into the category of things you couldn't believe shocked you? Will arsonists destroy Washington, D.C.? Will the water supply become permanently poisoned? Will China invade California?

For a long time whenever my clock radio showed 9:11 PM I would get a bit of panic in my gut. Senseless, I know, but true. And the other day at the grocery store I did a double-take after noticing a row of milk cartons with expiration dates of September 11.

I don't know if I envy or resent those with the emotional agility to forget the sadness of what happened, to forget the panic and the revulsion and move on to blame and condescension. Maybe I wish I possessed that level of mental nimbleness instead of this emotional constipation, built on incomprehension and sadness, that has only recently begun to unravel.

Did I react with sympathy or revulsion to the complaining? Complaints about the official death count: that we'd been told 10,000, then 8,000, then 5,000, such complaints implying this was not as big a deal as we had been told. Complaints of insufficient media coverage for certain ethnic groups who died in those buildings. Complaints about the nature of the enemy, and that this is not a real war.

More than any other are the irrelevant complaints that invoke the shock value of September 11^th for no reason other then to give weight to a losing argument.

I nearly vomited after realizing that the first tower had been destroyed. I saw it happen through the window of a friend's office. Strangely, in that exact office exactly 1 week earlier that friend and I had talked about the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Our conversation ended with me asking "Can you believe they actually wanted to bring those buildings down? Can you even imagine that?"

We sat there staring at each other for a few seconds with expressions of wide-eyed, head-shaking "Dude, that's crazy."

More body parts were found at the Trade Center site today. The dead are still being buried. Now it looks like the Port Authority and related parties will get sued to where there will not be enough money to even build a Starbucks on the World Trade Center site.

I can't figure out what authority has the most weight in deciding what, if anything, gets built there. Moral authority? Political? Economic? I do not know, nor does anyone I've asked.

The night of the blackout (August 14, 2003) reminded me of September 11, 2002.

On that day almost a year ago, I did what I will do again this year. I turned off all my televisions and radios, and ignored newspapers and as much of the Internet as possible. On the night of the blackout, as on the day of September 11, 2002, I could hear everything. The floor creaking as I walked on it. The sound a can makes when you press the can-opener into it. Breathing, thinking, knuckle-cracking -- they all sounded like I'd never heard them before. It made me rediscover that this is all there really is. The space I occupy, the air I breathe, the time passed in pursuit of some nonsense or other.

The other day I happened to find some of the pages I wrote on while sitting at my desk the morning of September 11, 2001. Just looking at this scares the shit out of me.

« It Was Dark • sorabji.com

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