Remembering 9/11

(From the quickly-dumped Spider-Man movie trailer.)

It's hard to believe so much time has passed since the 9/11 tragedy.  I was a new stay-at-home dad; my daughter had just gone off to elementary school and I was cleaning house with the television on in the background.  It was playing some NYC-based network morning show -- I honestly don't remember which one, but I think it may have been CBS This Morning -- with a view of the city behind the newsreader's desk.  I just happened to glance up to see the first plane plow into the tower.  Like most of us, for that first few minutes, I assumed that it had been a horrible accident.  Then I saw the second crash, live, and I knew something horrible was going down.

The hardest thing about that day was trying to explain to a first-grader what was going on.  The weirdest thing was the quiet skies for the rest of that week.

It's nice that enough time has passed that media can bear to show images of the twin towers.  A trailer for the then-new first Spider-Man movie was quickly yanked because it showed Spidey catching a helicopter in a web he'd spun between the two towers.  Ghostbusters went away for a while because of the painful views of the city which showed the towers prominently in the skyline.  And other movies either quietly went away or were re-edited to remove the images of the World Trade Center because the pictures were just too painful to look at.

I'm glad that enough time has passed that we can look at those beautiful buildings again.  I still get a little pang when I see them.  As a kid growing up in Jersey, I remember when the towers were built and I saw them go up in stages on our frequent trips to the City.  I remember my first trip to the observationd deck there, and I still have the squashed penny from one of those dorky souvenir machines that shows them.  I myself did experience a pang the first time I saw them in a film afterwards, but it was nothing like the first trip I took to NYC afterwards, when they were no longer part of the skyline with which I had become so familiar.  That was a blow right to my heart.

But an important part of "Never Forget" for me is recognizing what an achievement those buildings were, and honoring their beauty and their memory.  9/11 will always be the Pearl Harbor of my generation, but it should never mean that we don't bring ourselves to look at what we lost.  Remembering is the best way to give honor.