My Thoughts on 9/11

House hunting trip in Duluth after 9/11 forced us to move. Nov 2001.

I have an 8 mm video of my son. He’s just over eleven months old. He’s crawling around on the floor of my living room. He was kind of a fat baby. His chosen form of locomotion was to logroll around the house. We were living in South Ogden, Utah at the time. It was kind of a grayish carpet. In the background you can see the new entertainment center we bought to house our TV. Mission Style, when those kind of things mattered to me. Things like how many stars the restaurant had. What critics thought of the movie we were going to see. What kind of car we drove.

When I watch this video and see the TV on in the background, you can see one of the twin towers burning in New York City. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know why I was doing that. Why was I videotaping my son as he crawled around on the carpet during a disaster? I don’t remember doing it. Years went by and I was organizing our video tapes and looked through them to see what I had. I saw my son and there were the towers. When I looked through the lens and tried to imagine my thoughts, I drew a blank. I must’ve been in shock. Like someone who just got in a car accident and has a broken arm and doesn’t know it yet.

I don’t remember videotaping my son. I do remember that I was in the Mountain time zone when my dad in Maine called me and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was drinking coffee in my bathrobe. He said, “Turn on your television.”

I also remember my wife weeping in front of the tube. We were watching the people jump out of the World Trade Center and fall like horrifying confetti. She cursed at the screen. I was surprised at how angry she was through her tears.

They rarely, if ever, play video of the falling people on TV. In a world where nothing is forbidden, the restraint shown is remarkable. It isn’t WWII. Nobody today would hide the fact that FDR was in a wheelchair. They’ll show anything on TV.

They’ll show the money shot of the plane hitting the tower. Or a tower crumbling. But you won’t see much tape of people jumping. Somehow, we, the shameless, have arrived at a consensus. We look away.