Remembering...

I’m gonna philosophize with you for a little bit. It’ll set up the main point on this blog, I assure you. It’s my assertion that there are two types of memories. The first is the kind that just sort of happens, like if you accidently hit the record button on your VCR or DVR and you get a small sliver of whatever’s happening at the time. Like when I hear the Beatles’ song “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” I flash back to being 4 or 5 years old in Green Bay, WI, coming home from shopping at the Port Plaza Mall. I’m in the back seat of the car, a brand new Presto Magix in my grubby lil mitts and we’re on the road on route to UWGB where Bay Beach Amusement Park is to your left and the Wildlife Sanctuary is to your right. I was digging to “doo waaa oooh” background vocals, and just then the car followed a curve so the sun hit me with the perfect amount of warmth. Now, there’s a million things I did as a kid that were more memorable, or meant more in the overall scheme of my life, but for whatever weird reason my brain took a hold of *that very moment* and I can recall it, even today, with crystal clear clarity. But my 8th grade graduation? Nope, don’t remember that.

The second type is the kind of feel obliged to remember, or you remember only because you would rather forget it. An example, keeping with the Beatles motif: I remember waiting for the school bus in the dining room, and I think it was cold and wintery. The radio was on but I wasn’t paying attention, and then my mom peeked around and told me John Lennon had died. Now I was 6 or 7, so I couldn’t claim to be that deeply affected by his stuff back then. But I remember how sad my mom was. I don’t think she was crying, but her face suddenly had this weight attached to it, something you could see and even feel to some degree. I also remember parts of Hands Across America, and that was specifically because I was **told** to remember it as it was going to be a great moment in our country’s history. (The fact that some of you may have to go to Wikipedia to find out what exactly “Hands Across America” is shows how insightful that advice was.) I mostly remember our small Catholic school and a few other people in a line of about 50, with no other clusters of hands to connect to the left or the right.For some bizarre reason I thought the line was going literally snake across the country and that you’d be able to see this huge mass of people on either side of you, and you would complete the connection wherever you were. Yes, I was a weird little kid. I also remember the Challenger exploding and them announcing it on the building’s PA. All the teachers took us to the gymnasium (at the time I went to a small Catholic grade school, so the whole K-8 was probably a little more than 100 people) and they wheeled out a 19 inch TV on one those wheelie holders that brought the TV up to about a six foot height and we watched a hour or so or the news coverage following the disaster. I still to this day cannot understand the internal logic behind that, beyond that it was a “historic” moment. Now on the less gloomy side of things, there are certain events in your life everyone seems to remember: your first kiss (hi, Kimberly!) Your first day on the job (ah, the carefree days of being a dishwasher at Ledge View Supper Club!) Your first day of school (crying at kindergarden, wanting to cry at high school, being at first overwhelmed and then bored in college, followed by my first of many walks from the Lakeshore dorms to State Street to pick up the new Sonic Youth CD.) The first time you touched a girl’s bra (again in college, a few weeks later....OK, the aforemantioned bra – a red one – was in the dryer as I was putting in my clothes, and I oh-so-smoothly asked the only other person there, “Uh, hey, uh, is this yours?” and indeed it was)


So obviously the date of my post might clue you in to where I’m going here. Yeah, 9/11 was an event few will ever forget, an event that shakes every generation exposed to it. Much like how your parents or grandparents can tell you where they were when Kennedy was shot or when man landed on the moon, the Internet generation can paint a pretty vivid picture of 9/11 through their eyes. My eyes at the time were spending my days at my future wife’s apartment in Mazomanie, small and cozy. We had been dating for a few months, and were starting to adjust to each other’s routines, and our main routine was our work schedules. I was an assistant manager at Walgreens in Madison, WI, specifically the store that used to be located at the Hilldale Mall. Being a manager meant you had erratic schedules, and so that Tuesday I was scheduled for the afternoon closing shift. This meant I got to sleep in, which even back then was a nice luxury. Kelley, however had a Monday to Friday morning gig at MCI Worldcom in Middleton, so by the time I woke up she was already dressed, arrived and punched in.

In the weeks before the event in question, the radio had started playing two different songs. One was “Rockin the Suburbs,” the first single from Ben Fold’s first solo album of the same name. I had enjoyed all the albums he had released with the Ben Folds Five, and enjoyed the single, which mocked the rap/rock genre that was florishing at the time. The second was by a (then) largely unheralded band from Canada called Nickelback. It was called “How You Remind Me” and Kelley really enjoyed cranking it up when it came on (which was a different station than Ben’s song, and played a lot more often) I had thought it would be a nice gesture to get her the CD when it came out, which happened to be September 11th. So around 8:30am, I woke up and got ready for work early. My plan was to get the CD at Target on the west side, which was the closest CD-selling store to her work, coming to her office and surprising her with it, and then maybe going out to lunch with her, giving me plenty of time to be at work by 1:00 pm. I had a love/hate relationship with the radio at the time, and pretty much the only time I would listen to the radio was AM radio, and then only when Jim “Pimp of Dead Air in the Box” Rome was on. Since it was not 11am yet, I decided to take a CD with. (My Buick did not have a CD stereo, so what I did was attached my Discman CD player to the dash with some cleverly placed velcro and plugged in the cassette adapter.) The CD in question was Split Enz’s Anniversary, which was a concert of the seminal New Zealand band’s 20 year reunion in the mid 90s. I’m not a super big Enz fan, but I am a big Crowded House fan (Neil Finn, before forming Crowded House was in Split Enz with his brother Tim, who would later briefly rejoin his little brother in Crowded House as well as the aptly named Finn Brothers) and found the Anniversary disc cheap enough to give it a shot. So as the Twin Towers burned and the Pentagon was breached, and as Flight 93 abruptedly landed in a pasture in Pennsylvania, I was heading into work early, listening to Split Enz, with no idea of the horror that was happening one time zone ahead of me.

My first inkling something had gone horribly wrong was when I stepped into Target and almost everyone – employees and customers alike – were huddled around the TVs right by the entrance gate. I thought this was weird until I turned toward the TVs and saw buildings with huge clouds of smoke coming out of them. Like the rest of the people I wacthed for what must have been a half hour, before the scene got too much for me. I wandered around, trying to distract myself from the ugliness of the TV. I saw the Ben Folds CD and then the Nickelback CD, and thought of purchasing both before remembering we were trying to save money to pay for a washer and dryer at Sears. So I just got the Nickelback CD and hurried back to the car, eager to surprise Kelley and discuss the crazy events that had happened just a couple hours before. By this time I knew how to get to MCI blindfolded and a few miles later, was in the building and heading up the elevator to the MCI office. What I saw when I got there I had never seen before during working hours: the entrance room was dark and there was no one behind the desk. Since that’s where Kelley was supposed to be, it was a little off-putting. I hung around the dimly lit office and went to the door where the main offices were. I heard a TV in the distance, filtering in the latest information on the attacks, and nothing else. I didn’t want to barge in, since I figured everyone’s collective paranoia was at a peak. So I wrote a quick note to Kel, stuffed it inside the Target bag with the CD, and headed to work.

I was about 2 ½ hours early, so I parked in the lot and just listened to the radio as facts and rumours trickled in. By noon I was hungry, so I walked in the mall to get my lunch special (the baked chicken breast at Sentry) and was taken aback at how barren the mall was. After eating, I came in to work, and everyone to a person was shellshocked and in a catatonic. And when I say “everyone” it was about five employees and maybe 10 or so customers the rest of the night. (They had closed the rest of the Mall around 2pm, but since Walgreens closes for absolutely NOTHING, we remained open regular hours, and they left the closest outside doors in the mall open just for us.) Some of my co-workers couldn’t stop talking about it, some were already tired of hearing about it. The canned muzak, either on the 11th or the day after, abruptedly changed to a mishmash of patriotic marches and pop songs with the word “America” or “USA” in them. Some were obvious (Lee Greenwood? You betcha) and others less so (there was a Frank Sinatra one right after Prince and The Revolution’s “America” that had ol’ Blue Eyes rhapsodizing about kids playing in the park) There were only about eight or nine songs in this instant mix, which despite the noble intent, made it really annoying really quickly. (Plus, it seemed to go on for the better part of a week, before the country was ready to heal and listen to Seals and Croft and Air Supply again.) All the way home, and then at home, was catching up with the crisis. Since we had no TV in the apartment, we listened to the boombox radio, which made it feel like my grandparents probably did when trying to get the latest on the wars of generations past.

In the days and weeks to follow, more would be learned of the attacks, and the nation's collective paranoia would level off to the point it could be rated and color-coded. The drive to and from work was now suddenly dotted with American flags on either side of the road. On a personal note, we would end up moving less than two months later, right next door to a post office, just as the anthrax terror would reach a fever pitch. (Despite the numerous signs they were legally obligated to tack up, our local postmasters in Arena, Wisconsin didn't seem too worried.) And yes, I did end up getting that Ben Folds CD a few days later from Kel.

Of course, I ‘celebrate’ not one, but two big events on 9/11. Because two years after the Towers fell, my wife was rear-ended by a semi on her way to work, the after-effects of which (bad back, numb leg) she suffers til this day. I only remember bits and pieces of that day (but I remember again I got to sleep in) other than Kel’s dad leaving a message, telling me Kel had been in an accident but that she was OK. It's weird that I almost seemed to have shut that day from my memory completely. Obviously it happened, and we still deal with the ripple effects even now. But the voice of my father-in-law on the answering machine is the only thing that has stuck with me.

So on the anniversary of 9/11, all I can say is: my thoughts are with all the people who died on that fateful day, in New York, in Washington DC, on Flight 93, and all those who loved them and knew them. It was a sad day that the whole world still feels the effects of, and hopefully the best thing that comes from it is that we can stop something that horrendous from happening again.