Today is a little like that day almost 10 years ago, not quite as cloudless and crystalline, but with the fading feel of summer and the sense that autumn is in the blocks. I look up at the sky and think there is nothing to be afraid of. Yet it is out of just such a perfect sky that four infamous planes flew.
September 11 is the date that has been carved into our consciousness, but it has always been September 10 that has stayed with me almost as much. My memories of 9/11 are inevitably intermingled with the ubiquitous imagery from that day. I could see the smoke from the towers twisting above the skyline from my Guideposts office windows. I saw the dust-covered figures, mummy-like, walking from Ground Zero as I stood outside on East 34th Street. Yet those real-time images have been blurred by endless video footage of that day, the thousands of photographs. I only remember the event through the fog of shock, what I saw in three dimensions and what I saw in two dimensions intertwined.
September 10 is different. I remember everything about that day with a kind of frozen clarity—having lunch with a friend, making plane reservations without a second thought for a business trip the following week, picking up Chinese takeout on the way home from work and watching the Yankees battle for the division lead before falling asleep on the couch. It is all still so clear to me, the last day of an era that now seems almost innocent, the other side of a demarcation of history. How could I possibly have guessed what the future held? It is that that haunts me as much as what followed the next morning—the uncertainty of tomorrow.
We are not given knowledge of the future. Yet what September 10 teaches me—and all of the days that have followed—is that we are given a far greater knowledge, the reassurance that someone will be with us, today, tomorrow and forever, and that whatever the future holds, be it joy or tragedy, happiness or heartache, God will be there.
