| Tuesday, September 11, 2007 |
17:47 - Just another day
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Six years later isn't exactly a traditionally meaningful anniversary. But this time there's one thing in particular that makes it stand out: what with the leap year in between, this is the first time since 2001 that 9/11 has fallen on a Tuesday.
I remember in that first week afterwards, before anyone had decided what to call it, it was "Tuesday's events". In the second week, it was "the events of last Tuesday". And for the rest of September, I heard names bandied about like "Black Tuesday".
Most years on this date I tend to remember the unreal way the day itself went down, the headlines on the news sites, the lurid footage, the nervous IMs making nervous jokes about the poor Khlau Kalash vendor. But this year, instead, I find myself remembering the dull sense of unknowing dread that followed, in the uncertain days of mid-September. How seriously should we take the Taliban's on-camera follow-up threat of "a storm of planes"? Who was that Osama bin Laden guy—wasn't he the one who created Kimba the White Lion? Why do I have to learn about Islam all of a sudden? What does it look like when a nuke goes off in a city sixty miles away, visible above a line of rooftops out your bedroom window?
In some ways, it's just another Tuesday this year. A day to make appointments to get your car's climate control fixed, to sort out your third-quarter estimated tax payments, to get some vacuuming done. But in another sense, well... it is Tuesday.
I never could get the hang of Tuesdays.
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Brian Tiemann
