Growing Up With a 9/11 Birthday

For the last 10 years, I've never missed a 9/11 documentary on National Geographic or The History Channel or TLC. I rewatch MSNBC's replay of the September 11, 2001 Today Show each year. Because September 11th is my birthday.

The year that 9/11 concluded, my 2000-2001 year, is still a strong contender for the Year That Changed Everything -- if not for the Worst Year of My Life.

In Michael Mann's still-best film, 1986's Manhunter, a pre-CSI William Petersen is asked why he wants to do something as distasteful as going to visit Hannibal Lector (played by Brian Cox). In classic understated William Petersen authority, he says, "It helps me recover the mindset." I can relate. You don't always want to recover it, but you have to, if for no other reason than to find the strength to keep going, or to assess how far you've come.

September 11 used to be the happiest of days in my family. Not only was I born that day, but it was also the exact birthday of my late great-grandfather, in 1894. He died on New Year's Eve 1970, well before I came on the scene, but his wife, who lived to be 97, thought my later birth was a message from above (as did his daughter, my grandmother). Ten years before I was born, my cousins were married on my great-grandfather's birthday, and my own grandfather celebrated that week too (born five days after me, albeit in 1918). But that last year, everything changed.

In December of 2000, a week before Christmas, my 77-year-old grandmother died, after 3 weeks in the hospital ICU, from a massive heart attack. She and my grandfather (who'd died in 1994) had raised me along with my mom, put me through school, paid for my healthcare, bought me my computers and books, and lifted my spirits the way that the best spoiling-grandma could from day one, helping me financially as I tried to get my foothold as a young working writer in what was already becoming a post-print society. (The less said about my late father, the better.) Now, as the only child of two only children, my immediate family, except for my mom, was all gone.

Three and a half months later, a literary agent who was so impressed with my "youthful talent and energy" he'd promised to "put my name up in lights" (I should've hung up on him right then) and I had dinner in New York, where I'd traveled at my expense. After failing to sell the manuscript I'd sent him, failing to get me a promised job on the Discovery Channel, failing to seal a Savion Glover ghostwriting deal, he had promised me a gig writing a biography of Tom Tryon. The late Mr. Tryon's family had evidently told him that if they wanted to agent a bio, they'd get Binky Urban or Luke Janklow or Sandra Dijkstra or Joel Gotler, or someone from ICM or William Morris to do the deal, thank you very much -- followed by a firm "click."

Of course, he took his own incompetence out on me. To my having just lost my grandmother, he sneered with contempt, "Well, we've all got our problems, haven't we?" I'd have broken his nose if the pig hadn't been between 250 and 300 pounds. I took the plane back like a Columbo villain, plotting ways I could kill him and get away with it. No more promises to put my name up in lights anymore.

I spent the next few months on blotto pilot, not dating, too depressed to swim or hike, seeing what few friends I did at the library and movie theatre and video and record stores (half of which don't exist today), and watching TV until I could barely make sense of it anymore. (One of my best critic-friends later joked that I may have been the only person in the entire US and Canada who watched both the premiere seasons of Queer as Folk and Six Feet Under, and the final year of Diagnosis Murder.) I was just starting out in my work, just getting used to my 20s, and it already seemed like it was all over. Back to square one. I felt ridiculous in my ruin, the past few years for nothing, run into the ground. How would I get out of this?

But as my birthday approached, I started to regain some semblance of optimism, or at least my old endurance. I still remember jogging along the San Gabriel Riverbed at sunset the day before, psyching myself up for the end of my annus horribilis and the start of climbing back on the horse, full-saddle. I even drove to a local Porsche-Audi-BMW store to drool at the last of the outgoing 740 models, for wishful "someday I'll get mine!" vibes.

That birthday morning, I woke up ready to greet the new day, my new beginning. I rolled my eyes as soon as I turned on the cable, though. "Oh great," I snarled to myself. "Some stupid f***ing action movie, and this early! And they're flashing World Trade Center Attacked but they're showing the Pentagon!" The idea of a real-life attack of this magnitude was so inconceivable, it didn't even occur to me that it wasn't Independence Day, until I turned the channel, and I saw the same thing. Again. And again.

Oh. My. God!

This is the point in the essay where I'm supposed to go Oprah on you, and get out of meandering amidst my personal tragedies, and talk about how the courage and bravery of the 9/11 heroes restored my strength, reignited my faith, made me realize how shallow my own problems were and how I too could go on and beat the odds again.

From the bottom of my heart, seeing the true heroism and endurance, and the tragedy and bravery of people forcing themselves to go on after truly "losing it all" DID do just that for me, and more.

But alas, that wasn't all. Horrible things had always happened to some innocent people at random -- the drive-by shooter who "accidentally" kills a 6-year-old, the junkie who robs a little old lady for her purse, the crosswalk traffic accident, the house fire. Now, however, in the post-9/11 world, it seems like random, irrational ugliness and tragedy became less and less a horrible exception and more and more of a rule.

The post-9/11 world seemed to become the post-logic society, too -- an era of "macro tragedy". From now on, our setbacks would be Shakespearean, bigger than big, on the grand epic scale, leaving thousands if not millions broke and bleeding in their wake.

The next recession wouldn't be just a slowdown; it'd be another Great Depression. Enron and Bernie Madoff and Dick Fuld would make weapons of mass financial destruction. Iraq and Afghanistan would last as long as Vietnam, more than World War II and Korea combined. Hurricane Katrina would turn one of our flagship cities into Third World America. Our then-President would be accused of running an "Oil & Gas Junta" from his White House, to be followed by a "secret Kenyan Muslim" interloper. We'd get a national health plan with something for everyone -- to hate. Borders and Blockbuster would go under, and century-old blue-chippers like GM, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, and Pacific Gas & Electric would have to be pulled drowning to the shore and given CPR.

We were now in the era of the "game change", of the "reboot button". And of course, there's the War on Terror -- not Nazi Germany, not the Soviet Union, not an easily identifiable Dr. Evil, but terror that strikes with no warning, utterly unencumbered by logic or reason, an enemy written on the wind.

A prominent historian once said that nothing marked one as white-suburban-middle-class more than the Archie and Edith Bunker "addiction" to "saving and planning" for the future, for a "rainy day". But what good is planning and saving, after all, when the rules keep changing in the middle of the game? When there IS nothing predictable anymore, nothing you can count on to be there for you in 5 years -- let alone 5 minutes?

But there was that also one moment, the one good thing that came from 9/11. For that one bright shiny morning, as different and diverse and strong as all of our feelings had been and still are, we were all "real Americans" then. We weren't singing "Hail to the Thief" after "Bush Stole the Election" or Impeaching Clinton or shutting down the government. For that one day or year or month, we were all in the family, all in it together, all for one and one for all. One nation under God.

A true-crime book I once read ended with the cliched but applicable line, "The horror has diminished with the passage of time, but will never fade entirely."

That's certainly true of 9/11. But as we embark on the next unknowable Decade of Change and Trauma, as far as we've come from the world we lived in a decade ago, as different a world as tomorrow may be, let's all hope that the heroism and bottom-line unity of 9/11 -- though it has already diminished beyond recognition -- will never fade entirely, either.