From James Lilek:

I watched part of the CBS 9/11 special last night. (I don’t know if it’s been broadcast yet; I got the DVD at Target.) It is a pity that this particular historical record contains so much Bryant Gumbel, but it has its moments. In the middle of an interview with a woman who saw the first plane hit, she gasps Oh My God, another one - and it reminds you again of that moment, the point when you grasped exactly what was happening, and the ground swayed. I’d say it brought it all back but it never went away. There hasn’t been a day I haven’t thought about it.



That bothers some people. There’s an attitude in some quarters that there’s something unhealthy about thinking about 9/11, certainly in dwelling on the details. They’ll allow a certain amount of regret and dismay. They’ll permit you a brief spasm of anger, but it had best be followed with a nuanced assessment of American foreign policy. Remark that you had a nightmare about your daughter getting smallpox or a nuke in New York, and they’ll roll their eyes; tut tut the lad’s gone mad. These people are no doubt bracing themselves for the first anniversary, but for different reasons than you might have. They can’t stand people who won’t let go of 9/11. Once they washed the ash off their car it was over for them; why can’t it be over for everyone? Do you really think your inability to move along makes you a better person? Stop waving the bloody shirt. Send it to cleaners already, and leave Iraq alone.

Tonight I was googling around looking for a picture of Christine Hanson, the daughter of Kim Ji-Soo and Peter Hanson. She was two. The family was flying to Disneyland when the terrorists slaughtered the flight attendants, stabbed the pilots to death, and drove the plane into the building. (Yes yes, we know what happened; don’t be so dramatic, and Disneyland? Please. You’re getting bathetic.) My wife came up with Gnat to say goodnight while I was searching; I gave the little tot a peck on the lips and told her daddy loved her, and went back to work. As I heard the crib rail go up I heard a particularly deafening jet pass overhead - one of the old unhushed cargo planes that makes the china rattle at Jasperwood - and I remembered something from last night.

We were watching an Olie episode in which a storm knocks out the power, and Pappy tells tales by fashwite. (Flashlight, in non-Gnat parlance.) The episode begins with a little song, sung in ominous tones: storm’s comin’, storm’s comin’. Gnat sings along, since she’s seen the episode a million times. But in the middle of the ep she got up, tottered to the back door, and said: storm’s coming, daddee. Then she crossed the room to the window on the opposite side of the door, and said again: storm’s coming. I explained no storm was coming, that we were just fine. We were perfectly safe. But she got up again, and again, and again.

Then I listened to what she was saying: Stars Coming. Not storm: stars. When she heard the roar of the planes overhead coming in for a landing at the Mpls/St. Paul airport, she ran to the door to see the lights as they passed over head, then ran to the window to see the stars pass by once more. She knows what an airplane is - she’s been to France on one, after all, and even identified a picture of a swept-wing jet as an airpane despite its strange triangular configuration. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t see stars overhead as well, flying in formation, passing over the house like the smiling stars in her beloved Olie show.

She knows everything, of course. She’s pretty sure of that. If something’s unclear or strange, she asks, and then it either fits and clicks or it doesn’t, and her confidence in her knowledge is unchanged. (This morning, for example, she was looking at my screen saver, naming the celestial objects. Rrth. Mune. Jubider. Ooh, stars.) The world is an amazing place for her; it’s safe, it’s kind, it’s full of toys and nice dogs and trips to the park and Jell-O at night with a storybook, and when she falls asleep to the sound of the planes overhead she thinks of stars, spinning and twinkling.

Little Christine was Gnat’s age, give or take a month; bin Laden’s lackeys killed her - and did so to ensure that other fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters died as well, preferably by the tens of thousands. This little girl’s death wasn’t even a comma in the manifesto they hoped to write. They made sure that her last moments alive were filled with horror and blood, screams and fear; they made sure that the last thing she saw was the desperate faces of her parents, insisting that everything was okay, we’re going to see Mickey, holding out a favorite toy with numb hands, making up a happy lie. And then she was fire and then she was ash.

I feel the same anger I did on 9/11; I feel the same overwhelming grief. Nothing in my heart has changed, and God forbid it ever does.