Over the past twelve years, I've avoided the "where were you?" conversations and kept any thought or discussion of the event to a socially appropriate minimum. Perhaps because of the recent dramatic events- both very good and very bad- in my life, I was ready this morning to remember. I hadn't planned on doing anything to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11, but when I woke up today I had an urge to crawl into the attic, into a big blue bin of my past life, and find the scrapbook that I kept twelve years ago.
I was living in New York, technically in Jersey (Hoboken), with three other would-be performers in a tiny railroad apartment with three windows and no A/C. Thankfully we had a good supply of wine. I slept in that morning and woke to a phone call from my mother making sure I was ok. She knew that I often took the PATH train downtown, like most of us did occasionally. I was 22 years old and worked in a bookstore in Chelsea, but wasn't scheduled to work that morning.
It wasn't a close call for me, but it was dramatic. Scrapbooking was my way of coping in the weeks that followed, and this morning for the first time in twelve years, I looked through the scrapbook that I'd kept, and I remembered. And I was ok.
