Birthdays

September 11 has become a rather strange day in this home. My mother was born on September 11, 1937, in Joplin, Missouri. Aside from the passing of years, there was nothing ever particularly noteworthy about the date. People born on January 1, always here “Oh, were you the New Year’s baby?” Or people born on the Fourth of July are subjected to wonderfully witty remarks like “Did fireworks go off for you?” Dad gets that a bit – he was born on July 3.

But September 11 was always, well, just there.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was seeing a patient of mine in my Connecticut office, and then I had the rest of the morning off. His appointment was at 8 AM, and we finished at the end of the therapist’s hour, that is to say forty-five minutes later. I climbed into my car to drive the long ride home of approximately one mile. I had the radio on, as I almost always did, and it was tuned in to WCBS 880 AM out of New York. In that mile, I was listening to the breaking news about a plane or something hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Well, it was always bound to happen I thought.

I arrived home, and found Dan glued to CNN. I looked at the television images, and sat down, stunned. Shortly afterward, on TV, we watched the second plane hit the South Tower. Clearly, we were now in a new world.

Then we heard about the Pentagon. And the multiple rumors about other planes in other places, and those unaccounted for.

My sister lives in DC. My parents had no idea where their kids might be. It was not unusual for me to be in the concourse under the World Trade Center. I had no idea where my sister was, although I knew that the Pentagon was a good distance from her home in suburban Maryland.

So I called home, partly to wish Mom a Happy Birthday, but also to let them know I was okay. I couldn’t get through to DC, but I did get my (now ex-)brother-in-law an email, and he said that he and Angela were fine.

Mom wasn’t up yet. She, like myself, was never a morning person. And it was an hour earlier in St. Louis. So I talked to Dad, who was unaware of what was going on. “Turn on the TV,” I said.

Of course we all have our stories of that day. I heard someone on NPR this week say that it was our generation’s Kennedy assassination. Not sure that I totally agree with that conclusion, but I get the point.

But through the past years, I have felt badly for my mother. I remember when she said that she was changing her birthday. Her father’s birthday was September 3, and she told me in no uncertain terms that she was changing her birthday to that date. This was because she would go place and do things in the course of normal life and be asked what her date of birth was, and she would say “September 11, ….” And she would hear the articulate response, drawn out into a multisyllabic experience, “Ooooooh.”

Mom would have been 73 today.

I remember coming home from grad school one year, and just being down. I was in a funk and didn’t know why. It was Thanksgiving, and I had just celebrated my 27th birthday on November 20. This was in the days when people could meet you at the gate. I walked off the plane and the jetway, and I saw my dad, my mom, and my sister standing there, and it hit me like a lightning bolt. I was crossing a threshold. I saw my mother, and I realized I remembered her 27^th birthday. As I get ready to celebrate my own 50^th birthday, I realize I’m not as down as I was at 27, or 37, or even 47. Fifty feels okay. I’m not going to make my goal, I believe, of being in all fifty states by the time I turn fifty. Getting to Nebraska I could do on a weekend. But getting to Alaska – well, I don’t think that’s in the cards.

I look at 23 year-olds today, and I try to imagine what my mother was like when I was born and she was 23. A child. But those are conversations that will be revealed in another way and in another dimension of reality. For the time being, it is September 11. And I am profoundly aware of the tension between celebrating life, and mourning loss.