It Still Feels Like Yesterday

It’s been 24 years since September 11, 2001.

A lot of life has happened since then. A whole generation of young people—including those in their twenties and even early thirties—have no memory of the events of that day. Yet, for many of us, me included, that day doesn’t feel so long ago.

I lived in New York City in 2001.

In fact, I had just moved to the South Bronx from Berkeley, California for a yearlong seminary internship the first week of September.

Everything, absolutely everything, about the day remains less of a memory and more like a recitation, the kind I ask my young son to give me of his day when I pick him up from school.

“I got up early to train for the New York Marathon. I finished a speed workout on the track of South Bronx High School. I was still sweaty after my shower, so I stood outside the doors of the church where I worked trying to cool down. It was a beautiful day.

Suddenly, my supervisor sped through a traffic light and drove her minivan onto the sidewalk where I was standing.

She rolled down her window and said, “Get in.”

She was listening to the radio. She still hadn’t decided if the broadcast was true or a macabre morning show joke.

We arrived at her home. We turned on the TV. It wasn’t a joke.

Within moments of turning on the TV, as we watched smoke pour from one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center we watched an airplane fly into a second tower…then we watched as both buildings fell in a plume of smoke.

I’ll never forget it.

I’ve tried to describe to my son born almost 20 years after the attack what happened in a language he can understand.

A long time ago there was a day when bad guys hurt people and good guys helped people.

We remember people who helped people and we remember people who died every year.

The description lacks nuance about American foreign policy, world economic conditions, and religious ideation,

It’s a Kindergarten version—literally—of what happened.

15 years after the sad day of 2001 I was the Chaplain at a College on Staten Island.

I was asked to lead a beginning of the year prayer for faculty members—most of whom were not religious, including non-practicing but culturally observant Muslims. Not an easy audience to speak to about spirituality and pluralism…adding to this complexity was a fatal drug overdose of a popular staff member’s son the day prior.

So, rather than a prayer or a sermon, I read a poem. As a preface I said said. “events like September 11th have the ability to provoke trauma responses—even if we weren’t personally affected. (About half the staff was affected. Many of their friends or relatives were firefighters.) However, events like September 11th also have the ability to for us to practice the best of who we are. This is a poem about being our best.”

Gate A-4 by Namoi Shihab Nye

“Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal,

after learning my flight had been delayed four hours,

I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days.

Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress,

just like my grandma wore,

was crumpled to the floor, wailing.

“Help,” said the flight agent.

“Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?”

The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying.

She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely.

She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said,

“No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let's call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English.

I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to her.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her?

This all took up two hours. She was laughing a lot by then.

Telling of her life, patting my knee, answering questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one.

It was like a sacrament.

The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves.

Such an old country tradi-tion.

Always carry a plant.

Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought,

This is the world I want to live in.

The shared world.

Not a single person in that gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies.

I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.”

It was the right poem.

The room was silent as I finished reading. It probably helped that I had purchased cookies from the local Arab grocer and had him sprinkle powdered sugar over them; so that when we got to the part of the poem that talked about being covered in powdered sugar, we were covered too. It was as though in the middle of people’s grief and anger and probably skepticism of a Chaplain having anything worth saying we were all in the middle of practicing being our best by eating cookies.

In the years after 2001 and in the observance ceremonies since then I have used this poem often.

Sometimes I mention that the poet is from Ferguson, Missouri. Sometimes I say she grew up Lutheran. Sometimes I say she’s Palestinian.

But I always try to have cookies…

it’s like a sacrament…

This is the world I want to live in.