Eight Years is a Long Time

Its September 11th. The ceremonies occurred this year like they have for the last seven. The emotions may have faded a bit--the memories becoming milky and less severe, but the skyline is still missing a something, but only because we know that something is suppose to be there.

In sixty years, who will still remember? Who will still read the names out loud at Ground Zero? It will, I assume, become like December 7th. A mention will be made on the radio and evening newscast to remind those non-history-buffs of the importance of the date. Wreaths will be laid by heads of states who do not remember the fear that coursed through our veins, who can't describe the silence of their high school lunchrooms, who didn't give their weeks' allowance to Red Cross because they were impotent from such distance, who did not have hot tears when they saw the smoke billowing from New York, from the Pentagon, form the field in PA. He or she will not remember the rows and rows of empty gurneys and hospital beds on the TV because there we so few survivors found in the rubble. The men and women will act respectful and mournful and behave like one should act when one is acting like a day dictates instead of how one feels. And the pain and woe and misdigestion that brewed in our stomachs will be packed in boxes in the earth, or scattered ashes back to the earth, and we--the survivors, the rememberers--will become like the 2,993 people, vague memories of something that has passed and have been consumed by the great hunger of time.

And some of those people sixty years in the future will look back and try to fathom what was felt and what was lost and they will draw soft conclusions and turn off the news and go about another normal early fall morning.