It’s odd that today is the anniversary of the most significant and deadly terrorist attack in US history and I’ve heard almost nothing about it and I’ve read almost nothing about it in the press. Eighteen is a somewhat odd anniversary. Ten years, fifteen years, twenty years — these are significant because, well, I guess they’re half decades. But eighteen? Doesn’t have the same kind of significance — doesn’t feel that way, anyway.
It’s difficult to believe it’s been eighteen years. I’d just moved back to Poland, and for me, that’s what’s more difficult to believe: it’s been almost twenty years since I moved back to Poland after those two wonderful yet horrid years in Boston. That’s such a central period of my life, so significant, and I tend to organize my life around that as a milestone — when I had the courage to follow my inner voice, to do what seemed like the crazy yet right thing to do. I had a girlfriend; I was engaged; I had a great job making great money in computer programming; I lived in arguably the best city in the States, a city that feels small but has everything a big city has to offer. And I gave it all up and went back to Poland — what a crazy thing to do.
The attack itself — what a strange day. I remember coming back from school and trying to figure out what Pani Barnas was saying, something about a plane hitting a building, some kind of terrible accident. It was around four o’clock in the afternoon, so that made it 10 in the morning here. That would have been sometime between the two towers getting hit. I have a memory of watching the second plane hit the tower on live TV. Karol had stepped into the other room and I called him back: “Popacz,” I said, as if there were any other reason to call him back.
These kids were still four or five years from being born. What a thing to make you feel old. The kids I teach now weren’t even alive: I can’t ask, “Where were you when 9/11” happened. “Not even born yet,” they answer. That makes it like something that happened in, say, 1967 for me. I can’t think of anything significant that happened then. Was that when Israel was fighting one of its many wars of the 60s? Was that the Six Day War? Can’t remember.