Sept. 11, 2011, arrived overcast and gloomy in Bowling Green, Ky.
It seemed to fit.
I walked down the stairs from my bedroom to the front door to pick up the paper from the porch. I paused before I opened the door. I knew what awaited me inside the plastic bag wrapped around the paper — fat with inserts.
“I just want to get through the day,” I thought to myself.
I thought the same thing on my way to my desk 10 years earlier, when I arrived at the newsroom and found everyone huddled around a small, color TV with bad reception — gasping, crying and punching up cell numbers.
“Two planes have hit the Twin Towers in New York,” one of the ad staffers said. “It’s terrorists.”
I did not tune in the news that morning before work, nor did I listen to the radio in the car on the short drive to the office. I was operating in a vacuum. I did not know what happened.
I’m not sure I know what happened now.
I told the news staffers in the conference room to get back to work.
“We’ve got a job to do, folks,” I said, calmly but firmly.
Then I headed for my cubicle thinking: “I just want to get through this day.
On Sunday, there was no escaping the glut of news reports, memorial services, TV “specials” and the like — all appropriate.
But I avoided them.
My admission that even now I am not sure what happened that day is not born of insensitivity or disrespect. I know the facts. But I lack the context.
When it comes to historical context, a decade does not do it for me.
I am dealing with the events of one day 10 years ago much like I have dealt with the events of nearly a decade back in the 1960s and 1970s — the Vietnam War.
For years, I tucked the war away somewhere to steep — to be dwelled on in private, philosophical wrestling matches between me and me with only me watching.
And then about five years ago — some 30 years later — I started reading about the war: “The Cat from Hue,” “Dispatches,” “We Were Soldiers Once . . . ,” “We are Soldiers Still . . .,” “In the Pharos Army,” “They Marched into Sunlight” and more.
Slowly and on my time, not the media’s anniversary watch, I am trying to figure out what happened in that war — back when I was a naïve teenager lucky enough to have avoided having to “Go to ‘Nam.”
For me, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, need more time. How much? I am not sure.
Monday, Sept. 12, broke sunny and clear in Bowling Green.
The alarm went off and I made my way down the stairs to the newspaper sitting on the porch.
“Well, I got through the day,” I thought.
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