The Annual Post

So here we are, nine years out from–for better or worse–the most exciting thing to have happened to me, ever.

And I wanted to talk a bit this year about the “exciting” thing.

The word exciting has come to take on a positive meaning. The original meaning of “excite” was slightly different. Let’s check with our friend, the Oxford English Dictionary.

(ksat) [a. Fr. exciter (= Pr. and Sp. excitar), ad. L. excitre, freq. of excire to set in motion, awaken, call forth, instigate, f. ex- out + cire to set in motion.]

1. trans. To set in motion, stir up. a. fig. To move, stir up, instigate, incite. Const. til, to, unto; to with inf. or that (with subord. clause); also simply. Now only with mixed notion of 5, see below.

a1340 HAMPOLE Psalter Prol., e sange of psalmes..excites aungels til oure help. Ibid. ix. 25 Antecrist sall..excite him [God] in his synn to punysch him. 1398 TREVISA Barth. De P.R. V. xxiii. (1495) 131 Oxen ben excited to traueile more by the swete songe of the heerd than by strokes and pryckes…

b. To provoke, challenge. Obs.

c. In physical sense: To set in motion, stir up (so L. excitare harenam, Sallust.) Obs. rare1.

2. To rouse, awaken. a. lit. To rouse from unconsciousness. rare.

b. To call up (a departed spirit). Obs. rare.

c. To call forth or quicken (a faculty, feeling, etc.) from potential into actual existence; to rouse up, awaken (what is dormant, sluggish, or latent).

3. To induce, elicit, provoke (actions, manifestations); to bring about, occasion (active conditions).

4. To affect by a stimulus (bodily organs or tissues), so as to produce or intensify their characteristic activity.

5. In modern use: To move to strong emotion, stir to passion; to stir up to eager tumultuous feeling, whether pleasurable or painful. Also intr. and absol.

6. a. Electricity and Magnetism. To induce electric or magnetic activity in (a substance); to set (an electric current) in motion; also absol. b. Photography. To render (a plate, etc.) sensitive to light; to sensitize.

I bolded the ones I’m talking about (and of course, I left out most of the cool OED dates and quotations and things. Love that stuff though. Old habits die hard).

So, I’ve been feeling awfully awkward about thinking of 9/11 as an “exciting moment” in my life. It was a horrible day. Of course, for our school, the next 6 months were worse, but for so many—many too many—families 9/11 was life-changing in the most obscene ways.

However, those of us who came out alive, we experienced the largest—and probably longest continuous—adrenaline surge we’ll ever have. Even the memory of a drug-free childbirth (also looong) has been mollified by endorphins, convincing me that it wasn’t so bad and that we should, perhaps, do it all over again in a couple of years. (Um. No. We’re not going to. I’m just saying).

We didn’t get endorphins with 9/11.

Unless I’m misremembering my anatomy/physiology class, I believe one of the results of adrenaline is that you experience things in a heightened state. This is why being in a car accident we all say, “and then everything went in slow motion…” Just like a movie camera, our minds speed up so we can process things quickly—and save our lives. When a camera speeds up, it uses more frames per second to capture a given image. That means if you play it back at a normal speed, everything will slow down.

So my memories, even nine years later, are still shockingly distinct. One picture, one airplane overhead, one blog post, and I’m absolutely back there. I think that’s the adrenaline too.

Yet I still hesitate to call it exciting—even though it was, living on the edge like that. I imagine battle is similar, though I know 9/11 pales by comparison if only in it’s relative brevity. But there’s something about not knowing what will happen next in a life-or-death situation that focuses your mind so amazingly.

Yet there’s no comparison to other more appropriately “exciting things”:

giving birth
my husband agreeing to marry me (finally)
our wedding
learning to drive a car when I was 9
the first time I rode a motorcycle by myself
flying to NYC by myself (secretly) to surprise my not-yet-husband, only to realize I had no idea how to get from JFK to the Wooster Street Theater
“stage fright,” which to me was always pleasant…

These kinds of things are exciting in acceptable ways, I think. And they are all wonderful.

But they too carry the same weight—if we allow them to—of the original meaning of “excite”—to set in motion, to provoke, rouse, and awaken. All of my bulleted moments above set in motion the framework of much of my life. Exciting stuff to look back on.

I had hoped 9/11 would provoke a new spirit of openness, generosity, and harmony among those of us who are still here. I had hoped life would slow down, people would take more trains and drive gas-fueled cars less, we would linger over a meal out of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” with family, friends, and a bottle of really good wine.

And some of that has come true.

Mostly it hasn’t.

People still work insane hours, don’t have enough down time to recover from work, fly and drive everywhere, seem to be forced into faster and more and harder at every turn.

That sounds exciting, though, doesn’t it. Provoked, Set in motion.

So I guess 9/11 was a moment that excited us all—not in the happy spirit-of-a-new-baby, but in some kind of race. Are we trying to cram it all in because we don’t know when the next hit will come? Or are we just propelled along by the sheer grand tonnage of our society’s lemming-like need for speed?

I don’t know.

I still wish we’d all be a little less excited and a little calmer. I know I need the down time to be with my kids and recover—frequent mini-recoveries

I wonder if we need to come up with a word for survivors of harrowing moments? What do soldiers say? How do they describe surviving an IED attack? Even though they’re trained for those experiences, and we weren’t, I can’t imagine the human body would respond differently. I know we’re calling the aftermath PTSD, and that’s fine for what it’s worth. But that’s not what you call the experience itself.

All I know is everyone at my school was lucky—blessed. Not everyone associated with our school was so lucky. There were tangential losses of family members and friends. And those losses affect me to this day, which is odd. I can think about the death of my own grandmother who helped raise me with nary a tear, but people we lost that day who I didn’t even know—that chokes me up.

I was lucky enough over this last year to have a chance to work with the 9/11 Memorial Museum. The good work they’re doing has been calming to me. Just knowing they’re out there, cataloging, charting, collecting, saving. They’re piecing the story back together and rescuing it from the crazies who do things like quote my students in their insane screeds trying to “prove” it was a bomb and not a plane (dude. I saw the planes. Really. P-l-a-n-e-s) that brought the towers down. Someday—God willing and the creeks don’t rise—we’ll get to see the museum and the memorial fountains and the park. I don’t much care about the tower. But I do care about the fountains. It was wonderful to work in Lower Manhattan for a time and it will be wonderful to have such a lovely green space to find peace in.