Well, we’ve turned the corner on the decade marking September 11, 2001. Eleven years out, now, but who’s counting?

Over the years I’ve written many different 9/11 posts starting with our experience long before there were blogs. I also wrote about it irregularly here, on or around 9/11 anniversaries.

• on the ten year anniversary
• on the nine year anniversary
• on the six year anniversary
• and last year, after being interviewed by USA Today about moving out of NY after 9/11.

Fellow bloggers have posted timelines and pictures (I love the Towers of Light).

* * *

I’m in such a different place now than I was back then. I have two boys now, and the one who was a year old during The Event is now 12 and in middle school. He knows where I was and what happened. He’s starting to get interested in politics and the world. My younger boy sort of knows what happened, mostly from the book, The Man Who Walked Between The Towers (which I love), and by that I mean he knows there were big buildings that aren’t there any more and that the book makes mom choke up.

I suppose the best thing that can be said about hitting eleven years out is that this election cycle is mercifully free of Nine-Eleven-as-wedge-issue ads. It’s a mercy and one I’m grateful for. Nothing sickened me more over the years than watching those ads, that kind of grandstanding.

No, this year—aside from Thing 2’s meltdown over hidden math homework that I caught before we walked out the door—was a quiet, cool, calm morning (not terribly unlike eleven years ago). So calm that, had I not had to write a check for my kid’s school and thus had to write the date, I wouldn’t have noticed. One of the benefits of working from home rather than teaching in a classroom—I don’t have to write the date on the board anymore.

(see upper right corner—that’s my chalkboard, picture taken on my first visit back, 10/24/01)

This year there are no bells tolling and no reading of names playing in the background as I type. Nowadays “bells tolling” makes me think of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel (thank you Ehren and Shannon) rather than lists of the fallen. I don’t think this is a bad thing, but it’s a weird one. This year I turned 45. It surprised to me how much this age bugged me, too. I’m not one who spends a lot of time sitting around bemoaning my grey hair or my no-longer-18-year-old body (though it’d be great to finally drop the eight-year-old baby weight). So it was a shocker when 45 suddenly seemed like the Call of Mortality.

But it did.

And 9/11 brings it home, too.

I was only 34 when It happened. Depending on where you are on the cosmic timeline that’s either horrifyingly old or shockingly young to be responsible for running with a bunch of students away from a terrorist attack. In my current eyes, it’s scary young. I know so much more now than I did then. I have much better perspective on life (not just on running from falling buildings).   But I suppose that’s the way, isn’t it? I know there’s the old joke, “youth is wasted on the young,” and now I get it. (And I know some of you who are older than I are laughing at me for writing that. Enjoy.)

But it’s the truth.

All the things I might not ever be able to do—now that I’m starting what is likely to be the second half of my life—have been popping into my brain. Constantly. I can see that the world will go on after I’m gone, which is great, but if anything has defined me it’s my curiosity. It’s that I want to know. Pretty much everything. I love seeing connections. I love making connections. I love learning. I told Erica last night that right now, as I make final preparations to teach for the Hand Knitters Guild of North Central Texas and for the Dallas Handknitters Guild at the Knitting Fairy this weekend, I am currently in Shark Mode—if I stop moving I’ll die. I have so much to do, so much neat stuff to put together, so many new teaching ideas to try—and I don’t want to die.

I know, I know; no one does.

But for me, this doesn’t translate into some Fetish-of-Youth complete with Botox and 17 age-eliminating pills every morning. I’m not planning on sucking the health care industry dry trying to prolong my life long after Life has told me It Has Done With Me. I just want to make sure that I use the time I have left to learn as much as I can and to pass that on to other curious people. Thus the podcast (and the other one), and the books, and the patterns, and the (someday-please-God) novel (currently heading back to agents). Yeah, it’s a sad little shot at immortality, but it’s what I have. On a good day I feel pretty solid about it all, too.

So on days like today, as I walk back from my son’s bus stop and put letters in the mailbox and sip a coffee, I wonder what is it that drives me to do all of these things. Would I be like this if some guys hadn’t tried to drop a building on me eleven years ago? Does getting out when so many others died make me that much more intent on using my time to the fullest? Would I otherwise have been content to measure out my days by counting the numbers of students I saw filing through my classroom? Would I have ever podcasted or written or designed?

I don’t know.

What I do know is this: time will get me in the end, and if I was lucky enough to make it out of many earthquakes in SoCal, a car accident in high school, the Rodney King riots, and 9/11, then I sure as hell won’t be taking what time I have for granted. It’s a gift. Every day is a gift. Even the lousy days are better than no days at all. To me, the worst thing would be to reach the end and see behind me a wasteland of lost opportunities. Maybe I’m trying to live my life as a memorial, not just to those who fell, but for those who lived. Maybe the crazy things I push myself to do are really a desperate attempt to feel better about making it out when others didn’t.

Maybe.

Or maybe it’s my crazy DNA that pushed my ancestors from England and Germany to The New World, then kept pushing us west to California (which, as my husband likes to say, proves we’re nuts. Who would look at the Rockies from their covered wagon and say, “hmm. Eh. Not so big. Let’s keep going!”). Now that there’s no more land to push through am I just pushing through time?

Dunno.

But I’d hate to get to the other side of the Veil and be met with nothing but visions of what I could have done, smiles I could have smiled, kindnesses I could have offered, kids who could have been hugged. I’m finding more and better ways to balance kids, family, and my work. I’m still learning. I’m still living. And I’m still hoping that when I get to the other side, what I see behind me is a feel-good comedy rather than a Bergman opus.*

I’d rather look back on a life of fullness after 9/11 than a life like the emptiness I felt in 2001.

*not that there’s anything wrong with Bergman…