9/11

A favourite lead of journalists is the question, “Where were you when…?” Or, “Where were you on this date last year, or five years ago or whenever.If the date is significant then usually people have no trouble remembering.

My daughter Kate was in kindergarten when JFK was assassinated and she remembers her teacher announcing the news to the class. I was in Vancouver workshopping a new play and I had pulled an all-nighter on rewriting, slept a couple of hours and showed up at the theatre to learn that John Lennon had been shot. Bill and I arrived in Paris at the Russian Embassy to pick up our visas and were denied entry because Governor Wallace had just been shot. It wasn’t him they were worried about. President Nixon was due for a visti and they didn’t want anything like that to happen to him while he was in the USSR.

My father’s birthday was December 6 (1899). Halifax exploded on December 6, 1917, when two ships collided in the harbour and set off a very big bang. On December 6, 1989, fourteen young women, Egineering students at the University of Montreal, were massacred by a man who didn’t like smart women (I guess).

Significant disasters are memorable, hard to forget and tend to change our perspective. Thus 9/11: I have two friends with birthdays and one couple with an anniversary on September eleventh and they told me they had ceased to celebrate their day, ruined by another event.

I could tell you where I was. Can you tell me where you were?