On the Significance of Days
When I was a kid, the calendar divided into average days and holidays. On holidays, there were presents and candy.
Then the presents—and the holidays—lost their luster. I still remember the first birthday I got an electric razor and socks. Over time, I learned Jesus of Nazareth was not born on December 25th, Thanksgiving didn’t give the full story on Native Americans, and the Easter Bunny might be a pagan fertility symbol.
Eventually, I stopped wanting to get older altogether.
Holidays became about people. My mother held great open house parties and I loved to see our extended friends and family. Celebrations and get-togethers happened not on the day, but when it was convenient. The used-car-sale holidays too—President’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, any federal holiday that landed on a Monday—were clearly not a date, but rather a three-day excuse for a road trip to the cabin.
Veteran’s Day reminds you the calendar matters. November 11th is not just a date, but a specific hour of remembrance. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 ended the Great War. We still commemorate the significance and relief of that anticipated moment, the closing to one of our greatest periods of brutality. Veteran’s Day was “Armistice Day” until 1954, when the second world war’s armistice took precedence.
Dates and times mark the grinding of the clock until they, too, are ground away.
My family has plenty of days of remembrance if I go looking. My mom’s kind and gentle mother, Mary, the only grandmother my sister and I ever knew, died on April 10, 1979. It was devastating for our family, but a different kind of devastation from December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963, and June 6, 1944. My parents remember the attack on Pearl Harbor and the assassination of John F. Kennedy because they stepped across those lines on the calendar with everyone else around them.
On the sixth day of the sixth month of 1944, my mom turned six years old and the Allied troops landed on Normandy beach. She can still remember earlier nights when she was even younger, crawling under the kitchen table between my grandfather and great uncle Joe’s feet, listening and fearing their adult talk of war and Europe and Hitler.
I don’t know that type of sustained fear, but I do know the fear that divides a life into two calendars, a before and an after. I know December 7th fear, and I know November 22nd fear, because I was downtown in Manhattan on September 11, 2001.
I’ve never felt such a connection to others, to every stranger coming at me on the sidewalk. It was horror that bound us.
I remember one moment united, everyone going north on Lafayette towards Astor Place, moments after the first tower collapsed. There were four rows of us walking in single file under the heavy sun, two lines on the sidewalk and two lines along the curb. Despite the chaos, we followed the orderly city grid, laid out upon the island.
Suddenly, an FDNY vehicle raced past, also going north.
It was on fire. Its back window was down or broken and filled with debris billowing dark and curling smoke behind it. It looked like something out of a cartoon.
I thought to myself. Those are burning bodies. They don’t have time to put them out. They’re just piling them in and racing them to the hospital on fire.
I was in shock. My ability to reason was malfunctioning. In the middle of havoc, your imagination has no reference.
Every remembrance on the calendar is the birth or death of a savior, of the seasons, or of catastrophe. Nothing carves the insignificant moments of a day into memory like the sudden loss of well-being or its welcome return.