Today is my sister's birthday. She turns twenty this year, and it is the first time in two decades that I won't be around to celebrate with her. That is one of the weird things about living in New Jersey. Much like when I spent a semester at Oxford, you don't realize how many little things you miss. I hope my sister knows how much I love her, and that I wish I could be there with her today.
They say as you get older, birthdays get less significant, mostly because you have had so many and they all bleed together. Eventually only the big milestones get attention. I know that, at only the young age of twenty-two, I have already forgotten a lot of my birthdays from when I was younger. I remember one year where I had a party with friends from both school and from church. My worlds were colliding, but everyone got along fine. We went put-putting, and there was this enormous cake that my mom had made to look like a Chicago Cubs hat, and the frosting turned everyone's mouths blue. I remember the year in highschool when I got to go to Cedar Point with NHS and the trip just happened to fall on my birthday. I remember last year,when I turned twenty-one; it was the day District Bible Quiz Finals for my sister and also the day of her prom. So, on that day, I got up early, watched quizzing all day, then went home where my sister got ready and got picked up by her date, and they went to a friend's house where my mom helped cook Prom dinner for them. My dad had to work that night, so on my birthday, I stayed home alone and watched movies. Fortunately, I had gotten to celebrate with some friends the night before.
I don't remember many of my sister's birthdays at all. For most of them, I just remember that we went out to dinner somewhere or other. I remember one year when she turned eight or nine, she had a birthday party at this incredible place called Discovery Zone. It was like Chuck E. Cheese's on steroids with the most colossal indoor play-place that I have ever seen. For someone who loves climbing on things as much as I did (...as much as I do) Discovery Zone was a mystical wonderland. One year, I would have a birthday there as well, but I'm pretty sure my sister beat me to it. That party was particularly well-photographed, which is probably part of why I remember it so well. My sister had a gap-toothed smile, and I was wearing the only tank top I have ever owned.
A decade ago, on my sister's birthday, our family went out to eat at TGIFridays. I remember we had a booth next to a window where we could look across the street at the cars waiting to get into the Citgo station. They were waiting in a line that stretched all the way down the block for gasoline that had jumped from under two dollars to over four for the first time ever. We tried to be happy for my sister. After all, it was the first year that she would use all ten fingers to show how old she was, but none of us could take our eyes off of the TVs mounted on the wall of the restaurant. The news was on, and was showing endless clips of planes flying into buildings, of smoke filling the air, and of buildings falling. It was a very quiet dinner.
Everyone talks about how September 11, 2001 started out as such an ordinary day. I was in seventh grade at the time at the small private Christian school where I spent nine years. I was taking pre-Algebra that year with a mix of junior high students. One of them was absent at the start of class, but that was not out of the ordinary. What was strange was when he showed up twenty minutes late. The whole class was working on an assignment, probably trying to find that elusive x or something like that, but I sat near the teacher's desk and could hear some of the whispered words that this student told the teacher. There was something about a plane and New York and a second one, an attack. The teacher looked shocked and concerned, but none of the words I had heard made sense to me, so I kept working. Not much later there was a phone call to the teacher. He was speaking in a low, quiet voice, and after he hung up, he stood and told the class that the whole junior high and high school (there were only 10-16 students per class) were going to the auditorium for a special chapel. He told us that something had happened.
The principal at this school was a big man of Russian descent with small, close-set eyes. He looked somewhat like he might be in the mob, which could make him very intimidating when he talked to you one-on-one, whether you were in trouble or not. That day, however, he seemed different. Instead of his usual, imposing presence, he seemed almost frightened as he explained to us that there had been a terrorist attack on America, that planes had been hijacked and flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and another into the Pentagon. One of the teachers wheeled a large TV into the auditorium and for a half hour, we watched the news in silence. They were showing live footage from New York City. I remember thinking, Why is there so much smoke? Why are they only showing one tower? Is the other tower hidden in the smoke? It was only in a later class, when a teacher announced to us that the second tower had fallen, that I understood what had happened. Later that day, at TGIFridays, I would get to see those towers fall over and over and over again.
Words like terrorist, hijack, Al-Qaeda, and Muslim are common now, but before that, they were not used often. I didn't know what terrorism was. Before that day, the only hijacking I knew was from an episode of Seinfeld. I don't think I had any idea what Islam was before that. The world had changed, and from that day on, I was taught a new vocabulary that could describe that world. It was a vocabulary of fear and aggression, but also of confusion and questions.
I remember playing in my back yard a few days after 9/11, when a plane flew over. It was the first time since before the attack that I had heard a jet engine. I stopped what I was doing and stared into the sky. It would be over a year later that, while looking for something in the deep, dark recesses of the laundry room in our basement I would see a picture pinned to the wall that I had never noticed before. This part of our basement was filled with old toys and boxes of baby clothes, my father's golf clubs that he never used, along with various other miscellaneous things that accumulate in a house when people live there, and as such, we didn't venture back there very often. To this day, I am not sure where the picture came from or how long it had been there, but I will never forget glancing over and seeing a large panoramic print of the New York skyline at sunset, with two pristine towers gleaming at the center of the picture. Once again, I could only stop and stare.
I have grown up knowing that towers fall down, that reason can turn folly into madness and evil, that guilt cannot always be punished, that security is a lie, and that acts of hate and violence will perpetuate hate and violence. I have grown up in a world of chaos. And most of the time, I forget why it is that when I look at the world, that chaos is all that I see. Once a year, I remember.
These reflections could make for a very bleak worldview, and in some ways, perhaps they have. But as it is I have hope. Not the sort of hope that you hear about on television (because I have also grown up knowing that Presidents make mistakes), but a hope in something that transcends the instability and chaos of this world. I know a God who is eternally constant, whose name is love, whose title is peace, whose ways are just, and whose promise is life. Fear and death have power over me, because they are not forever, but God is.
"Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us." --Romans 5:1-5
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