My fifth grade social studies class met in our middle school auditorium that Tuesday morning. Someone said something over the announcements, and then–I think–we went home early.
At home, my mom showed me on our globe at home where “Afghanistan” was. This was the place the attackers had come from: I was told; she was told.
That night we went to our regular “Tuesday Night Together” at church to eat dinner and be with our community. Before dinner, I sat outside on a bench, under a tree as the smell of fall in western New York came on. I was reading a book about Joan of Arc.
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, USA, August 2021
Since then, I’ve learned about “flashbulb memories” in cognitive psychology: these are memories that stick out in detail as if illuminated by a flashbulb on a camera. They can often surround specific events, like 9/11. They can also be prone to error (see this).
Was what I remembered this year what I remembered last year on September 11th? The year before?
I’ve been thinking about the fact that each time I try to pull out an old memory, I may in fact re-encoding, re-laying it down. This makes me wonder if I remembered a wrong detail this year, maybe I’ve primed myself to remember something wrong in the future.
What’s the point of writing all of this? I’m not sure. What was the point of any act of violence? War? Terror?
I’m not sure.
But I know it was peaceful, at the end of that Tuesday as I sat on a bench, under a tree–shifting between reading about a woman burned at the stake and looking at the sky through the branches.
The Lazy PhD 