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I used to be a "journaler", for about 5 years in the late 1990s. It seemed like a good spiritual practice; a Catholic Benedictine priest/monk, for one, told me so. I kept it up until I started this blog in November 2002 (hard to believe, it's almost my tenth anniversary with it!). I guess this blog became my "dear diary".
Anyway, I now have a dusty stack of those marble-pattern composition books, filled will all sorts of self-indulgent thoughts. I almost never look at them, seldom ever read what I wrote. Nothing all that surprising or insightful when I do. I guess that I wasn't as interesting as I thought I was.
Nonetheless, I recently came across my entry for September 12, 2001. I didn't write anything on the night of Sept. 11, but here are some excerpts from "the day after".
Well, Black Tuesday happened. The WTC in lower Manhattan is gone. A symbol of the business world, the place where Top Gun people wind up [I had recently completed computer training by the Chubb Institute in their "Top Gun" placement program for middle-career people like myself; the training went well, but the placement in the info tech world never followed.] So yea, I was shaking in the office [I was working once again at the New Community Corporation on Market Street in Newark, where I had spent over 10 years prior to joining Top Gun in late 2000] on Tuesday AM after [going outside and walking to a point where I could view lower Manhattan] seeing the one tower standing, pouring out smoke like a chimney at a power plant. Chic [my boss] was grim, wouldn't say hello. Our world was under attack. The social fabric was torn.
Yea, me and Mike R [my cousin] saw it being built, when we wandered lower Manhattan in search of the remnants of the ferryboats [we were both fans of the old Hudson River ferryboats that ran across to Jersey City until the late 1960s], memories of another world. The WTC was a new world, the world of jet planes and freeways. And it was jet planes, all rounded and white, that did them in. I remember seeing the big hole in the ground [in downtown Manhattan] when they first started construction. Now that hole is gonna be back, 30 years later.
Maybe it's just as well that Top Gun didn't transport me into that world.
Well, in the Franklin planner page for yesterday [Sept. 11], the "cheer up" thought was this: "tough times are like speed bumps, they slow you down but don't turn you around". Or something like that. Just before the new construction secretary told me that a plan had hit the WTC, I was reading my draft letter [to a contact person in an academic institution] about my plan to get a doctorate in urban poverty studies. I dunno, was fate turning me away, or just slowing me up?
[It wouldn't be 9-11 that would stop me from going back to school for a doctorate; my mother was starting to lose her independence, and would require another 8 years of intensive financial and administrative support from me, to complement the commitment my brother had made to directly caring for her in her home. I was unhappy for a time about this, but it was probably was a blessing in disguise; I would have used up all my savings, which now form the cornerstone of my retirement plan, to get a PhD that may not have given me much in return. Most likely, a low-paying associate instructor position at a community college.]
If I were 'normal', I'd have a wife and some kids, one of whom would want to do a doctorate in urban poverty studies. Yea, this is a dream that arguably belongs to the next generation . . . But hey, I just wasn't meant for kids. So I've gotta do it . . . if the time is ever right. We shall see. For now, I'm still alive.
[So, you can see that the big 9-11 calamity didn't shock me out of my self-absorption. I was still thinking about my own future, and not pondering the fate of what seemed like an America under attack. I obviously didn't think that war was finally coming to American shores, that the neighborhoods and lives that we knew were going to be decimated, like Europe in the early 40s. And I was mostly right about that, thus far anyway.]
School just began for most kids. For me, this time of September was miserable. And now, the tables have turned. Learning is the only thing that gives my life meaning . . .
[Ah, and thus the "eternal student of life" theme of this soon-to-be-born blog!].
PS, actually, the entries in this diary over the next few months tracks how I got a job interview with the local Prosecutors Office and then left New Community for it. Now it's been over 10 years for me with the staff of "chief law enforcement officer of the county", and somehow I'm still there, keeping very busy, maybe even getting some things done and doing some good here and there. I would have never believed it, as summer ended and autumn began in that fateful year of 2001. I may actually have to sit down sometime and re-read that diary!