FOUND: “You’re Going to Grow Up in a Very Different America;” 9/11 & the Story of the Tiny Journal
The cover of the tiny journal. Image courtesy Michael Workman.
FOUND
By Michael Workman
In 2014, I was driving a delivery route for Newcity, which I’ve done now for some years, and I was stopping by the city-managed, south side recycling center to toss the old copies. It’s a routine I’ve been doing every month now for probably fifteen years or so and, on a few occasions, like that day, I encountered a heartbreaking sight. When I opened the lid to the gigantic blue recycling bin, it was filled to brimming with someone’s discarded personal library.
Over the years, it has happened 3-4 times: a local professor dies, and the family or whoever’s responsible for their estate doesn’t know what to do with their stuff, and especially all the books, course assignments, stacks of binders filled with syllabi, class notes, textbooks — and sometimes, their entire library of books.
My own personally library is stacked with some key titles — one such house-clearing landed me stacks of beloved philosophy and art book titles I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to afford. Still, these finds are always accompanied by a little frisson of anger and despair — doesn’t anybody care, I mean honestly? — and then I lean back against the big blue recycling bin, reflecting on the awful schism of death, of its ability to rip an opening into the deepest parts of us, to leave it seething and raw, and I turn myself around and get to saving what I can.
On that afternoon in 2014, sifting through the stacks of books in the recycling bin, I found the tiny, hard-bound journal pictured above. When I opened it, I was halted to encounter the handwritten scrawl filling its pages (immediately translating into a distinct voice in my head), cover to cover, page after age of little dashed-off drawings, descriptions of travels back and forth cross the country, parties, friends, and — in the middle of it — this one person’s experience of 9/11 as it happened.
As I sat there, holding this little palm-size journal in my hands, my throat knotted up, as it continues to do to this day whenever I read it. I still have a good ugly cry sometimes. It’s a word, a fragment, an image — the remains of a life lost in time, in a few moments, like this one, that we lived together. So I thought I’d share it with you, dear reader, on this anniversary of that terrible event in our country’s history, when we were transformed to a person by the senseless horror of it all. In doing so, maybe together we can remember, as the anonymous author experiences it, the tragic, awful, sad shift in collective consciousness that took place. It was a moment when my generation came of age, when we were no longer able to pretend that the reality of what the world actually is doesn’t exist.
So, dear reader, below I’ve sorted out seven of the pages, starting with 9/11 and continuing into the days that followed. But I’ve also organized the entire journal below as well, through which you can freely page and read the whole of the tiny journal. I do so in hopes that through this anonymous author’s musings, her curiosity and self-soothing and storytelling, in reflecting on the joys of her friendships, her passion for music and travel and living and, as she puts it, the gift that journaling represents for a “conversation with the child in you,” we may yet redeem some of the joy prior to that hateful, devastating moment before we were disillusioned by the ceaseless mass-scale violence that seems to haunt our country to this day, and that the hope for a better, more loving world may yet endure.
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