It stays in my spine

A few weeks ago, GR and I spent a long weekend in NYC. We're newbies to the city, so we visited the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Times Square, the Guggenheim, the Natural History Museum. There are a lot of people who disdain tourist hot spots and extol the virtues of experiencing, like, the authentic city, but those also tend to be the people who spend a quarter of their income on handlebar mustache wax and are thus not to be listened to. When it comes to your first or second visit to a metro, I'm a big proponent of taking in The Sights.

Walking around Lower Manhattan on our second day, we decided to swing by the 9/11 memorial plaza.

Prior to our visit, I was vaguely aware of the memorial's existence. From half-watched news reports of its construction throughout the '00s and footage of Obama's inaugurating visit, I knew the memorial "opened" on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, and I knew the basic logistics. I knew it was some sort of pool or fountain located on the site of Ground Zero, covering the footprints of the old WTC towers. I knew the outer edges were comprised of a black stone material. I knew the victims' names were carved into the stone.

As GR and I stood at the periphery of each of the memorial pools, I had a strong, to the point of overwhelming, emotional reaction. After a few minutes, I realized I was about to cry. I am not a person who usually experiences strong emotional reactions to outdoor art installations. More often, I get a bit frustrated at my inability to feel things strongly.

When I'm teaching my students how to analyze literature, and they're struggling to think critically, one of the tactics I find useful is to ask them to put themselves in the position of the author. Let's say you have a plot and some characters in mind, and you're about to write a novel. You can write your novel literally any way you want. Why do you think the author chose these words, to use this recurring motif, to use this setting? Maybe he just liked the way the words sounded, but don't most authors want to convey some set of ideas (about life or love or communism or whatever), and to not be obvious about it? Everything in a work of art is a choice, and every choice changes the way the audience is going to respond to the work. Why choose this?

I thought about this as we stood in the plaza and I found myself needing to take some deep breaths. Each memorial pool (indeed sized and located according to the Twin Towers' two base footprints) is enormous, bigger than you'd anticipate. "Pool" is also a bit of a misnomer: the walls plummet into vast, tiered, internally-constructed waterfalls that appear to descend after two or three steps into a center of nothingness. As a holistic effect, it's aggressively, stunningly empty. You hear nothing but the woosh of water, and you see nothing but the sheer black interior of the pool. Your fingertips sink into the names of the dead as you rest your hands on the wall's edge. The faces of the visitors on the opposite side are too far away to see clearly. One pool is staggering to look at, but there are two of them. You visit the second, and the experience repeats.

Theoretically, the memorial could have been anything. Brass labels affixed to ceremonially planted trees, after all, are memorials. There's Washington's obelisk in D.C. There's the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At the Pentagon's 9/11 memorial park, they installed a series of benches. Why choose this?

Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that the name of the NYC memorial is Reflecting Absence. My experience suggests that this is an appropriate title, and it's telling that the memorial is not named something like Never Forget. Beyond serving the literal purpose of memor-/reminding, the pools appear designed to convey the full and crushing weight of loss, to collapse you emotionally into the space in imaginative sympathy with the towers themselves. It's a memorial designed to devastate, not to console. The blackness, the emptiness, the scale, ask you to take the staggering loss of life into your heart and let it consume you for as long as you're willing to stare into the water.

It's as impressive as it is upsetting. I assume it's intentional. I have a lot of questions about how others feel about it. I'm not sure if it's a Sight I want to see again.

Just a thing that my mind do

In my family, I'm the youngest person in my generation: the youngest cousin, the youngest sibling, the youngest step-sibling. My oldest first cousin -- someone who from a generational standpoint is supposed to be "my age" -- turns 50 this year. I've come to terms with the fact that I'm likely the benchmark for making the family members in my peer group groan about their oldness. (e.g., "Little Linda's almost 30? I'm so oooooold.")

When you're The Young One, you're basically never the family trailblazer. For example, before I graduated college, I'd already been to half a dozen weddings of relatives "my age," as the older members of my cohort plodded into the marriageable age bracket before me. For a number of those weddings, I was not only an attendee but also part of the family, and so there are a lot of photos of me in various stages of pubescence and teenagerdom, smiling from the outskirts of large-group family wedding photos. (It's a visual cavalcade of personal fashion embarrassments. Looking at many of the dresses and skirt/blouse sets I wore, you'd think someone grabbed an Amish girl on her second day of rumspringa, set her in front of a Kohl's rack, and told her to pick out something fetching.)

I have a half-baked theory that if you're both self-aware and a Young One, you're likely to come to grips early with the reality that you're always walking in someone else's footsteps. Even if you deviate from the path set by your elders, you will be seen as deviating from a path. (In school, younger siblings are constantly encountering either knowing smiles of recognition or raised eyebrows of surprise from teachers who had their older siblings in class.) Canny Young Ones study the footsteps and reap the benefits. On a number of occasions, my sister and I have discussed how she functions as my own personal "dry run." She navigated high school, went to college, got married, had a baby. Meanwhile, I've skulked behind her, taking notes.

This dynamic lessens with time. Even if you're close with your siblings and cousins, once you're out of school, you splinter. You pursue different careers and get to know different people. You achieve life milestones that don't correspond with birth order. Basically, you become an adult. Birth order isn't destiny.

Still, I'm a person who likes learning by example. I like being presented with a structure, even if I'm then free to rip it apart. A happy Linda is a Linda with a frame of reference.