Earlier tonight I was having dinner with a small group of friends whom I’ve known for almost 10 years, although I’ve known some better than others. We’ve each been living in New York for at least that long, and have seen one another either individually or in groups on many different occasions over the years.
Yet, tonight, we gave over an extended portion of our conversation to a recollection of where we were on September 11, 2001 – how we got to work or school, what we did that morning and afternoon, how long it took us to figure out how to get around the city, in the hours and days afterward. And I thought: is this really the first time we’re talking about this, together? I know I’d talked about it before with different friends, but as we landed on it together as a group new bits and pieces came tumbling out, making the event much more strangely ‘recent’ than I would have expected.
There are two people I spent the whole day with (in 2001) with whom I’ve never discussed the event, even though I see them from time-to-time. The other person with us is now my roommate, and we discuss it rarely. Also, I have a tacit agreement with my friend J, a NYer whom I met in 2004 in Nashville, not to discuss it. On several occassions, it has been raised by others in conversation and J I engage in this somewhat elaborate process of diverting the conversation.
I suppose I’ve had dinner conversations like you describe and felt a kind of catharsis–getting our cards on the table, as it were–but I’m loathe to do that often, or to talk about it with non-NYers, frankly. I get particularly upset (like, the storming out of the room, rolling your eyes, telling the other person to shut up, upset) when folks from Iowa, say, start using the “attack on America” rhetoric and philosophizing about the nature of the event “for us”.
I’m sure I’ve talked about it before with different people but it has come up for me, like you, only rarely and as a full-fledged conversation topic only with very particular combinations of people, and only those who are from or have been in the City for a long while. What in fact triggered last night’s conversation was a sense of disconnect between our own political sensibilities (and those of many New Yorkers, I think) re: the ‘war on terror,’ immigration, etc., with those of large tracts of the country who seem to have taken rather different ownership of the event.