My high school prom came in 1976. Naturally, when it was time for the decoration committee to select a theme, the bicentennial was the first idea on the list. Just as naturally, we rejected it. We were way too cool for that.
If you're too young to remember what the bicentennial was like, just think of it as Y2K with fewer parties and more stars and stripes. Lots more stars and stripes. A nation that had just come through Watergate and was still stuck with recession and galloping inflation welcomed the chance to roll in some undiluted patriotism. Television networks that were used to passing off episodes of F-Troop as history lessons cranked up the biographies and reenactments. The radio poured out Elton's overproduced "Philadelphia Freedom" between bouts of Up with People schmaltz. It was all about as awful as you can imagine.
The idea that we would line our gym with red, white and blue that spring was enough to start an eye-roll that would take a team of opthamologists to correct. This may come as a surprise, but this generation did not invent either sarcasm or irony.
Honestly, I don't remember a lot from that year other than being full to the top and then some with the bicentennial. I remember that store shelves were overrun with plasticy junk featuring flags, the Statue of Liberty, and as many founding father action figures as could be squeezed into a match-book sized diorama. I remember wondering how you could sell souvenirs for a time when we all had to live through it. I have no idea where I was on July 4th of that year. Can't even recall if I went to see the fireworks.
I do remember a day four years later when I was working on a drill rig, trying to punch a hole into an an abandoned mine. A waitress ran across a busy road to tell me that someone had just shot President Reagan. I can still see her dark hair trying to escape from under her brown Hardee's cap. Still feel the mixture of grit and oil under my nails.
I remember five years later, sitting in a meeting when an engineer opened the door to tell us that the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded just after launch. I can name everyone in the room that day. Still see the slack expressions on their faces as they tried to grasp what they were hearing, still smell the cigarette smoke curling up from the ashtray in the center of the table.
I can remember that September morning 10 years ago, as impossibly bright and clear in St. Louis as it was in New York. I could position everyone in my office to match that day, put every person back in their old footsteps, every desk back in its old place, every trinket and photograph, every pen, every half-eaten donut and half-full cup of coffee. I can remember just how everyone leaned in to watch what was still novel—news streaming, pixelated and grainy, over the Internet. I can remember every expression of confusion, every lip twisted in shock. Every glint of tears on their way.
That's the way we're made. Our brains record things most sharply when they're bathed in the raw, scorching bath of adrenalin and fear. We may not know how to act in the moment, but later ... later those moments of absolute horror are carved way down in our minds.
It's a system we inherited from our ancestors, one that served them well when they came down from the trees. Remembering every ordinary second was not as important as remembering the seconds. Seconds when we barely escaped a leopard at the waterhole. Or seconds when some friend or relative wasn't as lucky.
In those moments, our minds become cameras—better than cameras—recording detailed impressions of the world with all five senses. Ordinary memories are written in pencil. These go down with indelible ink.
If you're old enough, you remember hearing the news of Pearl Harbor. If you're old enough, you remember John Kennedy's death. If you're old enough, you remember Martin. If you're old enough, you remember Bobby. If you're old enough, you remember when Hinckley pulled the trigger. You remember pride turning to devastation on the faces of the family of Christa McAuliffe as they realized what they were seeing. You remember the impossible moment when the first tower began to go down.
You always will.
It's a shame it has to be that way. The sunny afternoon with your family raking leaves on the lawn, the color of the paint in the first apartment you ever lived in on your own, even the expression on your daughter's face as she struggles to blow out three candles with one breath ... these things fade. They become things we know more from photographs than our own minds. The horrors hold on.
Maybe it still needs to be that way. I don't know.
Last Saturday it was a hundred degrees in St. Louis. Now there's a chill in the air. It feels like fall. But in a way it's felt like fall for a decade. Maybe it's only the 35 years between me and that kid taking his grandfather's rusty pickup to gather supplies for the prom, but it seems that something's changed. Something deep, half-hidden, and hard to express.
I really wish we hadn't been so cool. I wish we'd strung flag-patterned bunting in the rafters and let George Washington's boats float in the punch bowl. I wish we'd gotten down and rolled in that happy patriotism, at least a little, while it was summer.
Maybe it's just me, but this feels like fall.