Recently, I asked my mom what life was like for her during World War II. I'm not sure what made me ask the question. Every once in a while, I feel a desire to know details from a relative's life. Some sort of personal story or mental image that I can hold on to and perhaps pass on to my kids one day. I wasn't sure if she would have that much to talk about in regard to the war. After all, she was very young when it was going on, and was only about 7 or 8 years old when it ended. Even so, she had these two things to offer:

1. There were these air-raid drills during which there would be mandatory lights-out in all homes. Her family would sit in their living room, the only light a soft glow from the round dial of the radio. And even though she was told that these were only drills, my mom would imagine that the Germans were out there somewhere possibly about to bomb their neighborhood.
2. The day it was announced that the war was over, her family celebrated by going outside and banging pots and pans in the street. All the neighbors did the same thing. She felt an awesome sense of victory and celebration. Her mom cried and she didn't fully understand why.

These were powerful images to me. My mom and I have probably come to understand the war in the overall context of history in much the same way: retroactively, through text, photographs, video, words, documentaries. But I can read hundreds of accounts of the war from various historians, I can view thousands of photos, watch hours of documentaries, and none of it will be quite the same as the mental images I have of my mom, my aunt and uncle, their parents, celebrating the end of the war by banging pots and pans outside of their house in Michigan. Or of them sitting quietly in a dark room listening to the glowing round dial of the radio, waiting for an air-raid drill to end. It feels close. It feels more real.

All this made me wonder what I might say if my kids or grandkids were to ask me about some big event from my lifetime, something like 911. What would I say? During 911, I lived in Dallas, Texas, over a thousand miles away from the attacks. Even though I watched the second plane hit the tower 'in real time' as it was actually happening, my experience of that day was filtered through the camera lens, just as my kids' experiences will be. I was not one of the dust-covered New Yorkers in the streets of Lower Manhatten that day. I have no first-hand knowledge of the fear of that day, or the way the city smelled, or the eery sounds of alarms as a cloud of dust enveloped the area. The only sights, sounds, experiences I personally have of these events are those that I got from TV, the Internet, or magazines, with the exception of a few personal stories I've heard from friends and family, most of whom were in DC, not New York. This leaves me wondering what I could possibly say to my theoretical children during this imagined interaction I might one day have.

I could of course tell them about the social and cultural climate in America: how after 911, there was an initial wave of patriotism, but then it became even more strongly divided, politically and culturally, than before; we went on to fight strange wars; the economy tanked; the Internet bubble was gone, but the Web continued to be a dominant force in everybody's lives.

Blah, blah, blah. This is all stuff they could read in a textbook somewhere. Also, they will have access to the exact same images I saw, the same videos, the same articles, the same stories. So maybe the real story on something like 911, for me, for them, boils down to this: I felt a very real and palpable fear when I watched the towers fall, like I'd lost something dear and close. I remember hugging your mother in our living room in front of the TV and feeling small and sad and bewildered. We cried. Later that day, more out of habit than anything else, I went to work. It didn't really seem right, but I didn't know what else to do. People around me, walking, driving in cars, strangers, they all were a comfort to see. Somehow, everybody felt like a friend.

For the most part, these will be just words and won't fully describe 'what it was like.' But they'll tell a small part of my own experience, something close, something personal, that will go beyond the hours of footage they'll probably be able to view online. And maybe, in some ways, that will make it more real.

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