Yesterday and Today

In March 2002, six months after 9/11, two friends and I travelled to Ireland to celebrate one of our birthdays. One night, I was unable to sleep and went downstairs in our hotel to get a cup of tea and write. The night clerk, a young man in his twenties who was also in charge of the shop, brewed me a cup and went back to sweeping the floor of the small room, a task from which I had interrupted him.

“May I ask you a question?” I asked.

He leaned on his broom and smiled. “Of course,” he said.

“What did you think when you heard about the towers falling in New York?”

He paused. “Em…the first thought was sorrow, of course. There were quite a few Irishmen in the towers, too.”

I nodded. “What was your second thought?”

“Are you sure you want me to answer that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“My second thought was, ‘Now they know,'” he replied.

I nodded again, but this time I said nothing. I was 44 at the time, and had lived insulated with an all too often smug sense of invincibility, perhaps even superiority, as an American. It would be a while, maybe days, before the full import of what he said struck me. Although much younger than I, he knew what it felt like to walk down the streets of Belfast during the conflicts between the IRA and England, never knowing if an explosion was just about to happen and life was about to irrevocably change for him.

I was strangely embarrassed.

Throughout the rest of our trip, we were welcomed with open arms. Ireland had suffered a major blow to its tourism, given that few Americans flew anywhere for a period after 9/11, and a good portion of their visitors before had been those of us who’d descended from ancestral clans and painted our rivers green on St. Paddy’s Day. Once, a couple from elsewhere in Ireland, on holiday in Killarney, on their way out of a restaurant where we had played with their infant who had persisted in crawling to us at every opportunity, stopped at our table. “We’re glad you’re back,” they said.

Although I had been to England and Scotland before, this was my first trip to Ireland. I had fallen in love with the place and six months later, I returned with one of my friends and a couple I was close to in celebration of his birthday on September 4.

We arrived at our hotel in a small town on the west coast and gone to our respective rooms. On each of our pillows was a card, advising us that on September 11, the hospitality industry across Ireland would pause for a minute of silence at 1:46 p.m., the moment one year before that the first plane had flown into the Twin Towers.

We met downstairs for a cup of tea and a bowl of soup soon after, and we talked, with tears in our eyes, of our memories of the year before and of the kindness of our hosts.

The week proceeded and we visited towns up and down the west coast before swinging down across the south before heading northeast for Dublin, from which we were departing the next day. We had lost a sense of the date until we stopped for lunch at a pub in Carlow.

It was Wednesday and the pub was filled with people—families, businesspeople, a few tourists like us. Voices in conversation and the clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen made it feel much like a Sunday afternoon. Hungry, I had chosen roast beef and potatoes and carrots from a large buffet, and when I sat down at our table, I glanced up at a television above the bar. On it, I saw the face of President George W. Bush. He was in New York at the first memorial service and SkyTV was broadcasting. The recounting of the names of those who had lost their lives was soon to begin.

I had taken a bite when the bustling pub went completely silent and looked up to see a member of the wait staff, previously on her hurried way from one part of the pub to another, completely still, head bowed, hands clasped behind her.

For a full minute, I sat with roast beef in my mouth, unable to chew or swallow because of the constriction in my throat. I was not alone—my fellow travelers were equally unable to speak for several moments after the noises of this fine Irish pub returned.

I’ve wondered many times since, when terrorist acts have taken the lives of innocents around the world, when tragedies like the Christmas tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, which took the lives of over 200,000 people, and more recently in the wake of now well over 600,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, many of which may well have been unnecessary, the suffering of which has been dismissed as a hoax, a political exploitation of ignorance that leaves me incredulous. How many times have we stood as a nation, bowing our heads in silence in honor of those gone because of senseless violence and utter disregard for anyone else in the world?

Yesterday, at the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, as they did twenty years ago, the Welsh Guard played the national anthem of the United States. I watched the video in instant tears at the sounds of the first musical phrase. I was instantly transported to that day in Carlow and the undeserved grace I felt as an American. Then, I found myself once again in a small hotel coffee shop in Killarney.

This time, however, with hindsight I couldn’t have had that night, I responded to the young man.

“We haven’t learned a thing,” I said.