The past week felt strangely calm, despite the ongoing election drama and the excitement of first snows up high in Park City.Sept. 11 came and went. To be honest, I barely thought about it on the day. I noticed a few tributes on social media, and especially a post made by a friend in New York whose father was killed in one of the towers on that Tuesday morning back in 2001.It’s funny how the mind hides memories. How time distorts them, turning them into some kind of unrecyclable foam. Like pink packing peanuts you turn over and over in your fingers, squishing them down into small, flat discs you could kick under the coffee table and forget about. At least until some day far in the future, when you happen to move the coffee table and find that the discs have sprung back to life. And you wonder how they got there in the first place.On this quiet morning in September, it’s cold and dark and all the windows are shut. The sounds of the cars whooshing by on Park Avenue are muffled. And scanning my mind for a moment, the memories come like sudden flashes of bright light.At work in my old ad agency job in Rochester, New York.Proofing mechanicals in the creative pit.A young intern I never really liked runs in and says, “Someone just crashed a plane into the World Trade Center!”Brilliant sunshine casting angular shadows onto the purple carpet.Bewilderment, then utter disbelief as the second plane crashes into the other tower on live TV 17 minutes later.I remember calling my then-husband to find out if he was OK, if his family who lived in Queens was OK. Our biggest worry was my brother-in-law who worked in the financial district, near the World Trade Center. We found out later that he was OK, too.Two months later, my husband and I were in Queens to celebrate Thanksgiving with the family. We decided to go into Manhattan to pay our respects at Ground Zero.I recall walking down toward the site from SoHo. We’d seen the images on the news for weeks. But now, here we were in person. It felt like a kind of slow-motion still life as we walked past storefronts and fire departments. Past barricades plastered with missing-person fliers. Past makeshift memorials laid with candles, American flags, plastic bouquets.I remember it being cold. All the buildings were covered in dust. Ashes floated in the sky above us. Finally, we reached a crowd of people standing in front of a high chainlink fence. Hundreds of people were gathered, yet no one said a word. That eerie silence is what stays with me more than anything else.I remember standing next to a building with a window covered in thick, gray dust. It was the kind of dust you couldn’t resist drawing a smiley face in when you were a kid, black soot trapped in the tiny creases of your fingertips even as you tried to wipe it away. But I didn’t touch it. I didn’t touch anything. Even looking at what lay beyond that chainlink fence felt like it could physically harm you, like looking directly into the sun.Still, I somehow I got up high enough to look beyond the fence. I remember seeing the mountain of rubble they called The Pile. Still standing upright amid the crush of the debris was an enormous steel lattice. I remember thinking that it looked like lace. Impossibly fragile-looking, it had managed somehow to defy all that violent destruction like an accidental memorial to what lay below it.We lingered silently for a little while. Enough time for some mumbled prayer that had no beginning and no end.Try as I might to summon the ghosts of other memories of that day, I come up blank. Neuroscientists who study the power of emotional memories say we only remember things important to our future well-being. The power to remember is only as strong as the power to feel in the moment.“There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences,” Jane Austen wrote in “Mansfield Park.”Some memories are as strong as that wall of latticed steel at Ground Zero. And as fragile. It is up to us to keep them alive.The post Betty Diaries: Remembering 9/11 appeared first on Park Record.