A Part of the Main

 I have a friend at Yahoo! who is originally from the Ann Arbor area, went to school at the University of Michigan, and is fanatical about Michigan Wolverines football. He told me that there is a pub in downtown Portland that shows every Michigan game and that a healthy crowd of Michigan alums turn up for the occasion. I work during the day on Saturdays so normally I wouldn't be able to attend, but yesterday was the much ballyhooed first night game ever in Michigan Stadium, so after work I headed down to The Thirsty Lion to check out the game.

Ann Arbor, Michigan is roughly 1,934 miles from here. Prior to this afternoon, I would have never imagined that a scene like this could ever take place in Portland, Oregon:

I asked the man distributing the University of Michigan Alumni Association name tags (yes, they had name tags, and yes, they are an official branch of the Alumni Association) how many Michigan fans were at the bar, and he said well over two hundred.

The atmosphere at the pub was electric. That was mostly due to the game, which was one of the most dramatic sporting events I have ever watched (see a video recap here): there were three touchdowns and lead changes in the final 1:12, and Michigan came from behind to seal the victory with a mere two seconds left on the clock. At that moment, the pub burst into utter pandemonium. Everyone in the place, myself included, was bouncing up and down, screaming, hugging and/or high-fiving every perfect stranger within 10 feet, and of course, singing "Hail to the Victors" at the top of our lungs.

However, there was something besides the game that made the night feel so special. Looking around at all the alums young and old (some very old) clad in Michigan Maize and Blue, it made me feel like I was a part of something so much larger than myself. The Alumni Association's website states: "With more than 460,000 living Michigan alumni, the Alumni Association represents one of the largest alumni bodies in the world." I feel a tremendous amount of pride to be a Wolverine, and though I know but a small fraction of them, I feel a strong connection to the 460,000 others out there.

Michigan football is one of the primary channels through which I feel that connection. It's not like I have a strong connection to football in general - I had never actually watched a football game of any sort before I moved to Ann Arbor, and the team had three of the most regrettable seasons in its storied history while I was a student there. Regardless, Michigan football seems to transcend time and circumstance and reach into something deeper inside me. (Judging by my Facebook news feed immediately after the game, a whole lot of my Michigan friends share this sentiment.) Even before the game, as I watched the players run out onto the field and jump up to touch the "GO BLUE" banner as part of their pregame ritual, I had goosebumps.

The elation I felt after my communal experience watching Michigan's dramatic victory was a stark change from how I had been feeling earlier in the day. In the course of my work I land on the Yahoo! homepage frequently, and in the past few weeks they have been featuring a lot of content commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Part of the way through the day I clicked on a photo slideshow called "9/11: The 25 Most Powerful Photos." As I clicked through the photos and read the captions, I had a breakdown and began to cry at my desk.

I spent September 11, 2001 in Campinas, Brazil as a missionary. It was a Tuesday morning, so we went to a district meeting as usual. Afterwards, (Elder) Sam Green, my missionary companion at the time, and I had lunch with a woman from church. Early on in the lunch I remember her saying that she had seen something strange on the TV. She asked, "What's the name of that really big city in America?" I said, "Uh, New York?" "Yeah, that's the one," she answered. "What's the name of the really tall, famous building there?" I thought for a moment. "The Empire State Building, maybe?" To which she replied, "Yeah, I think that's it. I saw on TV that it got bombed or fell over or something." I thought she must have been confused or was maybe talking about a movie that was on TV.

Halfway through the meal the we got a phone call from the bishop saying that we needed to stop everything and get over to his house immediately. I don't believe he even mentioned what the reason was. So we hurried over to Bishop Sérgio's place where the news was playing. I was totally stunned - it didn't seem like it was real. The whole thing felt so distant - it was happening in a country that was so far away, being reported on the TV in a language that was not my native tongue.

The Brazilian news didn't seem to have very much footage. They kept looping the same piece of video taken from the street level looking up at the second tower as it exploded. The camera then whipped back down to focus on  a man with a look of sheer terror on his face who collapsed as if his nerves had stopped firing the necessary messages to his muscles in order for him to stay standing. They showed that man collapsing over and over and over again, and I remember thinking of the scripture in Luke about "men's hearts failing them for fear" in the last days.

I don't remember exactly how long we stayed there watching the news - an hour, maybe two hours. The bishop wanted us to stay longer and keep watching (I think he understood that we needed to let it sink in), but I remember thinking that there was nothing we could do about it, so we should probably just get back to work.

The life of a missionary is very disconnected from the media, so a lot of what I heard about life in America in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was through my parents' letters. They talked about how people displayed flags everywhere, how everyone became nicer, and how the country as a whole had been brought together by the tragedy. However, by the time I got back home to the United States in July of 2002, the country had already started to move on, which left me feeling like I never had a chance to be a part of what is perhaps the defining American experience of my lifetime. And in a weird way I have felt like there is an essential component of American-ness that I have been missing because of that.

Do you remember Charlie Brown's opening monologue from A Charlie Brown Christmas, where he laments that he doesn't understand The True Meaning of Christmas? Here's a refresher:

 If you substitute 9/11 for Christmas, that's how I have felt for the past 10 years:

"I think there must be something wrong with me... I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel. I just don't understand 9/11, I guess."

For the past few weeks I have been following the 9/11 retrospectives in the media particularly closely because I saw it as an opportunity to gain some great insight into The True Meaning of 9/11. When I clicked on that photo slideshow at work, I was overwhelmed by how fresh and raw it all felt to me, having never seen any of the images before. I went through so many emotions in a matter of minutes - terror, anger, sadness at the loss of life and our country's loss of innocence.* I felt my heart ache for the victims, for their families, for the survivors covered in ashes, for the brave ones pulling bodies out of the rubble, for the men whose hearts failed them for fear, and for our great nation.

You may think it odd that a post about Michigan football veered off into a "Where Were You on 9/11" story. I had originally planned a much more straightforward post about how I feel on the 10th anniversary of the attack. However, on the drive home from the pub last night I was thinking about the extremes of my day, and how both a football team and the commemoration of a national tragedy had made me feel like I am connected to something larger than myself. I don't want to sound like I'm trivializing 9/11, but something about sharing that experience with all those Michigan alums in a pub thousands of miles away from that football game helped me make some sense out of my feelings about 9/11.

I didn't know a thing about Michigan football until September 2007, yet I still feel like I have some kind of place inside of that tradition. I've been an American my whole life (and a proud one to boot). Although I wasn't physically located in the country on 9/11 and my missionary calling prevented me from following the media coverage of the aftermath, I think I can rest from my search for The True Meaning of 9/11 because on this day I do feel a strong connection to my fellow Americans. 

*While I was writing this post, I saw a note pop up in my Facebook news feed written by my friend Bryan, whose 9/11 story is eerily similar to my own (on a mission in Brazil at the time, never felt like he processed it, broke down this week while looking at a photo slideshow, our two names are homophones, etc.). In his brief note he expressed some thoughts that are very similar to what I have written here. He articulated a few things so well that I hope he doesn't mind that I have borrowed some of his phrasing. Seeing his note was a really unexpected moment of feeling a connection to someone.

Note - I took the title of this post from a well-known poem by John Donne:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.