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In the Time Between “Now” and “History”

In the Time Between “Now” and “History”

Last updated on: September 11, 2026 at 6:12 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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In the Time Between “Now” and “History” 2026-09-11T18:12:05-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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The statue of liberty overlooking the island of Manhattan on September 11, 2001. The Twin Towers are burning with a plume of smoke blowing out over the city.

image via Pixabay

I couldn’t tell you the exact moment at which current events become history.

I know that the period between “now” and “history” is a little less than twenty years, because it was in late summer of 2020 that I noticed the footage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks looked old. For a long time, every time I re-watched the videos of all the news coverage, that footage looked like it was taking place in the present day, and then one day it looked dated. The cars parked on the sides of the street looked like old cars. The clothes and glasses bystanders were wearing seemed quaint. The year 2001 had become a part of history.

Now, six years later, I look back at that article I wrote, and it, too, seems like a long time ago. It was written in the first Trump term, in the middle of a pandemic, and we’re in a different era now. My nephew, Jimmy’s boy, was a toddler in 2020, and now he rides a two wheeler. Adrienne was in elementary school and now goes to high school, where one of the teachers is twenty-four years old: she was an older teenager in 2020. The teacher put on a video of 9/11 footage for the Freshmen to watch, explaining that she hadn’t even been born yet when the terrorist attacks happened. And I felt doubly old. I had watched current events become history, twice.

The other day I saw young people on social media asking why Millennials have such strong memories of 9/11 and speak about it with the horror that we do, and I was puzzled. I didn’t even know where to begin.

I wanted to start by saying that I was home alone on a sunny Tuesday morning, when my father ran screaming into the house. He’s just been with a client whose son lived in New York, and the son called the father to say “I just want you to know I’m okay.” Neither the client nor my father knew what he was talking about. You didn’t usually see important breaking news while you were at work in those days, unless you happened to be near a television. Only rich people had cell phones and those were the kind that didn’t beep every few minutes with news alerts. The son explained there’d been a major terrorist attack and hundreds of people were dead. My father listened to the first tower collapse on the car radio all the way home. He turned on that horrible square TV in the dining room and there it was: one tower still standing, where there had always been two. There had never not been twin towers. Everyone in the world knew the Twin Towers. The Twin Towers were the symbol of New York. And now, suddenly, one tower was a cloud of ash engulfing Manhattan.

I also wanted to start by saying that my mother was with my young siblings at the homeschool tutoring co-op in the church social hall. They’d just finished daily Mass and were starting their math lessons. Next thing she knew, the pastor’s brother came running into the building, yelling as my father had done, and at first she couldn’t understand a word coming out of his mouth. They gathered all the children into the same room, to wait for their parents. One of the children was crying because her father was currently on a business trip in New York, and she had no way to know if he was safe. Most everybody knew SOMEONE who was in New York, and none of us knew if they were safe.

I wanted to say that we watched the split screen of that last tower burning, next to the Pentagon burning, for what seemed like hours. We saw objects that moved and wiggled fluttering out of the towers’ windows, thousands of feet in the air, and didn’t know what they were, at first. It turned out that some of those things were bits of paper, and some of them were debris, and some were live human beings. You could hear their bodies hit the ground in some of the footage. They sounded like gunshots.

And then the remaining World Trade Tower disintegrated into a column of ash. I’m sure it made a tremendous sound at ground zero, but on the news video my father watched, it was silent. The falling bodies had made a sound, but the moment I saw the building collapse, all I could hear was the news anchor stammering.

Shortly after that, we got the word that another plane had gone down, “near Camp David.”

“Where’s Camp David?” I asked my father.

“It’s right near Granny and Grandpa’s house,” he said.

I ran to the phone to call my grandparents, but they didn’t answer. They didn’t call to tell me they were all right for days.

Of course, none of those memories would answer the questions on social media.

Maybe this is the answer: there was a time, not a long one, where Americans felt safe. We shouldn’t have, but we did. The Cold War was over, and our side had won. Those godless Communist nuclear bombs weren’t going to vaporize us after all. The world was not going to come to an end. We believed, baselessly, that everybody liked Americans and viewed us as liberators. We assumed, again baselessly, that terrorist attacks were a thing that happened in other countries and not here. The United States wasn’t like those other countries. It wasn’t a place where dangerous things happened, because we were good people who didn’t deserve dangerous things. That was how we saw ourselves. And in the space of a few hours on a Tuesday morning, all of those assumptions were ripped away in the most traumatic way possible. We didn’t feel safe or liked or exceptional anymore.

Every foolish, cruel, and shameful thing we’ve done in the twenty-five years since then, has been a desperate effort to get those feelings back.

We no longer live in a post-nine-eleven era. That era is a part of history now. But everything in the world we live in, has been shaped by what we did in the post-nine-eleven era: in the time between “now,” and “history.”

Someday, this time we’re living in will also be a part of history. And I don’t know what happens next.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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