Creepy Cutoff

A discussion in my Creative Writing class -- which consists of sophomores, juniors, and seniors-- revealed that the current crop of high school seniors will be the last that remember 9/11 firsthand . . . in my Composition class, we always read Jonathan Lethem's essay "9 Failures of the Imagination" and, in the past, the discussion inevitably turned to where they were when they heard about the attack, and how they processed the information (that is the theme of Lethem's essay: the stages of processing new and tragic information) but next year I will have to ask the kids how they think other people-- older people-- dealt with the tragedy; the event will start to take on the pale, abstract cast of history.