Journalism is “the first rough draft of history,” as Washington Post publisher Philip L. Graham famously put it in 1963. Which might explain why my mother, never a big consumer of news or politics, must have left my sister and me in front of the TV in the living room of our house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on the morning of September 12, 2001. We watched looping footage of the Twin Towers collapsing as the acrid scent of jet fuel that would linger past Thanksgiving began to creep in. My mother must have gone to a newsstand or a bodega that is no doubt closed now, where she bought all four major New York City newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News.
Twenty-two years and a dozen moves later, or a month before she died, she took me to her storage bin in an ugly concrete block building next to Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, where we had a fight over how much crap she had hoarded. I encouraged her to get rid of all this stuff that was costing her money she couldn’t afford. She insisted that these were artifacts of various phases of our family life and the material culture of American society, and I insisted that if you could stand to not have it in your house, you don’t need it.
Wasn’t there at least something that I couldn’t bear to lose? I tried to bite the bullet, casting my gaze over boxes of old ornaments, photos, and clothes from the different phases of her varied and well-lived life. I failed only once: I kept those yellowed, wrinkled newspapers.
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