First published in the Star Tribune on Sept. 11, 2006

9/11 OPENED THE DOORS TO A BIRTHDAY FELLOWSHIP
Americans who shared Sept. 11 birth certificates wound up sharing their lives.

By Jim Foti
Star Tribune staff writer

There was the little girl from Michigan who had never seen the footage of the Twin Towers’ collapse because her family didn’t have a TV. There was the Hindu woman in Oklahoma who, a few days after the attacks, was abruptly told by a fellow grocery shopper to “go back to your country.” There was the Navy captain who had just marked her birthday by sharing some Krispy Kremes with her co-workers when their office building — the Pentagon — was hit by a jetliner.

These are some of the people I met on my 9/11 birthday travels across America.

While national attention is focused on the events that took place five years ago today, a more personal shift in my life began four years ago yesterday, when this newspaper published my essay on what it was like to have a Sept. 11 birthday. The short piece described some of the social awkwardness I had encountered — should friends really be wishing me a “happy” anything? But the bottom line was that I was just grateful to have a birthday at all.

After the piece ran, the e-mails came in, from as near as Minneapolis and from as far as California and Connecticut. The messages from these “birthday people” were humble, sincere and often humorous, and I realized I had an unusual fellowship with all sorts of people I had never met.

So I decided to go meet them.

At first, I kept it local — I headed to Minnetonka, where Bob Pozner and his younger daughter, Julie, both have a 9/11 birthday. They welcomed me into their living room, told me of how they continued to focus on the positive on their birthday, and showed me pictures of a family trip to New York City in November 2001, when ground zero was still smoldering with smells “you won’t forget.” They also gave me a tour of their house, and while the antelope head mounted in the den indicated a bit of a gap in our common interests, we still had a “birthday person” bond — one that had invariably led us into topics as profound as life and death.

There might be a book in all this, I thought, and after scouring the Internet and asking around in my various social circles, I found dozens more birthday people around the country. Over the course of a year, I made a couple of giant road trips and several smaller ones, putting 14,000 miles on my Corolla and visiting 33 states, including several I’d never been to before.

My travels took me to places like the dusty side of Salt Lake City, where a middle-schooler named Jesus lived in a house that lacked a telephone but had a sign on the front door saying “this a Catholic home” to dissuade proselytizers. At school, Jesus had composed a poem about his new feelings about 9/11. “My birthday,” he wrote, “was like losing my best friend.”

In the west Texas city of San Angelo, I met a family so friendly I felt as if they’d practically adopted me. After I met with the daughter who shared my birthday, she and several other family members took me out for a Tex-Mex dinner, gave me a guided tour of the town and a handed me a gift bag of local specialties, including pickled okra and a wicker basket in the shape of Texas. I was just some guy from a thousand miles away whom they’d never met in their lives, and I was moved by their kindness.

On the East Coast, I met an array of New Yorkers — a resident of a high-rise who avoided his 42nd-floor balcony before 9/11 and now enjoyed it even less; a Minnesota-born psychotherapist who knew two victims of the attacks and saw his caseload soar; a journalist who headed into Manhattan on 9/11 while everyone else headed out. And ground zero was another numbing stop on my tour of sites where hatred had struck a blow, which included the Oklahoma City National Memorial, the field in Pennsylvania where Flight 93 went down and the Pentagon.

No matter where I was, people’s attitudes toward the birthday itself were remarkably consistent: very little self-pity, a tendency to avoid televised anniversary coverage, a yearning for family, and a general desire to celebrate — respectfully — regardless. 9/11 also turned out to be a turning point for several birthday people, including a North Carolina woman who took stock of her marriage and realized it needed to end, and a 20-year-old who had joined the Marines and was in California to study Arabic to join the fight against terrorism.

Despite all the memorable experiences, my plans to publish a book did not pan out. (Not every personal journey, no matter how fulfilling, equals a manuscript.) But the effort was still worth the gasoline. I wound up meeting more than 60 people, and the very concept of home became something of an abstraction now that familiar faces could be found around the country. When a 66-year-old farmer in southern Illinois showed me his gun collection and his wife warmed me some leftovers, there was nowhere else on earth I wanted to be.

9/11 may symbolize the ultimate breakdown in human understanding, but I came to understand people better than I ever had, at least to the extent that people could be understood. For example, the exuberant Texans, whose paths never otherwise would have crossed with mine, still send me e-mails offering a version of Christianity that differs from my own faith traditions. Every time I receive one, I’m reminded of the broadness of the human spectrum and the value, especially in this fractious era, of listening to all kinds of people — and of thinking of them, in some way, as family.

When I was in Kansas City, a woman I interviewed there predicted that 50 years from now, 9/11 would seem as distant from daily life as Pearl Harbor does today, and even with the attention the attacks are getting on this anniversary, I suspect she might be right. But I know a group of people who, even if they experienced the events at some remove, will remember them every year. And I’ve realized just how American it was of me to try to seek out something positive in the face of tragedy — and to do so by hitting the road.