Newsletter 124: Another Damn September 11 Anniversary

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one’s from September 2018, about the annoying fact that September 11 happens every year.

For the first time since I moved away in 2013, I was in New York City for September 11 this year. I travel to NYC every two weeks to tape my Sports Illustrated show, and it’s a little disorienting how much more distant New York feels each time I’m here. It’s just not the place I used to live in anymore. It’s not better, it’s not worse, it’s just different. When our youngest son Wynn was an infant, like two months old, I had to leave for three days for a work trip. When I returned, there were all sorts of things he was doing that he hadn’t been able to do when I left. He had changed while I was gone; he was a different person entirely. That’s how I feel about New York now. It rotates and dissolves and regenerates so quickly that if you leave it alone for a while, it’ll be different place when you come back, and if you leave for five years, it will essentially be unrecognizable to you.

I noticed this in small ways at first, my favorite old bar now being a Duane Reade, that sort of thing, but after five years, I’ve changed almost as much as the city has. I actually caught myself, a few months ago, letting the bellhop at my hotel hail a cab for me, which would be just about the most embarrassing thing a New Yorker could possibly do. I lived in NYC for more than 13 years, but I…