Here’s a handy schedule of fall 2008 TV premieres.

The day slips itself into our calendar again. In the limbo of early September — no longer summer, not yet autumn — it shows up. Sometimes I think it’s going to be an ordinary day, and then I read something about it in the damn New York Times and it comes back: the way the day felt, smelled, sounded, tasted.

But most years, my need to react against others’ feelings warps my own. If I try to ignore the media force field, I realize I’m aggressively doing so, which is the opposite of ignoring. If I write about it on the blog, I’m following the Approved Party Line, because We All Must Remember, and I hate doing that. But if I don’t write about it, then that, too, is giving in.

I resent people who weren’t here that day, people who merely watched it on TV in the middle of America and have tried to take ownership of it away from me for the last seven years.

And then I realize I’m being a 9/11 snob.

I shouldn’t discount the feelings of a Kansas grandma who watched it on TV. She has as much right to her feelings as I do.

And there are people who experienced it much more firsthand than I: those who lost a close relative, those who had to escape from the buildings, those who were in the financial district. Compared to them, I’m the Kansas grandma.

We are all allowed to feel what we feel.

So I try to resent the 9/11 sentimentalism only when it comes from people who love America but hate New Yorkers. Or when it’s exploitative. Things like this, or, you know, this.

Doug would probably be married today and he’d probably have a couple of kids. But those kids will never exist. I wonder if unconceived children have souls.