This is the remainder of what I started writing about earlier, that post will appear below this one.
Oddly enough, with Katrina's aftermath, we're not thinking about what this date signifies. In some ways that's good because life does need to get back to normal. But we shouldn't forget either. In about 6 hours, we'll be four years removed from that terrible hour.
When I first heard about 9/11, I was at work in Toledo when my boss called from his home. He was about to take his kids to school when he called and told me something about a plane hitting the WTC. I just assumed it was a small plane at first and an accident, but then word started spreading about what was going on and we all became glued to our radios.
That was a scary day. I know we had a regular staff meeting that day and we were supposed to finish up a presentation for a new synagogue that night. But that presentation wouldn't occur as it became apparent things wouldn't be normal for awhile. And I feel sorry for poor Rob Brunk. 9/11 happened to be his first day at work for us. Rob's a nice guy who I worked with at a firm before Hobbs + Black (my former employer) so I was glad to see him come aboard. But not on a day like that.
One of the people I feel the most for now that time has passed is my stepdaughter. By then, she was living with her mom in Elyria, Ohio, where they moved after our divorce. But the events of 9/11 put a damper on what was supposed to be a fun senior year for her.
I recall going to a scheduled marching band event the Saturday afterward. Her band, being the host, was the last band to perform. But instead of a rousing sendoff number, her band simply left the field to a single drum cadence. Obviously it reflected the solemnity of the moment, but I felt cheated for her. Being in the class of 2002, she's always going to have that stain on the memory of her senior year of high school.
To this day, we still occasionally get the healing wound torn open. The latest controversy surrounds the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania. It gives architects a bad name in my opinion. And architects are an interesting lot. While the "name" architects you see in the trade mags and in academia (and who run the AIA) seem to be flaming liberals, almost all of them I've worked with have been moderate to right-wing. The gentleman in question earlier (my old boss) who called about the WTC disaster was probably the most leftist and even he agreed with me on some things.
But I'm glad that we're starting to again view this day as somewhat normal. It'll never be quite like the way 9/11/01 started out (a glorious late summer day in both NYC and Toledo) but sometime the pain will wear off and be replaced by a legacy - a legacy of freedom for many of the world's most oppressed people that came out of that horrible day's events.
Totally unrelated edit: As of this post, I've had to turn word verification on for comments. I hadn't posted my last post 10 minutes and I had two comment spammers, neither of which was germaine to the subject. So my friends at places like WriteWingBlog and the league:revisited will have to type one more word. I apologize for the inconvenience but I'm the only one allowed to mess up my blog with "inappropriate" comments!
