9-11: I Remember

Five Years ago at sometime before 6 AM Pacific time my friend Matt called me. His words were simple, "Turn on the TV, someone just flew a plane into the World Trade Center on purpose."

My wife and I then watched the dark oily smoke as it billowed from the side of the North Tower. Could this be an accident? But that line of thought ended at 6:03 when United Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower.

My son was five years old at the time. And I remember feeling despair...War. Explanations would be for much later. But for that morning: cereal and cartoons in the family room.

The Pentagon was struck. How wide was this attack?

We watched the report of Flight 93 and simultaneously said the same thing: "There were heroes on that flight."

There were many Heroes that day and many since.

Nothing I can write today is worthy of this tragedy.

Although I live in Los Angeles now, I grew up in New Jersey and lived in New York City for ten years, it is a town I love, a magic place filled with a buzzing energy unmatched by any other city in the world.

I have it seems a limitless supply of snap shot thoughts about this day, like polaroids dipped in sad water and left out to dry on a tarred city roof:

Civilians: Men, Women and Children!

I never got to the top of the World Trade Center.

They were beautiful on that day I took a circle line cruise just before I left for the west coast.

My brother Bill who died in July 2001 was a construction genius. Would he have been involved somehow?

Loss, a chasm of Loss.

And on and on...

Five years later we are still here. Both the idea and the country of America is working as it has since 1776.

As I write this, my son now ten is beginning his fifth grade day. My wife gathers the leash to walk our shelter rescue character of a dog Shadow, and I remember.

I remember.

Later,
Paul Parducci