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
