niNE-Eweven?

I saw Mr. Pseudonym off to work this morning for the first time in six weeks and, breathing a slightly guilty sigh of relief (hey--I love the guy, but six weeks?!), sat down with a cup of coffee to check out the weather on t.v. I had forgotten what today was.

Every station was carrying reports of the 9/11 memorial observances in New York, at the Pentagon, at the Flight 93 Temporary Memorial in Pennsylvania and all around the nation. At Ground Zero, survivors of those who perished in the attack read the names of the dead, including the name(s) of the beloved lost of each person reading. Other survivors placed flowers, cards and other tributes in the reflecting pool where the north tower of the World Trade Center once stood. The pool glistened in the sunlight while survivors wiped tears from their eyes and hugged each others for comfort.

It's been five years and, for many of us, watching film of the attacks still produces that crushing feeling in our chests, that horror and disbelief, as if we were living that day over again today. Our lives as Americans changed forever on 9/11/2001. We lost our innocence and our sense of being sheltered from the cruel savagery mankind inflicts on itself around the globe. We were children before 9/11--naive, gullible, unaware and overly confident. We knew of the horrors of life elsewhere, but we were convinced our country's fortifications would always provide security and safety. We had never been attacked on our own shores in this manner, and we could not come to terms with experiencing firsthand that which we had seen in news reports from other parts of the world.

I sat, watching the memorials, waiting for the tears to inevitably begin flowing down my face. There was a camera shot of the reflecting pool showing a little girl of about three or four years dipping her fingers in the pool. She had long, dark hair done up prettily with a ribbon to match her pink dress, and her older brother stood next to her. The camera swung away briefly to focus on an elderly man crying inconsolably as he placed flowers in the pool, and then it returned to the little girl in the pink dress.

The little girl was laughing and squirming away as an adult standing behind her attempted to gently pull her away from the pool. She grabbed some floating flowers and swished them around in the water, laughing as her brother smiled uncertainly at her antics. She began a little dance as she shook droplets of water off her hands and then said something which made her brother burst into laughter himself.

I have three children of my own, and I remember how little girls in pretty, pressed dresses and ribboned hair can cause their parents crushing humiliation with a few careless words or a bit of inspired misbehavior. All I could think, while watching the child on t.v., was, "Oh! Her parents must be mortified!" As I watched, the child continue in her naughtiness, I began to smile. Kids will always be kids, and if we are lucky enough to be able to raise them comfortably, we can count on them repaying us by behaving like savages--with reckless abandon, at the worst possible times, without a care in the world.

As the names of the dead continued to be read by the weeping and shaking survivors, I found myself continuing to smile. That exasperating little kid was the daughter, step-daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece, cousin or dear little friend of a person who died unexpectedly five years ago today. That healthy, scrubbed, pretty little child with the terrible sense of timing is going on with her life, carrying a piece of a 9/11 victim along with her. We just don't know for sure, but perhaps a part of those we have lost looks down on us all the time; maybe we feel them smiling down on us with the sunlight and hear the sound of their laughter in the wind.