Keep it special, unique, memorable.

The Middle School Remembrance Ceremony for 9/11.

The tenth anniversary of the horrible day that was September 11, 2011.
I feel like I've been tiptoe-ing through the week, feeling the press of the moment when so much truly changed for us as Americans. Pearl Harbor was "American Soil"...but Hawaii seems like a exotic locale. When you are there, American though it may be, you can only feel like a suspended reality of America awaits elsewhere.
New York City, was here. A place I worked many years ago, but is held in my memories like part of my viscera, the smells of exhaust and street vendors burning hotdogs and stale pee and that mysterious effluvium that flows from the grates in the sidewalks, warmth up your skirt in the winter. The sounds, always cabs- honking, honking, zooming, and the rumble of people steps and voices and the subway and the pigeons. The cool smoothness of the high end store fronts on 5th and the grimy, bum-filled doorways of the Bowery. When the train rumbles to a stop and you step out into the fetid warmth of the bowels in Grand Central, that is a different Cate, one who walks fast, speaks to no one, eyes up, bag held tight to side. She could hail a cab in rush hour, she could bargain for a scarf on the sidewalk from the man who had laid out his cheap knock offs on a blanket next to the gutter. Those memories are there, mostly held apart from my conciousness. Who needs 'em? Not I, the girl whose legs sport rings of bruises from last week's brawl with the ram. Not I, the girl who is finally finished painting the fence, it looks just grand.
But on this day, 2001,when I sat in library story hour, baby on my lap, Middlest with pudgy hands and baby curls sitting cross legged in front of Miss Brenda, listening to The Hungry Caterpiller,  Eldest at the nearby elementary, a normal average morning in the city, all safe and accounted for...and heard whispers of other mothers.  Surely a rumor about a plane and the World Trade Center, far away in New York, but then, not a rumor, not an accident, not a terrible mistake, not far away.  Part of me felt New York, and the shift in the conciousness to a generation who will have more to face.  My children will be raised in the shadow of that day.Shadow that brings light to the illusion that we are apart. We are Hawaii, we are Isreal, we are Bahgdad, London, Madrid. We are vulnerable. It will be men and women who keep us safe, or don't. It will be men or women who shatter that safety.
It is you,  Louie, Nick, Chris, Dana, Cable, Dominque, Brian, Mitchell, Colton, the boys from West Virginia, California, Texas. You girls from Arkansas and Boston and Kansas. You are who we look to for the net that keeps 9/11 so special. So unique, so solitary, so memorable. 10 years on, you're doing something right.