The French toast morning

I’m not sure if I was 7 or 8 or what day of the week it was. Somewhere between sleep and school I was in the kitchen. Just sitting, looking at my dad walking back and forth between the fridge and the stove. He didn’t just have a messy hair, that morning something about him was different. Between his instructions on how to make “the perfect French toast”, he kept on reminding me of how terrific everything was. Like he was hiding something that was already obvious. I wasn’t old enough to realize why but I felt that things weren’t the same.

The toast didn’t turn out as perfect as it sounded, and neither did my day. Although I know he tried, nothing changed. The pan was left unwashed for a couple of days and no one talked about the burned toast. I ended up going to school without having breakfast. There were no further discussions made about it. After all these years still sometimes I find myself sitting on that chair trying to figure out what happened.

Too far from home

She describes the park as small, saying that its not even considered a park. Looking at the modern benches and new pavement, she thought it was newly built. There weren’t any elements of something historical or any traces of what was there before. All she could have been reminded of was a modern decorated garden at Biscayne Ave in Miami by an architecture called Buru Marx. The park didn’t have anything else for her; it was too new to remind her of home. She left. On the way back she came across a few town houses that reminded her of London and English architecture. Standing in the middle of the street she describes as ‘peaceful” Giovanna tried finding something that could have took her back, but New York wasn’t anything like home.

Between Christopher and 10^th

Somewhere between Christopher and 10^th there’s a little triangle park right next to an old library. I guess in a city like New York just a few benches and trees are enough to call it a park! With hardly any space to walk, you find yourself just sitting. In a fenced park with a few trees, five minutes is enough for you to get bored from looking and before you know your staring at an old pot left next to a tree thinking of your grandmother. If you’ve moved to New York, no mater where you’re from and how long you’ve been here, there is always going to be something that reminds you of home. Whether it’s the construction work across the street or the old lady in the park, there’s something about it that feels good. With not much to see, I took a few moments to look around one last time and then headed back. An avenue and a couple of blocks away was enough for me to realize that it wasn’t just the park; I had left a part of myself when coming, a part that I constantly try to replace with what I have.

A Walk Around the Void of 9/11

Walk onto the plaza in Lower Manhattan and you hear the memorial before you see it — a whooshing through the oak trees. You soon realize it’s not the wind, but water. At the footprint of each tower, north and south, a vast square emptiness is bound by four walls of falling water, the pool below pouring into a smaller central void that flows out of sight. The memorial is black upon black, but the water casts reflections. Sunlight and mist make fragmentary rainbows that flicker as clouds go by.

Tourists are milling about and buying souvenirs, guides are explaining, construction workers on the perimeter are relaxing. Though it is a murder scene, the memorial is not a morbid place. The trees soften it, as does the presence of children who have no memory of that morning, 15 years ago on Sunday.

There is an underground museum nearby, if you want to immerse yourself in that day. But the event is hard to grasp in full if you never saw the towers intact, if you never gazed straight up between the two pinstriped columns and got dizzy at the scale. And if you were not downtown that day, and did not have to flee uptown or across a bridge, did not have your memory seared by the smoke, the dust, the smell, the incomprehension.

The memorial has the power to gently push you back — not to horror, but maybe to tears. This is the effect of seeing the thousands of names, incised in bronze rows, five deep, encircling the fountains. Each row is like a lei of five strands, lives linked by work or some other related or random circumstance, and one awful fate.

Walk slowly, and let your eyes absorb the loss. Jeremy “Caz” Carrington, of Cantor Fitzgerald. Deepa Pakkala, Marsh & McLennan. Uhuru Houston, Port Authority police. Maybe technology someday will allow us to hover over a name and hear a story, summon a life, see the braid of loved ones formed over a lifetime and then, suddenly, snapped. Who were these dead, and where might life have taken them? William Mahoney, Fire Department Rescue 4. Michael Quilty, Ladder 11. Heather Malia Ho, pastry chef at Windows on the World.

Many of them had no idea what was happening, and none knew what the attacks would lead to. The years of unending warfare, the disasters overseas, the new way of living: see something, say something, fear everything.

The memorial, blessedly, does not summon any wretched aftermath. It summons, instead, dignity and honor — of the victims who called home, leaving messages of love, of the first responders who rushed toward the smoke and flames. There was great bravery that day, and exemplary leadership in the days and months after. Rudy Giuliani, creating calm and unity; George Bush, honoring the workers and the fallen amid the wreckage.

Fifteen years on, the evil of 9/11 may still reverberate, but the goodness remains a thing to marvel at. And the 9/11 memorial — subdued, profound — is almost miraculous, given its tortured birth by committee. Years ago two mayors, Michael Bloomberg and Mr. Giuliani, were in a group discussing what the memorial should be. Mr. Giuliani wanted something big on that “sacred ground.” Mr. Bloomberg argued for a school, not a monument. “I always thought the best memorial for anybody is to build a better world in their memory,” he said. “I’m a believer in the future, not the past. I can’t do anything about the past.”

He was right about what we can’t do. But many of us can do this on a bright September day: Take the subway to Lower Manhattan. Walk a block or two, find the way through a construction zone and down a chain-link corridor. Take the time to walk around each void, watching the names flow by. There are too many to linger over, but read those you can and reflect on the whole. Take several turns, pondering, as a pilgrim might do, the enormity of the loss, the passage of years. And what we, the living, can do to build a better world, worthy of their sacrifice.

9/11 anniversary: Services held 15 years on

Services were held across the United States and the world to mark 15 years since the 11 September attacks.
Six moments of silence was held in New York City, to mark the times four hijacked planes crashed and the two World Trade Center towers fell.
Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton attended a ceremony at the rebuilt site.
Ahead of the anniversary, President Obama said it was important to remember America’s “core values”.
“We’re still the America of heroes who ran into harm’s way; of ordinary folks who took down the hijackers; of families who turned their pain into hope,” he said in his weekly radio address.
“We are still the America that looks out for one another, bound by our shared belief that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper. In the face of terrorism, how we respond matters.”

President Obama held a moment of silence in the White House at 08:46 local time (12:46 GMT), the time the first plane hit the World Trade Center. He will later speak at an event at the Pentagon.
Neither presidential candidate spoke at the New York event, where the names of the victims were read out.

Close to 3,000 people died when planes crashed into the towers, as well as the Pentagon in Washington DC and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Fifteen of the 19 attackers were Saudi nationals.
An independent panel completed the 9/11 Commission Report a year after the attacks.
But several sections – informally known as “the 28 Pages” – were withheld from the public for 13 years, fuelling speculation about their contents.

The pages were released in July, and showed it was likely the attackers got financial help from people inside Saudi Arabia, but that there was no official Saudi role.

Last week, the US Congress unanimously passed a bill allowing 9/11 victims’ families to sue the Saudi government.

Texas mattress shop closes over ‘tasteless’ 9/11 ad

A Texas mattress shop is to close after facing a backlash for a 9/11-themed advert described as “tasteless”.

Miracle Mattress faced strong criticism after its “twin tower sale” offered every mattress sold on the anniversary of the attacks for the price of a smaller twin mattress.
In the clip, staff fall into two towers of mattress, knocking them over.
“We’ll never forget,” the presenter of the clip says in the now withdrawn advert.
Miracle Mattress owner Mike Bonanno said that “effective immediately, our Miracle Mattress store will be closed indefinitely”, in a statement released on Friday.
“We will be silent through the 9/11 Anniversary to avoid any further distractions from a day of recognition and remembrance for the victims and their families.”
In a letter published earlier, Mr Bonanno apologised, saying the video had been produced at the company’s San Antonio office without permission from management.
“The video is tasteless and an affront to the men and women who lost their lives on 9/11. Furthermore, it disrespects the families who lost their loved ones and continue to struggle with the pain of this tragedy every day of their lives.”
Twitter users criticised the company over the video. “This is absolutely sickening,” said one. “You deserve to be out of business. End of story,” said another.
A total of 2,996 people died on 11 September 2001 when al-Qaeda militants hijacked four planes, crashing two into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York, a third into the Pentagon and the fourth into a field in Pennsylvania.

For more info:
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/11/us/9-11-events/

me without me writing

me without me