Happy Autumn!

Ahh, September! We’re well entrenched in our September now that today is the 23rd of the month. The third Saturday of September is normally a day of import in my town: Our Town Day. This year we also had the ribbon cutting at the high school too. Our Town has a fair each year, with non-profit groups selling things at hacked together tables and calling them “booths” with pride. My Girl Scout booth was ably filled with a mom and a daughter (our reluctant teen Girl Scout!) and their cool crafts. I got a hairpin which consisted of a silk flower with an eyeball in the middle in honor of the soon-to-arrive Halloween. Lovely! A couple of people were creeped out by it!

At the high school, there was a ceremony for the ribbon cutting to commemorate the completion of the construction. Luckily I had a napkin in my pocket, because I did cry, all of the gratitude, all of the nostalgia welling in my heart, making me proud to live in this silly little town.

I love the small-towniness in this town, if that is a trait a place can have. I love that the town pulled together to vote for the renovation, that all of the townspeople, young families and elderly, were behind the push to get this work done. I love that my girls have grown so tall, still as beautiful as I thought they were the days they were born. I love that more people smiled to see me last Saturday than the number who turned the other way when they saw me coming.

My older daughter lived through 4 schools being reconstructed. My younger daughter reaps the benefits. Small town politics are great too, and the ceremony included many speeches extolling the virtues of supporting a fourth construction undertaking ($51 million!) but the most striking moment was the recollection by the school board Superintendent about the first vote held two weeks after THE September 11th in 2001.

My mind drifted back to the day, and the many responses I had personally, the many intertwining of my life and the devastation. First, I am a civil engineer, and was working for a structural design company. When the first tower was hit, my boss was staggered. Clutching his heart, and holding his head, he said: the tower is going to collapse. We watched on the tv as is did just that. Days later, I started sobbing in my car on my way to work, when the realization hit me that some other civil engineer, somewhere else in the world, designed the attacks. All of the good that can come out of my profession – roads, buildings, bridges, towers and tunnels - and yet one of my kind had chosen to hurt so many. Deliberately was an accessory to murder by the use of education.

Our Town Day Fair that year came up for cancellation, but the town decided that we would go forward with our celebration of our small-town lives, to deliberately recognize how lucky we were to be alive. The Base families wandered through, shell-shocked. Our Town families clutched their children as they went on their rounds at the fair. Mothers hugged mothers as we met each other at the fair, all of us, as abutters to the Air Force Base, feeling so close to danger, so close to those who put themselves in danger for our freedom, and close indeed to the families our soldiers support on the base by their work for our country.

My siblings in New York, my brother and sister, lost days and weeks in their city, their daily habits interrupted. That day, my brother sat with children, gathered in the gymnasium after The Towers fell, waiting for parents who rushed to retrieve their most precious belongings, waited with children whose parents did not come to pick them up that day or any other day thereafter. He tells a story of seeing the dust clouds, of closing the shades after the first plane hit so that the children in the classrooms could keep calm.

And all throughout and ever after, my nephew Benjamin, on the occasion of his 19th birthday, thought: no one will ever forget my birthday again.

We were lucky in that we did not lose anyone we knew directly.

No special finale here. I wish my Septembers did not include memorials other than birthdays.