Saturday night the Missus and I spent some time with Suzanne, Ryan, and the kids at a winter festival in Warren Township, New Jersey. As we were strolling around, I took my four-year-old grandson Cal with me to visit the September 11, 2001 Memorial that is located at the front of the Township's Municipal Complex. As I was holding him, and the two of us looked at the Memorial, he asked me what it was and what it represented. I told him.
Given that he is just four years old, I provided him with what admittedly was an abbreviated recitation of that day's events. Given that he is just four years old, he may or may not have understood much of what I told him. It matters not. What matters is that he asked the question and listened to the answer. I have every confidence it is not the final conversation he and I shall have on this subject.
Warren Township, New Jersey
September 11, 2001 Memorial
On December 7, 2022, which was of course the 81st anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the September 11, 2001 terror attack claimed yet another victim. Lt. Maureen Gill-Donohue of the NYPD, a twenty-year veteran who retired in 2012, succumbed to the 9/11-related cancer she contracted from months she spent working the pile at Ground Zero and, thereafter, at the Fresh Kills Landfill. She is survived by her parents, Patricia and James Gill, her husband, NYPD Detective Thomas Donohue, her three children, and five grandchildren.
Events echo and reverberate across time like ripples across the surface of a Neither their impact nor their import can be permitted by those who bore witness to them to become attenuated. Not simply for nostalgia's sake but because their effect on the day-to-day lives of far too many has not become attenuated. As it continues to affect any one of us, it continues to affect all of us.
-AK
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