Eight Years Later
It's amazing how much the memories of this day can still hurt years later, even though I was nowhere near NYC and the one person I knew who died that day was a kid down the street who I hadn't seen in years. I still cringe anytime a plane or helicopter flies overhead. I'm sure that wouldn't be true if I lived under major air lanes, as I used to do back on the street where I grew up, as I'd have gotten desensitized long ago. Being at an airport, for example, is no problem. But it's so rare here that the extremely occasional helicopter or plane flying low enough to really notice still hits a "things in the sky that don't belong there" button.
I'd worked a third shift the night before, and I was scheduled to work second shift that night. So I was in bed and asleep when it all happened. When I got up at 2:30 that afternoon. Patsfan drove me batty insisting I watch this, that, and the other comedy or cute animal thing he had on videotape ... until I'd had my coffee and was actually awake. Then he told me something bad had happened and he was going to show me a news clip. Work that night consisted largely of keeping my clients away from news broadcasts. Not so they wouldn't know but so they wouldn't immerse themselves in the constant rebroadcasts, because as much as it affected me, I could only imagine what seeing that over and over again would be like for a person with paranoid schizophrenia. I took a page out of Patsfan's book and brought videotapes, which I kept running constantly on the office TV.
I remember when I found out that my former neighbor-kid had been at the World Trade Center. Remember asking what his job was these days, where that would have put him, and what the odds were he'd have been on a lower floor and able to escape. Then it finally sunk in. After he'd left the military, I heard he'd become Secret Service. Don't know what he was doing at the Twin Towers that day, but if he was on a ground floor, he didn't run out. He ran in, either to protect the person(s) he was assigned to or to rescue whomever he could.
On the Neokoroi list today, someone mentioned the fact that modern Hellenic Polytheists don't often do much in the way of worship of heroes in the way the ancients did and that they either had been doing or planned today to begin doing specific libations for the heroes that emerged from this day. That's given me pause and made me think about some sort of ritual honoring/acknowledgment/something I might like to do at some other time for the all the everyday heroes in our world. But also, today, I'm going to join in with a general libation for all the heroes, big and small, who stepped up to the plate on this day eight years ago, and a specific libation for Craig Miller, the kid from down the street.
I'd worked a third shift the night before, and I was scheduled to work second shift that night. So I was in bed and asleep when it all happened. When I got up at 2:30 that afternoon. Patsfan drove me batty insisting I watch this, that, and the other comedy or cute animal thing he had on videotape ... until I'd had my coffee and was actually awake. Then he told me something bad had happened and he was going to show me a news clip. Work that night consisted largely of keeping my clients away from news broadcasts. Not so they wouldn't know but so they wouldn't immerse themselves in the constant rebroadcasts, because as much as it affected me, I could only imagine what seeing that over and over again would be like for a person with paranoid schizophrenia. I took a page out of Patsfan's book and brought videotapes, which I kept running constantly on the office TV.
I remember when I found out that my former neighbor-kid had been at the World Trade Center. Remember asking what his job was these days, where that would have put him, and what the odds were he'd have been on a lower floor and able to escape. Then it finally sunk in. After he'd left the military, I heard he'd become Secret Service. Don't know what he was doing at the Twin Towers that day, but if he was on a ground floor, he didn't run out. He ran in, either to protect the person(s) he was assigned to or to rescue whomever he could.
On the Neokoroi list today, someone mentioned the fact that modern Hellenic Polytheists don't often do much in the way of worship of heroes in the way the ancients did and that they either had been doing or planned today to begin doing specific libations for the heroes that emerged from this day. That's given me pause and made me think about some sort of ritual honoring/acknowledgment/something I might like to do at some other time for the all the everyday heroes in our world. But also, today, I'm going to join in with a general libation for all the heroes, big and small, who stepped up to the plate on this day eight years ago, and a specific libation for Craig Miller, the kid from down the street.