Nine Years Ago - Meg Cabot. I checked and it’s been a few years since I posted this.
I don’t know how many of you know it, but my husband worked in an office across the street from the Twin Towers, and was sitting at his desk when the first plane hit on this morning nine years ago. He literally saw the people in the windows across from his desk die. I think sometimes with all the kooks trying to get attention by doing crazy things, like burning books, it’s easy to lose focus on what really happened today. That’s why it’s important to keep THAT in the news, not the opinions of people who just get shown on TV because they’re so laughably ignorant. So I am posting this again because there might be new readers who missed it the first time, and also because, well, people died, and that’s worth remembering: Nine years ago today I got woken up in my Greenwich Village apartment by a phone call from my friend Jen.
“Look out your window,” Jen said. That is when I saw the smoke. I called my husband’s office first thing. Baring the Weight Poem. Beliefs. It's funny, the things we believe — the reasons we have for believing those things.
I read far too many ghost stories growing up, and I did said growing up in an old house which enjoyed nothing more in the evenings than to do a bit of noisy, spooky "settling. " So, I believed in ghosts; I believed that our house had ghosts, although I had never seen one; and I believed that an old white cat named Ding could protect me from these ghosts. Could, and would. I can't explain the logic, quite.
I'd read in one of my scary-story compendia that, if you sense a ghost but can't see it, looking between an animal's ears in the direction of the ghost will render the ghost visible to you. I never saw a ghost (not in that house), so maybe she did. Angels in America. The evidence that Don is an angel is compelling, provided you're inclined to believe it in the first place: his date of "birth" is September 11; he appeared when I needed him, and withdrew (to New Jersey) when it seemed I could continue alone; and his name is Don.
"Father. " "Paterfamilias"; "protector. " "Teacher," if you like. Or perhaps he is properly a Donald, a name which means "ruler of the world" — or, according to several sites I consulted, "brown stranger. " Not very diplomatic, but not inaccurate either. Diana Vreeland once said that magic doesn't come to those who don't expect it, and I have a similar belief about ghosts: if you don't believe in them, you won't see them (or become one).
I will stipulate that God works in mysterious ways, but assigning me an angel when it is an all-hands heavenly-creatures emergency five blocks away is straight-up bad management. On the other hand, he's never turned up again. The "why" remains, always. I know why. Happy birthday, my friend.