September 13, 2007

Jim Dwyer, co-author of the remarkable book, 102 Minutes, had an uplifitng piece in yesterday's New York Times, reporting on the ceremony down at Ground Zero, on the sixth anniversary of the attacks.

These passages moved me to the verge of tears:

“Yesterday, on a showery morning, no more than a few hundred relatives and friends of the dead gathered on Liberty Street. Ahead of them, a grove of construction cranes rose from the pit of ground zero. Behind them, traffic heaved along Broadway, the soaring notes of a flutist’s ‘Amazing Grace’ dueling with the diesel wheeze of buses.

“The families hiked down a ramp to drop flowers into a pool. No one will make precisely that memory walk again; the ground will be built over next year.

“Sept. 11, as a public occasion, has shrunk to life-size: potent as ever for people holding photographs of fathers on their wedding days and mothers in their backyards, but unlikely to start wars again.

“Babies are in first grade, children have graduated from high school, teenagers have finished college.”