Thursday, September 11, 2008

Remember 9-11


I remember where I was on September 11, 2001 when the planes flew into the World Trade Center buildings and then the Pentagon and then into a field in Pennsylvania... how could I forget.


I was at work. We had a staff meeting that morning scheduled at 9AM. Bob arrived a few minutes before 9 and said the news reported that a plane hit one of the World Trade towers in New York. I had a small B&W TV at the studio so I got it out and tuned into a station. As we were watching news reports live on the TV I saw the second plane impact the second tower. At that point we knew this wasn't an accident and that it was deliberate.

That evening when I got home from work, I went out to our front yard and hung an American flag from a branch of a tree that was very close to the edge of the street. A year later I got a card as a result of that single act. More about that later.


This video will remind you of some of the events and images from that day.

I urge you to watch it and remember...



On September 11, 2002... one year later, I received a card in the mail. It was from a person who had driven by our house early the next morning following the events of 9-11 and was moved by my flag at the edge of the road. She had written a Letter to the Editor the previous June for Flag Day and recounted seeing my flag on the morning of September 12, 2001. She sent me a copy of the newspaper clipping in her card.



The flag flies in our front yard every day now, 24 hours a day, from a regular 20 foot flag pole. (There is a light on it from sunset till sunrise.)

On this special day, a second flag also flies proudly from a tree by the street. The same flag I hung from a branch on the evening of September 11, 2001 to encourage people driving by that all was not lost. That our country had witnessed terrorism on a massive scale never before experienced, so vivid because of the TV coverage and so personal, yet here in the front yard of a house in Mentor, Ohio a flag beckoned to them that Old Glory's message was was obvious "...our flag was still there."