It's for me.

So I'll never forget the peace and security we took for granted---and lost forever---on September 11, 2001.

It's for me to remember when the world ended. When the towers fell. When the world rearranged itself.

Ring around the roses, pocket full of poses,
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down...

That's a child's nursury rhyme, with a chilling origin, during the Black Plague, and speaking of them turning to ashes, and falling down.

Watching the two hundred-story buildings crumble into powder, becoming an avalanche of ash...a tidal wave of dust...

It has taken a second meaning.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall...down...

This morning I was in the car with Barb coming into work, listening to the radio Bob & Tom show. Humorous and Roger Stern-ish in tone, albeit without Stern's acidity, it was odd to hear one of them say,

"That's weird. We're watching the television, and it looks like some plane ran right into the World Trade Center. What? It was deliberate?"

Here I am saying to myself, What's the punch line? when they continued,

"This is not a joke! A plane has crashed into one of the World Trade Towers..."

A few minutes later:

"A second plane just hit the second tower directly."

I took Eric in to go to the Men's room before he went to school. Everyone was standing in front of the two huge plasma TV screens in the front halls....and the world trade center looked like a double torch, with huge billows of smoke coming out of it...

Watching reruns of the plane slamming into the second tower...

Of the two towers aflame or with huge holes, looking like a bad disaster movie, a cheesy Godzilla movie...

Watching images of Manhatten becoming a cloud of smoke and dust, not a skyscraper to be seen past the cloud...

Watching the towers crumble---the skyscrapers, which we thought near-immortal, spires to the skies...collapsing...crumbling...

Along with our sense of security.

Our sense of peace.

Our sense of protection.

To see people running in fear and horror from the crumbling dust-avalanche, and later, covered with ashes.

Sackcloth and ashes.

Plainly horrified. Not panic-striken. Indeed, people seemed remarkably calm.

There was no looting.

All over the country, people gave blood in long lines, waiting hours to give blood---to do something.

At least in my section of the countries, special church and synogogues and mosque meetings were held, to give each other comfort and strength.

Bush looked to me, a bit wooden, and a bit---ummm, callow when he spoke tonight. Like a kid wearing his father's clothes and trying to act like an adult.

I hope he's up to it. I really do.

But he looked---ashen.

Yet---I liked what a cardinal said afterwards. When he talked about the blood drives, and the courageous ambulance and firemen and women who disappeared by the World Trade Center, and the lack of looting...

He said light a candle.

Light a candle of hope.

Hope that we don't become a jingoistic anti-Arab country, painting people by their ethnicity and religion which might be all they have in common with possible perpetuators of this act. (And we were wrong in the Oklahoma City bombing. Don't blame bin Ladin---yet. Till we have proof.)

Hope we don't become a country afraid to travel, or so timid that we make travel near-impossible for all the precautions we take.

Hope we don't become a country at the mercy of terrorists, either.

We've had the ashes already. Now light a candle.

It's a shame that tragedy like this has to happen, for us to see that flame. Yet maybe it's the answer to why evil and tragedy is permitted in this world---so we can find out, ultimately, what we are capable of rising to...in the worst of circumstances.

Maybe that's the solution to the Problem of Pain.

Light a candle ---to hope.

To tolerance.

To the best of the human spirit shining through.

Do it tonight.

Like so many who died today, you never know if you have tomorrow.