911

The day most of us currently living in North America remember vividly has come again. Earlier this year several members of my family visited Ground Zero when they were in New York. One of them became sick, as did another woman nearby from the air around the site.

I guess this giant graveyard still, whatever covers it, remains a giant graveyard in much the same way other graveyards old and new do, whether people deny them or not.

If you have lived long enough, you may have attended the first, or last, Beatles concert. You may have been alive when John Kennedy died.

Like me, you may have been awake when CNN reported that Princess Diana had been in a car crash in Paris, and still awake several hours later when the ambulance finally reached the hospital and she was pronounced dead.

You likely remember where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001 and probably what you saw and heard and felt that day. You also know that as many as 30% of some group of people believe that ‘911 was an inside job’. In other words that we have not been told the truth about it.

Many of these same people, or some like them, still wonder whether Princess Diana was deliberately murdered; others have a theory about President Kennedy, UFO’s and a multitude of other events real or imagined.

I personally do not spend a lot of time thinking about who is doing harm to someone else and what person or group may currently have plans for ‘world domination’.

Once you have been given remission from Cancer, each day and each year are what you celebrate and think about.

When you have lost the person people today call their ‘significant other’, a lot of the spurious and fantastical hold no interest to you, however and whoever tries to involve you in their particular preoccupation.

Instead you take a moment, each year to celebrate your birthday, the day you were told your Cancer was probably behind you, the day your dearest love died. Such days are personal to you and are your own. 

The other days, that the world considers significant to the history of mankind are also important because they let us know both how far we have come as a species and also remind us of how much farther we need to go to learn how to coexist peacefully with our fellow human beings.

On historical days, we pause and remember, our place among others but especially the hopes and fears we have personally lived with and moved through. Probably more than any other thing we come to a point that we realized that 'somethings lost and somethings gained in living every day', as someone wisely said in a song from years ago.

Ultimately, we conclude that, it is our place among the living that we note and commemorate and place our hopes for a better tomorrow upon; having noted the value of the past in making our present what it means to our lives today.