Observance for the day. Couldn’t put this better than Teresa Nielsen Hayden, consulting editor for New York-based Tor Books where she goes to work:
Some of the stories getting told now are the ones people couldn’t bear to tell or to hear told last fall. They lodge in the mind. I’ll never be able to stop knowing what fell on the WTC plaza and the roof of St. Nicholas’ church that day, when the towers were burning but not yet down. I’m grateful I climbed down from my roof before I had to see the towers collapse. I’m infinitely grateful I didn’t see it any closer. Some of the people who saw that happening up close were little kids. Who cares what the media’s doing? This isn’t about them.
You can read the details of that stuff somewhere else.
I need to say this one thing: I am more grateful than I can possibly say that on the day, I had the opportunity to do a few small things that helped other people. It was a great blessing, and did more to get me through 9/11 than anything else.
Here’s something I know a lot of people are doing tomorrow: They’re going to go to places and get together with people they couldn’t get to on the day. Ellie Lang says she’s getting together with a bunch of people from her gym. I’m probably going in to Tor, where I desperately wanted to be last year, when my people there walked out on foot, miles and miles in some cases, to get to their distant apartments, find their children at their schools, find a working phone, find a subway connection to another connection to another connection in the hope of somehow getting home to Brooklyn or Queens or New Jersey.
You can read the rest of her piece here.