How She Spent a Tuesday in September

Because it is Saturday or maybe Sunday, I'm hoping you have a little time to head over to FranIam's blog this weekend to read her triptych on how she experienced 9/11. Scroll down to her post from Tuesday and read it straight through.

FranIam's blogspot address is "festinalente-franiam.blogsplot.com". The reason that I spell it out here is that she explains that 'festina lente' is a term taken from her stone soup of a religious background that means 'to make haste slowly'. She tells us in so many ways how she made haste very slowly on that day and the days that followed. Very real questions of staying put in midtown Manhattan or following the refugees north into uptown and beyond: Harlem. Worrying and then not worrying about whether she would die that day, both telling friends and co-workers that she loved them in case the world did end and arguing fiercely for peace in the midst of chaos in case it did not.

Fran writes so eloquently of her own experiences that she brought to me so many of my own on those days. Some that I haven't thought about for quite some time. I was amazed at how, though so close to the action that day - she reports that though no traffic sounds were ever heard inside her office high up in a midtown tower, that day they could hear sirens heading to Ground Zero - much of what she experienced was the same as those of us who were thousands of miles away.

Ack. Get out of here. Go read. Now.