things change, things don't
Sep. 11th, 2009 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lauradi7dwIt was my habit for several September 11ths after the one in 2001 to send fondness reminders to people, in response to the big reminder that we had been given of sudden death. Anybody reading this can take it as said, and I may do some more tonight via email.
We were in NYC last weekend, ringing bells at Trinity Church. Just before leaving, we walked a block out of our way to visit the old WTC location. I have changed my mind over the years, and now think that it should be just left as a big hole. Not going to happen. I've lost track of what the building plans are, but it's a construction site now. Across the side street is a high priced "museum," clearly set up to rip off sentimental tourists. More emotionally real, the local fire station has a memorial plaque to one of their own, and when we were walking past PS 89 (a few blocks away) earlier in the day, I was moved to tears by the plaque about the children who were so close and witnessed horrors on the fateful day. Now it's just a pleasant looking school. I just checked their web site and the daily announcements don't mention the anniversary directly, although there is information about emergency notifications in general. More important to the little kids there now is probably this morning's welcome back to school breakfast.
There was a lot of blather at the time about how everything had changed, and nothing would ever be the same. I disagreed with that at the time, and I think I've been proven correct.
I was thinking yesterday how some things really don't change, while we were standing at the blackboard writing tentative translations of made-up sentences from the worksheets, some people having problems with the inflected endings on the nouns. Forty years ago, possibly to the day, I would have been doing exactly the same thing hundreds of miles away with a different inflected language (Latin instead of Old English). I'm older, the world is older, but writing one's answer for all to see is still a little intimidating, and "in" still takes the accusative when it means "into."
We were in NYC last weekend, ringing bells at Trinity Church. Just before leaving, we walked a block out of our way to visit the old WTC location. I have changed my mind over the years, and now think that it should be just left as a big hole. Not going to happen. I've lost track of what the building plans are, but it's a construction site now. Across the side street is a high priced "museum," clearly set up to rip off sentimental tourists. More emotionally real, the local fire station has a memorial plaque to one of their own, and when we were walking past PS 89 (a few blocks away) earlier in the day, I was moved to tears by the plaque about the children who were so close and witnessed horrors on the fateful day. Now it's just a pleasant looking school. I just checked their web site and the daily announcements don't mention the anniversary directly, although there is information about emergency notifications in general. More important to the little kids there now is probably this morning's welcome back to school breakfast.
There was a lot of blather at the time about how everything had changed, and nothing would ever be the same. I disagreed with that at the time, and I think I've been proven correct.
I was thinking yesterday how some things really don't change, while we were standing at the blackboard writing tentative translations of made-up sentences from the worksheets, some people having problems with the inflected endings on the nouns. Forty years ago, possibly to the day, I would have been doing exactly the same thing hundreds of miles away with a different inflected language (Latin instead of Old English). I'm older, the world is older, but writing one's answer for all to see is still a little intimidating, and "in" still takes the accusative when it means "into."
