9/11 – Three years later.

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. Martin Luther King

Three years. I can’t believe it was three years ago. My recollections are so vivid, the emotions are so strong, that is feel like it was three weeks ago.

When one looks back on their life they look for the milestones, the moments in time that meant something. I had nice list of them before that day, and that list filled me with confidence and pride. Those moments defined me: the final moments of the marathon when you can hear the announcer saying “three hours, fifty eight minutesyou can do it!!!”; tying on the crisp new black belt after complete exhaustion from “the test;” and the smell when you open up the first overnight shipment of the magazine, and you push the packing materials aside and pull out the first issuestill sticky from coming off the presses. I lived for those moments.

Then the buildings came down and I felt my soul collapse. Those moments suddenly meant nothing to me. The flames and the smoke billowed up from Ground Zero while we stood on a rooftop in shockthe sun was going down. You could hear those fighter jets but you didn’t see them. Thousands were dead, we didn’t sleep. The sun was coming up and it wasn’t a dream no matter how hard we wished it was.

When I look back on bar graph of my life there is only one spike now, and that is 9/11. Everything