Headstone, Bell Cedar

How could it be that 15 years have gone by since that awful, and almost unnaturally beautiful, Tuesday morning? It seems so recent, so God-awfully-fresh, so almost yesterday that I'd made the 70 mile schlep to work, exited the Shoreline East commuter train in New Haven, walked though the Green to my office at 149 York Street, and got ready for whatever challenges awaited the managing editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine. Not long after I'd made coffee for my colleagues—role reversal, I know, but I made a great pot of coffee—our young editorial assistant came in with the awful and, at that moment, inexplicable news that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. The day, and the entire world, unraveled from there, and a decade and a half later, here we are, the world still unraveling. I don't have answers. I don't have any strong belief that anyone really does. (I do, however, have the strongest belief that the Trumpster, doesn't.) All I have is the belief that we need to remember... and try to figure out a way to craft a world that will honor the dead. And the living.