The past is always with us

We love nice round anniversary numbers, and tomorrow is an irresistible anniversary: 9-11.

The events are no more or less horrible this year, as opposed to last year or next year, but most of us appreciate an agreed upon time to memorialize major events. We do it with wedding anniversaries -- two weeks from tomorrow my wife and I will celebrate 50 years of marriage -- and with high school and college graduations -- ten-year and twenty-year gatherings, for instance. 

Logically, agreeing on a time to check in on what happened then, what has happened since, what is different or the same, etc., makes sense. Twenty years is a large enough period of time to provide some separation. Twenty years is long enough past to be only an entry in a history textbook for Americans who have not reached 21 years of age, including our four grandchildren. Twenty years is enough to create an entire new generation of societal reference points and allusions.

I drove to Safford, Arizona, the evening of Sept. 10, 2001, spending the night at a Comfort Inn prior to meeting with a yearbook staff at the high school. I had just begun a short, forgettable job as a yearbook publisher representative, and meeting with the adviser and staff at Safford HS was one of my first tasks.

My sales territory was vast, and there are only so many towns and schools in southeast Arizona. Our home was in Tucson, and the most efficient strategy to stop in and see teachers and students was to spend a couple days "on the road," cramming as many visits in as practical.

Anyway, I was eating the hotel breakfast when the two TVs high on the wall began showing the attack. There were a number of folks in the breakfast area, but no one spoke. And no one left. We just watched.

By mid-morning the towers were down, confusion was everywhere, and I had joined the rest of the country with a sick feeling in my gut. I tried to call Kathleen, who was still in Iowa City, selling our home there and prepping for the move to AZ, but the phone system was overwhelmed. I did not even own a cellphone at the time, but the cell towers couldn't handle the volume of calls in any case. Imagine that.

Kathleen, of course, tried multiple times to call our elder daughter, Lesley, but that didn't work either. Why repeated calls to Lesley, you ask?

She was the associate features editor for the Rocky Mountain News and one of her "beats" was fashion. As part of her work, she went to New York for Fashion Week each fall, and it turns out that she was the only RMN staff member physically in New York City that morning. 

She was able to use the paper's resources to contact her editors back in Denver and suddenly her assignment switched from covering fashion trends to gathering stories for the paper back home. It took at least three days for a senior columnist/reporter to get a flight to New York and to relieve her so she could return home.

When something overwhelming happens we can be forgiven for panicking a bit. I knew in my head that her hotel was in Midtown and that the towers were in lower Manhattan, miles away. Still, my wife and I worried as only parents can. After all, Lesley was just 28, married for just one year. 

She was OK, though to this day she still does not talk about what she saw and smelled and heard as she did her best to find angles to cover that would be unique for Colorado readers. She walked south from her hotel for miles until authorities would let her go no closer. She did file a half-dozen stories over several days, somehow keeping it together, embracing the chaos, and finding those local angles. I have copies of all her stories, and they are terrific.

Many hours later Kathleen got through to her, if only for a few minutes. We were separated from one another by distance but as one in our worry. We were safe, far away from the attack, but adding the possible dangers for our daughter to the overwhelming images and tragic human stories made it all so personal

And twenty years on, those emotions and fragments of memory remain raw and vivid.

Lesley was among a legion of unsung "heroes," people who did their best to do their jobs in the face of enormous confusion and tragedy.

She'll always be a hero to me.