Today - 9/11

It's currently bright blue sky and 56 degrees.

We're working against deadline, which includes later this week another appointment at the World Trade Center Health Center.

I am getting a haircut this morning.

Edited: I love the stylist I've been fortunate enough to find, finally, after so many disappointments. She been doing hair in this neighborhood since she was 23, and now her son is starting his first semester of college next week -- a music school, in Miami. Over the four years I've been going to her we've slowly learned things about each other, and we have quite a bit in common.

This is the first time she's been open on 9/11. This is the most normal day I've had since 9/11. It's hard to comprehend that it's been eleven years since we watch the Tower fall, standing on the sidewalks -- she outside her salon, us outside our apartment building -- and breathing what we didn't know we were breathing yet -- so much of it was invisible to the eye. Our memories of that day and the days that followed are still so vivid and sharp.

She had to leave her salon's location, because it was closed for so long -- she even had trouble getting back home, which is uptown, that day, and then couldn't get back into the neighborhood for all those days we were closed off by military corden. Just as we lost our work and living, she lost her establishment. She moved to where she is now, which is much smaller, with only two other stylists on staff. She has no receptionist or cleaner. She does the reception and cleaning herself.

Ned and I are now part of the patients at the World Trade Center Health Clinic, that treats people whose health has been affected.

We speculated that perhaps why this 9/11 feels more 'normal' is because the Obama administration dispatched Osama bin Laden. Some sort of closure for us, whose lives were so changed by that day.


Here is a first hand account by one of our dear friends, who we had not at that time even met, who, at that time did not live where they live now, but just -- well, he tells you.

It’s like New Orleans residents, with Katrina and the Failure of the Levees. We who saw this, breathed it, lived it, somehow, early in meeting, there’s something that clues us in, that we share this.

For us in particular the suppressed rage from 9/11 and how our federal government responded, blew up in us with the Failure of the Levees.