Overheard at... Starbucks

"Glad nothing happened yesterday...."

So I wanted to write a blog yesterday with my thoughts on the day, but everything I started ended up sounding too trite. I thought I would try again today.

Crazily enough... my sister's birthday falls on September 11th. Just to make things more interesting she got engaged on 9/11, was in the army in Germany that day and had to spend the next week on base away from her new fiance. Every year I call to wish her a happy birthday and end up feeling awkward. I have to think her birthday has turned out to be worse than my older sister's whose b-day falls on Dec. 26th.

My daughter has a lovely book called, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. We have read it every year on 9/11, but this was the first year that she wanted to know more about what actually happened to the towers. I tried to explain, but somehow there aren't really words to explain how we all felt that day watching them fall. Also... given her proclivity to turn even small tragedies into horrible anxiety, I decided to skip the role that the airplanes played in it all... I had a feeling otherwise we might never be flying again.

The big thing I am still trying to figure out, 10 years later, is how things seem to go back to normal after what seems like such a life changing moment. It feels similar to the time in my life when I returned to America with my husband after living in England. I felt so disjointed, as if I was living life on a parrallel plane. 

Today I am sitting in Starbucks and meeting up with writing friends and having my coffee and getting ready to work on my editing.... just like i did last week. So I guess how could my writing about 9/11 not end up sounding trite. Life's biggest moments always seem like a cliche in retrospect. It is only thorugh music or art, representations of the feelings, that I feel the banality can be overcome.

Perhaps today I will let my writing express the feelings of confusion, fear and anger that still linger 10 years after that tragic event. My character