Kitty pics and a touch of memorial

Well, here we are, on The Date. I can't let it pass without saying something, it would feel wrong. But I won't say too much.

For those who don't want to/can't read more 9-11-a-tude, here are my usual weekend kitty pics. They're as nice a way as any to spend a moment on a sad anniversary, methinks. And then I'll put my 9-11 bit after that, so it's easily skippable.

Working From Home

or

Views From My Cubicle

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The one show I watched after 9-11, of which some part always stayed with me, was a PBS program called Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. I kept a transcript of it on my computer. It was the ending that moved me, where the participants talked about the people who jumped out of the windows. I think those images haunt many of us. I was going through a series of 9-11 photos on a news site this week, and when I hit one of those falling body photos, it made me jump--you don't get used to it.

So here are the last 4 statements from that program, talking about two people who held hands before they jumped. I don't post them here to convince people to believe in God. As I remarked to a Betty posting this week, I believe in God because I want to, it's just a choice. When I see an act like that, of people staring into the abyss but being there for each other, I do see God in that. But I don't think one needs to see God, to be just as profoundly moved. Cause it's not God per se that moves me, it's the love in that act. People connecting. That's what's exquisitely beautiful. (I just happen to think love and God are the same thing. I'm crazy like that!)

JOEL MEYEROWITZ: One of the most impossible and memorable images of that day were people leaping out of the windows, being forced out by the fire behind them, driving them, herding them out the windows. And to see that image of two people - co-workers, strangers - I had no idea, but that not knowing made it all the more poignant for - reaching out for somebody's hand to take your last step, that you would end your life in the hands of a stranger, plummeting thousands of feet to your death.

MARGOT ADLER, NPR Correspondent: I think that the power of that image is it doesn't give an answer. It takes us in two opposing directions. On the one hand, we are all alone at the end. Life is fleeting. There's no one to help us when we face the abyss. And there wasn't. No one came for them. And on the other hand, they reached for each other. They said that in that moment when they're facing the absolute ultimate, there are other human beings to reach out, to be there, to help them, to help us.

IAN McEWAN, Author: To me, it just seemed the bleakest possible image of the whole thing. Actually, I couldn't find a scrap of hope in it. What I saw was utter desperation, jumping to certain death rather than dying in pain and fire. It spoke to me of sheer panic, humans brought to the sort of furthest edge of despair. I found no hope in that at all. If there is a God, he's a very indifferent God.

BRIAN DOYLE: A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met, and they jumped. I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers, but I keep coming back to his hand in her hand, nestled in each other with such extraordinary, ordinary, naked love. It's the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It's everything we're capable of against horror and loss and tragedy.

It's what makes me believe that we're not fools to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them, like seeds that open only under great fire, to believe that who we are persists past what we were, to believe, against evil evidenced hourly, that love is why we are here.

Tom Waits - Never Let Go

I'll lose everything

But I'll never let go of your hand