Eight Years Ago Today......

[NapsterNova]

God Bless America and all the men and women who keep us free

[Schonyenko2]

Special thanks to folks like Tommy K., Rick Nelson, Nghtflyr, and all those who volunteer, or are paid professional fire fighters/EMT/law enforcement personel.
They don't do it just today, they do it everyday.

[MosportGreen66]

[ QUOTE ]


[/ QUOTE ]

I could see the light from my front lawn, could also see the smoke after the attacks. Heres to those who lost their lives and who serve this country for our freedom. Never forget.

[jtower1969]

We lived about 15 miles from Towers...I still remember the horrible smell that day and the weeks after...I instantly remembered this as my clock radio went off this morning and 1010 WINS said its 9/11.

[Ngtflyr]

I remember vividly exactly where I was and what I was doing when it happened. I was at a SAREX working with an A-10 Reserve unit at Belle Chase NAS in New Orleans and was in the process of mission planning for that day's flights. Larry Munz me called into the ops center to "check this out", I walked in just as the second plane went into the WTC. The first thing I said was "we're under attack." That was before the plane went into the Pentagon. A number of the pilots there were AA pilots in their civilian job. It was sombering moment and there were a lot of pissed off professionals there who knew the rulebook had just been tossed out the window. We instantly knew it was no longer business as usual. I now understood how Americans felt when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Makes you wonder what the hell the USPS is thinking when reissuing for the 5th time the EID Muslim 1st class postage stamp, just this month????

Look Here

[x Baldwin Motion]

Timothy Michael O'Brien, Cantor Fitzgerald WTC

my childhood pal since kindergarden, Rest In Peace.

[x Baldwin Motion]

Tim's Brother-In-Law
Stephen E. Tighe
also of Cantor Fitzgerald WTC
http://www.rfgifts.com/obrien.html

[x Baldwin Motion]

Paul Talty NYPD Emergency Services Unit


Third classmate of mine from Rockville Centre to perish on 9-11-01

[x Baldwin Motion]

I just found this on the web. Thanks for reading it and thanks for all your support.



How 9/11 Hit My Hometown

By Elizabeth MacDonald
Rockville Centre NY


(An annual 9/11 message from EMac)


Like too many other towns in the New York area, the 9/11 terrorist attacks killed loved ones in my hometown of Rockville Centre, out on Long Island, at least 65 people.

My sister Catherine married a fireman on September 9th, two days before 9/11. Chris dug out his brother-in-law, also a fireman, from the demolished lobby of the World Trade Center, pushed underground, that New Year's eve. My brothers and sisters knew many who passed away. Uppermost in our minds is how the good soldiers of our country are taking on an undeniable evil.

And uppermost in my mind, and also on the minds of people here in New York and in my hometown, is how the good people around the country responded to perfect strangers, sending letters, notes, school children signing banners with messages of love and care to us tough New Yorkers, messages made out of anything they could get their hands on, even the sheets they took off of their own beds.

It still brings me and my friends to tears, the memory of the messages you sent that hung on banners around Ground Zero.

To paraphrase a recent quote I saw, when New York City cried the rain down that terrible night, you stepped up.

New Yorkers needed you, even though we didn't expect it, as we sit so self-reliant in our armadillo shells, because we maybe think the country expects us to be so hard-bitten and tough.

But those of you who saw the pain on the TV sets or heard about what happened on the radio, you reached out. You knew that terrible news events are not just some dry, abstract things that only live in dusty newspapers or in pixels on TV screens.

New Yorkers haven't forgotten Americans across the country who stood with those who lost loved ones, here and in Washington, DC and in Pennsylvania. They never will.

You stood with us when we were down, and by doing so, you changed the fabric of New York City. You changed the fabric of this country.

That's the untold story of 9/11 that no one around here will ever forget.

Like many around here, the people of my hometown of Rockville Centre find it much easier to discuss other people's suffering than their own. They just genetically don't like things self-referential.

For the people of Rockville Centre, a leafy Long Island town 45 minutes from Manhattan, it was painful to see people who I went to school with, grew up with, gone.

Neighbors who had prayed long into their night that their father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, husband or wife would come home, only to find out they were gone.

Then the funerals and dealing with the sinking realization that their loved ones will never come home.

People were falling to their knees onto their heads crying, at home, in the shower, in the hallway.

It's a pain that we've all gone through in our lives, I know you have too, dear readers. This was crushing.

The pain still runs thick and deep.

Rockville Centre is a town of New York City financial services professionals, firefighters, police officers.

Rockville Centre is the home of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, who used her childhood there as the basis for her book Wait Until Next Year, about her love affair with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Marilyn French, author of The Women's Room, is a native.

Rockville Centre is a place, too, where, on a hot summer day in the 60s and 70s, local priests were seen, in all irony, blessing cars exiting from the church parking lot on the way to the beach, using dashes of holy water.

Like many areas around the city, Rockville Centre was punched hard by 9/11.

But my hometown, this commuter-belt community, 45 minutes from Manhattan by train, looked death squarely in the face and mobilized.

Priests from St. Agnes Cathedral, the eighth-largest Catholic diocese in the country, made themselves available 24 hours a day. The church immediately held services.

I can remember, after receiving communion at one of the funerals at St. Agnes, turning around and getting set back on my heels.

Most everyone in the packed cathedral were kneeling with their heads in their arms on the pews in front of them, a dense, unrelenting vacuum of desolation.

I can't forget this and I never will.

But along with the sadness, families immediately went on the move. For example, they dropped off pots and plates piled high with food at the Rockville Centre Recreation Center for families in need.

They took children in if parents were needed elsewhere. They made phone calls, they cleaned, they did laundry for those affected. Or they stood there silently, they sat in one another's company, hoping the kindness of their presence, a shoulder to cry on, would be enough, unusual approaches, maybe, for this unsentimental town.

And the families who lost loved ones themselves went on the move. I remember how the families of Stephen Tighe, 41, and Timothy O'Brien, 40, both now gone, responded. Tighe and O'Brien, both natives of Rockville Centre, were brothers-in-law and fathers of young children. Both worked in securities trading on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center at Cantor Fitzgerald, a global securities firm that suffered the heaviest losses of staff.

I can remember their father, Bernard O'Brien, telling me: "I got strength from Timmy. He was the rock of our family. Both he and Steve took things nice and easy; they never got too excited, they got things done."

O'Brien spoke at a series of nine masses at St. Agnes the weekend after the attack. Mourners stood five deep in the aisles to listen to his moving tribute, where he read the names of the missing and gave thanks to the community.

Like the O'Briens, other families hurt by terrorist attacks in my hometown looked ahead.

"So many people waste their time complaining about stupid things. You really want to make the most of life," Bonnie O'Connor told me at the time. O'Connor's younger brother John Ahern was the victim of another tragedy, Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 (I grew up with John, he was also my childhood boyfriend).

"You get so much extra energy from this grief you don't know what to do with it. If you don't do something with it, it can really eat you up and destroy you," O'Connor said at the time.

O'Brien agreed.

For instance, at the masses where he spoke, he made this final remark: "I asked everybody to make themselves a promise. I asked that they would never let a day go by that they wouldn't give their loved ones a hug and tell them that you loved them, because you never know when the opportunity won't present itself again."

O'Brien added: "The tissue papers came out," and seeing the compassion enveloping him in a warm bear hug of an embrace, that's when he started to cry.

And each time he spoke, O'Brien got a standing ovation.

PS Being a (horribly lapsed) Catholic, who fears bursting into flames if she walks by a church, I do very much love a number of saints who help me through times of trouble, one being Saint Dismas, a man whose name has been lost to the sands of time. He made the ultimate leap of faith that still rings down through the centuries that has grabbed my heart for good. A thief, he didn't question, he didn't say, "If though art Lord," instead he said with the simple clarity and purity of a humble soul, "Lord."

And if you know who he is, then you get what I mean.

[firez]

We took the 3 pumpers and aerial truck out today at work and followed our 2 minutes of silence with all the units sounding their sirens. We had 85 of our 125 member department show up.Touching