September 11, 2001

Tuesday morning, just drinking some coffee on the back porch looking up at the pale blue sky, no clouds, quiet, unusually quiet, no airplanes rumbling above me in a holding pattern like normal, no sirens, no traffic noise and then in one second, everything changed. I turned and saw “BREAKING NEWS” on the screen of the television and for once, it was BREAKING NEWS. Time: 8:50 a.m. Date-September 11, 2001.

The only other time in my life that I had seen that look on a news announcer’s face was November 22, 1963 when CBS newsman Walter Cronkite was handed a piece of paper, live, and had to read the words on that paper, “President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard time”.

As William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”.

You, me, the rest of us may not remember a particular day, memories fade, but just the mention of these two days in our history, jerks us back to those days and thrusts into our now.

My aunt was not an educated woman, she was a mother, a real good cook and she told us something that has tempered me many times, “Before you do anything important, wait 15 minutes”. Life is all about choices. As the Cantonese cook in John Steinbeck’s book, “East of Eden”, whispers in his masters’ ear when the master questions why one son is so good and the other so evil, “Timshel”, Hebrew for the English word, choice. He further explains that in the Bible, the Ten Commandments are written Shalt and not Will.

How history would have changed had that assassin and those killers taken 15 minutes to timshel good.