ghosts

I found Kathleen’s entry moving. I, of course, remember the day well. My husband called me to give me the news while I was on my way to drop the girls off with our daycare provider, who happened to be a good friend of ours. She and her husband were from Long Island, and her brother lived in Brooklyn and still does (Kathleen, I’ll give you his name if you want – he’s a great person). He worked at the World Trade Center, on one of the floors that suffered a direct hit. He was on vacation. Talk about your guardian angels! He lost a good number of friends, though, and he was without a job, and it was a terrible time. When I got to my friend’s house, she was crying. “I just called Jimmy to make sure I could hear his voice,” she said. “I just keep thinking, what if he had been there? I could have lost him.” She has since lost her husband, and Jimmy was a rock during that miserable summer. What if he hadn’t been there to hold her up?

One of my most vivid images of September 11, 2001, is one that exists solely in my mind, and it came courtesy of Kathleen – or rather, her friend, who took a ferry into work each day. She told Kathleen about the cars she would see on the boat each day, cars that belonged to people who would never pick them up. I formed this vivid and painful image of riding into and out of the city on a ghost ship. What does it do to your mind, to begin and end your day with ghosts?

We have ghosts here in Denver too, of a different sort. I went to the Littleton Historical Museum recently. My girls love it there – they have a working 1860s farm that’s manned and run as a pioneer farm would be. I took the opportunity to tell the girls all about the show “Frontier House,” which I’m sure Kathleen will appreciate (she remembers my obsession with that show). But as I toured the museum’s indoor exhibits, I thought, “Why is there nothing about Columbine?”
Columbine High School still stands in Littleton, of course, and perfectly normal kids go in and out of there each day. The terrible school shooting could have happened anywhere; but the fact is, it happened here, and some aspect of it makes the news every day – kids dealing with residual trauma, lingering civil cases, kids who attend Columbine now going out of their way to extend their hands to those in need. People here will always talk about where they were when they found out about the shooting. Like the people of New York and New Orleans, the people of Denver know what it means to live with ghosts.