Never Forget

Carl DiFranco

Always Remember

The World Trade Center

Little Things

Contrasts

The Little Blue Shirt

I don't suppose this day will ever pass unmarked here. Memories of these terrorist attacks  are etched in acid in all our brains. 

The people we lost. 

Innocence lost. 

So very much lost.

Repairs that are still ongoing and often involve family members.

This is a great nation. I firmly believe that we are among the most generous people in the world, but the World Trade Center attacks shattered more than the foundations of New York City.

They injured us all, in ways that may never be healed.

I was awakened not too long before midnight last night by the ringing of the portable phone, which I cart upstairs whenever my boy is on the road. He and my brother are both working in the City right now, so today has a bunch of extra worries for me....

I clawed up out of restless sleep and fumbled in terror....that is what terrorist attacks do...they leave an aftermath of fear even in those not damaged directly. It was okay....it was Lifeline calling to tell us that an elderly relative had taken a little tumble, but had been checked out by paramedics and was A-Okay and fine and no worries mate.

It took me a long time to go back to sleep.

Stand strong friends and neighbors...we are all there for each other.

Carl DiFranco Tribute

Since September 11, 2001, when one of the planes that flew into the World Trade Center turned south just east of here over Amsterdam, it is hard not to notice the rattle of the kitchen windows when a jet passes by. I still stop to listen every single time I hear a plane. In the first days after the attacks it was estimated that more than five thousand people died in the assault. As bodies were counted and some of the missing found, authorities finally decided that only 2996 people actually died.

Only.

As if any single one of the souls who were lost that day, heroes and homebodies, doctors and stockbrokers, firemen, policemen, cooks and secretaries, could be encompassed by a word like only.

They were not only.

They were not some incomprehensible count of the dead and missing.

They were our friends and neighbors. People loved them. People wake still wake up today missing them and mourning them and go to bed each night bereft because they are gone.

One of those 2996 friends, neighbors and loved ones was 27 year-old Carl DiFranco.


This is to honor Carl on the fifth anniversary of the nightmare that took him from his loved ones. Raised in Huguenot, NY and a lifelong resident, Carl was assistant vice president of Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., located in the World Trade Center. He graduated from Monsignor Farrell High School and cum laude from St. Johns University. He liked to bowl, play tennis and jog. Married a short time before the attacks he was widowed within months, when heart problems while awaiting a transplant took his longtime sweetheart, Loren Bosso.

Carl must have been a wonderful person. He supported his sister through the birth of his niece, then helped through the difficult weeks that followed. The day he died his mother’s car had a flat tire, so like the decent son he was, he offered her the use of his truck. This made him a little later than usual, but not late enough to be saved. He also took his mother on “dates” and surprise trips. He pitched in willingly to help her with projects around the house and yard. In a New York Times article she said, “I keep thinking I hear him coming in the door, that I'll have a chance to help him get through it," (referring to the loss of his beloved wife.)

From what I read in many tributes from people who knew him, his kindness and caring for his mom reflected the way he always was. Friends remember him as someone who was brave and confident, kind, generous and quick with a joke. There are many poignant references to him by the people who knew him to be found all over the Internet. They make hard reading, but they put a face on what our nation lost that terrible day.

I hope this small tribute will help to remind us of Carl and the many other special people who were taken from us on September 11. I will try to think of him and the good life he lived when I hear planes overhead, instead of reflecting on the terror of those days.

***I would like to thank everyone whose written tributes at the time of the tragedy provided me with a glimpse into Carl’s life. I couldn’t know him, but I admire him just the same.
***The picture appears many places on the Internet, so I don’t know to whom to attribute it.
***I will cross post this to my other blogs in hopes that it will reach just a little further.

We all Remember

A few days after 9-11 I was on the floor, dragging things out from under Alan's bed to pack or toss.
I found this shirt in my hands. It is stored now in my top dresser drawer, with bringing the baby home from the hospital outfits and a bag left to me by a best friend who is gone.

What we were doing when our world was torn apart. My mother remembers Pearl Harbor and how she and her cousins overheard the adults downstairs expressing their horror.....

I remember being in class, 1963, mid-afternoon on a Friday late in November, when suddenly our teacher hurried out into the hall, and trotted away, simply leaving the class alone and unattended. We could see other teachers hustling down the hall toward the office, classes abandoned, lessons forgotten.

Something big was happening. Something bad. We sat in our seats, whispering, rustling papers, and looking around outside....what was going on?

 It was scary.

Then came an announcement over the loudspeaker. Our president had been assassinated. In those days we didn't have social media to foment flavor-of-the-week outrages...he was pretty much beloved. We were sent home early, but didn't feel that usual sense of magical freedom that an early dismissal usually provided. We were too stunned.

I remember even better sixteen years ago today. At exactly this moment in the morning one of the planes took off from Logan Airport. I had shifted the kids out to the school bus and was packing, an endless job for a family of five pack rats, who had had fifteen years in a huge house to accumulate stuff. 

The boss's mom had passed away on my birthday in July and we were slowly moving into her house...this house...here on the farm. The boss was milking and feeding alone that day.

I had the radio in the kitchen tuned to BUG country, listening to Frank Alford's morning show as was my habit. Something in his voice made me leave the front of the house where I was working to go back to the kitchen where the radio was, only to hear that the first plane had hit the World Trade Center. I trotted back to the living room to turn on the TV.

At first no one knew what was going on. It seemed as if it might be accidental. Then came the second plane.... I hurried to the farm, helped the boss finish milking, then we went and got the kids from school, and to the store to buy emergency supplies.

Today people take the latter for granted. Stores empty of bread, water, milk and TP whenever there is a threat, be it weather or otherwise. That day everyone thought we were nuts.

Later my boss at the paper told me that one of the planes made its fateful turn toward NYC right over the city where the paper is based. 

It was eerie in following days with no planes left in the sky.

We were missing the boss's mom, Grandma Peggy, something fierce, but we were almost glad she missed the horror of that day and those that followed.

And today, we will all remember again. What we were doing. What we thought and how we feared. How our country pulled together for a while, somewhat like it is doing now with all the disasters coast-to-coast.

 What were you doing when the world stopped turning?

Under the World Trade Center

***Photo by Alan with cell phone

The boy is working four stories down, under....


It's okay when he's with the crew, but sometimes they go topside to get coffee and he stays alone with his cooler and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (the broken down little red truck sure cramped his style...at least the jelly is Mom's strawberry).


Then it is different. He keeps talking about it. 


A glimpse of movement at the edge of his vision.


Nobody there.


Shadows that shouldn't be there, gone when he turns to look. 


A prickly feeling.....


I suppose there is no reason to be surprised at this. The other men sense it too and talk about it.


He got lost down there. Took him a while to logic his way out.


We truly need to remember......

Little Things

Can mean so much. Last Saturday, Alan took his sister, his fiance, and a friend to NYC for a quick tour of the most popular sites. While they were at the World Trade Center Memorial, they took the time to find this name on the wall....Carl Anthony DiFranco.

Cold chills ran over me when I saw this photo in a text he sent me.

You see, I feel as if we knew this young man, who perished so suddenly and needlessly in that horrific act of terrorism.

Thank you kids, for being so incredibly thoughtful as to interrupt your day in the big city to find and photograph this for me. It meant a lot.

Always Remember

I have never forgotten this young man, Carl DiFranco, whom we never knew in person, but who became important to us during Project 2996, when bloggers were asked to write tributes to the victims of the World Trade Center Attack.

Ever since the day of the attack, which came when we were in midst of some of the deepest and most disturbing family turmoil I can remember, trying to move up here, while still running the farm, sorting through the loss of the boss's beloved mother just before, I have found eerie connections to what happened. It may have been half a state away, but it was and remains all too close.

Over the past year or so, our boy has worked construction far under the site. He has spoken to us of the unsettling atmosphere down there, the sense of shared terror and loss far below the ground.

Though we are often encouraged to put the day behind us, to forget, forgive, move along, I will never forget. I still watch the sky. One of the planes involved in the attack detoured south right down the road from here. I will never forget the empty skies, the fear, the flags.

We should always remember.....and just for the record, I am so grateful that today our boy is home and not working under New York City.

Where is it?

I am betting some of you will know where these photos were taken. Alas, I was not there and did not take them. Rather my youngest brother and his wife, the weavers, took these when they were near a place where he was drilling to stabilize some earth...that is what he does by the way when he is not farming or weaving...he drills holes for concrete and grout to stabilize stuff, including the subway tunnel where the World Trade Center once stood.



****Update, I KNEW I had seen this building before! When Matty sent it to me it looked so familiar. Today I went searching for where I had seen it. I haven't been to the state in question since about 1973. If you want to know the answer to the question of where it is, go here......and little bro, not so long ago you were not so very far from on of my favorite bloggers!

He uses this thing, (although the trailer is not supposed to be broken like that.)



If you know where these were taken, state, city, general locality (there are two) or anything, leave an answer in the comments if you wish.

****Except for the drill these are Florida pictures taken around St Augustine and at White Springs Florida. I recognized the store right away and had to search Pure Florida to find the other picture where I had seen it before.

Contrast

Sitting on the porch in the glorious morning sun. Goldfinches squabbling over something, swirling through the sky. Spider webs rainbow shiny. Birds everywhere.


Talking on the phone with my boy in the city.


 He is at the World Trade Center.


I am at the edge of a tiny town of 700 souls.

Screaming sirens wail through the phone at my ear, and people shout and mumble, cars rumble, trucks grumble...the sounds of the city waking up.

And in my other ear I hear an Amish buggy clopping by. I can hear that the horse (like most Amish road horses) is dead lame and his trot is more of a three beat gait than two like it ought to be.


Contrast

Humble

The kid is back in the Big Apple, away at his off-farm job, and so very not here......... although through the wonders of Net and cell phone we keep pretty close all the same.


The other day job training took him to the World Trade Center site. He said that, as he walked down the street by the site, he felt humbled and awed and thought a lot about all the good people who lost their lives there. He wants to take me down to the city so we can look for Carl DiFranco's name on the memorial.


I was humbled that he even reads this blog, and that, while he was doing such exciting new stuff that is going to be so big in his life, he remembered that other young man, so tragically murdered along with thousands of other innocents, by enemies of our nation and our way of life. And touched...I was touched....


I hope I get to make that trip....seems very fitting somehow....

Guess Who's going to the State Museum

She believes in being prepared.....This trip is a pretty big deal.

She will see beams from the World Trade Center, some of which her daddy, who drives truck, hauled here from there. 

She will get to meet the Cohoes Mastodon. I still remember the first time I saw it, when I was, I think, in 5th grade. It made quite an impression, and I am sure today will for Peggy too.

And the Native displays. My first visit there was unforgettable as well and I am sure Peggy will be talking about them for weeks. 

There are minerals that her great grandpa found in the mineral section.

After all the educational stuff, there is lots of fun as well.

I hope they all have a great time!

Another Sunday has rolled around and a fine one it is. There was a heavy ground fog when I got up but it is gone now and the sun is putting a serious shine on everything. The old horse pasture just glows with goldenrod and the geraniums are like multi-colored torches.
I think the gardens and fields give us a nice show every year so when the snow flies we know just what we are missing. Fall must be on its way. The weather is turning much cooler, at least at night, and the kids are coming down with colds. The health issue with back-to-school is a big one here at Northview. All three kids have asthma to some degree and the cold and flu season is just a misery for all of us. One more reason to love the seasons when they are not in school.

Back-to-school also means less help and not much company during the daytime. We get a real good picture of just how much the kids do for us (and with us) when they are not here to do it. This year none of them will be able to miss school to go to the fall farm show with us, which takes some of the fun out of it. On the other hand, it is amazing just how much work I can get done with no interruptions.
I miss them though.

This morning the milking crew, (not including yours truly because of my day off), had another typical Sunday-fine-as-frog-hair time. A former show heifer named Drive had a great big half-shorthorn bull calf up in the cow pasture yesterday evening. (We have been moving the close-up heifers in with the milk cows because the coyotes have been stealing calves from the inexperienced young mothers. Cows don’t put up with such shenanigans.) This morning poor Drive came down minus her newborn, looking all forlorn. They put her in the barn and went looking for baby…and for a milk cow from my string, named Zinnia, who was also absent without leave. They found the pair together, Zinnia smug as a cat with a bowl full of cream, with “her” new baby. They had to put the calf in the barn to get Zinny in and then they couldn’t get her out.
She wanted to stay with the young ‘un.
Thinking back I remembered another calf stealing cow, old number 20, whom we eventually sold because she stole all the calves she could find. She would literally try to kill anyone who tried to take them to the barn. She once jumped into a 20-foot sheer sided ravine just to get around us and run back out to pasture to a stolen calf. I ticked back over the generations to Maroy Bianca. That was 20’s pedigree name. Sure enough, Bianca was the mother of Milestone Blackie, dam of Blackbird, dam of Black Berry, through several other cows to Blueberry, (you guessed it), dam of Zinnia. The whole crew traces back to an old show cow, Ronscott Sovereign Lucky, a 4-H calf Ralph bought from Mike Scott. Who would believe that such a tendency would come down through so many generations?
A cow like Zinnia is a mixed blessing. On one hand there is no way a coyote is going to kill a newborn calf with a cow like her in the picture. On the other hand, sometimes it is a little hard for people to bring calves in as well.

This is the forth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Since that day, we never hear a plane go over without looking up.
Every single time.
One of the ones that flew into the World Trade Center turned south for New York City over the City of Amsterdam, just eight short miles from here. It made me think then and it makes me think now.

Sunday Stills...Patriotism and 4th of July

This is the story of a little blue shirt that has insinuated itself into the tapestry of my love for America and the people who make our country great.

It all started on September 12, 2001. Our family was already in turmoil when 9/11 took place. My beloved mother-in-law had passed away on July 4th, incidentally my birthday. She had lived at the farm, while we lived in town and commuted to run the place with her. I cannot convey to you how close we all were. The kids loved their grandma, the boss loved his ma, and she and I had worked through some rocky years to be truly close. When she needed to communicate with her hospice workers she called on me to be her interpreter. That meant a lot to me. We were all hurting.

Now we were moving, from our home of 15 years to live at the farm ourselves. Not going to lie and say that I liked living in town, but still...there were gardens that we built and planted, years of memories and years of junk, all needing to be sorted and dealt with. I was doing it pretty much alone, because the boss was farming and the kids were in school.

Then the planes hit the Trade Center. Normally I would have been milking cows, but I was home packing with the radio on. When I heard the news I turned on the television and watched the horror, then ran to the farm to tell the boss and to the school to grab the kids...that is just how we are...together in crisis.

The next day the whole world was different and yet life had to go on. Our house in town belonged to someone else and we simply HAD to move. So I went on packing. On my knees on the floor in Alan's bedroom I reached under the bed to the nightmare/tangle/boy's nest underneath and pulled out a little blue shirt.

I spread it open in my lap to see if it was a keeper or a tosser.

And there was the NY skyline complete with the Twin Towers. I remembered...class trip with Becky, buying the souvenir from a street vendor for the little boy left at home.

It rocked me. I kept it.

Then, what with the move and all, it vanished not to be seen again for nearly ten years. Sometimes I vaguely wondered where it had ended up, but this house is staggeringly huge...26 foot long rooms, three stories and a cellar, a footprint that would scare you. I didn't forget it, but I didn't come across it either.

Fast forward through those nearly ten years. I love the Sunday Stills challenge and try to participate every week. As I hung up laundry last Wednesday I thought about the little shirt. And thought that if I actually knew where it was I would use it for this challenge. Didn't say a word about it to anyone though. Figured I would grab pics of the fireworks at one or the other of the two racetracks on either side of us, even though I am terrible at nighttime photography.

Thursday Beck and I undertook to finally clean out the front hall. Two stories high and the size of a normal living room. It is an incredibly beautiful space, but a catchall for any junk anyone is too lazy to cart upstairs.

We were about half-way done when Beck held something up. "Look what I found, Mom."

Yes, of course, it was the little blue shirt. Mind you, she didn't know about that moment ten years earlier when I pulled that shirt from under the bed The kids were busy with their own adjustments to a changed world and a new home then so it didn't show up on her horizon much...and I hadn't mentioned to anyone about wondering where it was.....

I suppose you could call it all coincidence...but to me that is one spooky little shirt. I am going to launder it now and put it in my dresser drawer with other mementos of old friends and baby dresses (yes there was a time when my daughters wore dresses) and things of that ilk. And I am glad the lost is found.