THE LAST FIVE ...

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Sunday, Oct. 17, 2004 - 6:42 p.m.

1130 days later

Gah! So much to do. Just when I get caught up with my magazines to the point where I can start a new book -- Friday Night Lights, one I've never read, but the current selection for the ESPN.com Page 2 Book Club -- the New Yorker has to come out with its 200-page Politics Issue, Outside sends me a new issue and the Notre Dame alumni magazine arrives. Not to mention Sports Illustrated. That, combined with my near-daily updates on the baseball playoffs, means I'm behind on my blog reading and TV watching and lots of other things. And I find it hard to not get a little Xbox time in each day.

While at work last Monday night, I did manage to write down another gem from our friend John Madden: "He finds a hole where he can make penetration." Always reliable.

I did manage to plan and organize a great weekend for three college friends and their families, which are now expanded to include two children under the age of 2. I took the second half of last week off, and on Friday Bryan and I headed into the city with his parents to meet up with one group, which brought us to ground zero. It was my first time. My last visit to the area of Church, Cortland and Dey streets was November 17, 2000. I'd been up to the observation deck twice, but on none of these trips did I have a camera. I have no pictures from the Twin Towers plaza. I was reminded of this while reading the informational and historical displays on the fence around the site. A light-gray outline of one of the towers from the point of view of someone standing at its base is the subtle background of a black slab that contains photos and descriptions of the building of the towers and their history. I distinctly remember one trip, a sunny summer day in the plaza, when I saw a photographer turning his camera to the sky, the two towers receding into the heavens, and thinking how banal and common that view was, how uninspired the photograph would be. Now I wish I had one.

Bryan asked if I was purposely avoiding making a trip, but that wasn't the case at all. I just never made a point to go; I never got around to it. I wanted to in the early days afterwards, but I wasn't in a position to drop what I was doing to help in any way, and I didn't want to be just another tourist looking at the mountain of debris. So I made it there on Friday, when it's just a hole and you look for a steal beam or a slab of concrete that might have been a parking level -- anything from the original World Trade Center complex. You look for a small piece of the grand structures to hold onto, one aspect that hasn't changed that helps you remember. You come up from the subway into the refurbished World Trade Center PATH Station, but instead of being inside the complex, light from outside pours in from one side, and you walk over to the fence and there's the big pit. Instead of taking the escalator up into the lobby of one of the towers, you climb the steps and emerge into daylight.

Most of what remains of the old World Trade Center lies solely in your mind. It's up to your imagination to recreate it with less open space, less bright daylight and more shadows from the skyscrapers. It's just different, is what it is.

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