Word: skies
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Those mornings outside my apartment building seem far away today. Yesterday morning, the buildings fell from their place in Manhattan's sky. They were not knocked down by ferocious wind. They were not stolen by a fictional thief. They were not hidden in the precipitation of a chilly New York morning...
Only God knows what kind of heroic acts took place at 25,000 feet as passengers and crews contended with four teams of highly trained enemy terrorists. But it is clear that the hunt for the culprits began way up in the sky, by the doomed passengers and crews themselves, minutes before the attacks took place. The victims on board at least two of the four planes whispered the number and even some of the seat assignments of the terrorists along with their final goodbyes in their brief and haunting Tuesday morning cell phone calls. A flight attendant on board...
...because it is uncommon. On Sept. 11, we valued heroism because it was everywhere. The fire fighters kept climbing the stairs of the tallest buildings in town, even as the steel moaned and the cracks spread in zippers through the walls, to get to the people trapped in the sky. We don't know yet how many of them died, but once we know, as Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, "it will be more than we can bear." That sentiment was played out in miniature in the streets, where fleeing victims pulled the wounded to safety, and at every hospital, where...
...plane, a tire, office furniture, glass, a hand, a leg, whole bodies, began falling all around--people in the streets all stopped and looked, and fell silent. As the smoke rose, the ash rained gently down, along with a whole lost flock of paper shuffling down from the sky to the street below, edges charred, plane tickets and account statements and bills and reports and volumes and volumes of unfinished business floating down to earth...
...this to our children and to ourselves, what will we do? What else but build new cathedrals, and if they are bombed, build some more. Because the faith is in the act of building, not the building itself, and no amount of terror can keep us from scraping the sky...