A 9/11 Remembrance

The crowd going to the 9/11 reunion for our folks was simply huge so we had to go. I would have totally regretted not going.

But I wasn’t going to go without my girls. So around 2:00 the whole family hopped into a cab and headed to a dive bar in downtown Manhattan. I warned my daughters that they were likely to be bored. It would be a bunch of grown-ups talking. Victoria asked, “will they have toys there?”. Sorry kiddo, not that kind of joint.

We were quite late (it was officially 1-3) so when we got there, everyone had already arrived. We had pretty much the entire bar. It was fairly amazing. I spend ten minutes saying hi to the people in the front of the bar and Danielle is saying, “are you done?”. I point to the rest of the bar and tell her, “I’m friends with all those people”. I think she was a bit surprised.

It was a bit dull for the girls, but they were largely great. Of course everyone was happy to see them and Danielle heard “I can’t believe how big she is” a million times. Kevin Mei was particularly fun with the girls (he convinced Tori that he’s 15).

They picked out songs on the juke box and the bartender threw in extra money for them. He gave them free chips and the waitress brought Tori extra French Fries (she is a serious French Fry girl). The New York State “no kids sitting at the bar” law was not enforced this afternoon.

Aside from that, I got to see people I haven’t seen in years. Some more than 5 years. We had people from way out of town, really an incredible gang. It shows the power of Facebook because that’s how this whole thing got organized. One of the old gang, Eileen, even put together a photo book via Shutterfly with old pictures of the folks we lost.

So we remembered our folks and had a great reunion at the same time. Bittersweet, but overall a really good time.