9/11 Memorial

Just a few days after it opened, a friend from work got preview tickets for the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero. I haven't followed the site plans closely despite biking past the area with its high fences for the past several years. I was surprised at how affecting the memorial is.

Water constantly rushing down is both peaceful and urgent, but the hole is threatening - you can't see it's bottom and the walls cut sharply down for both - it feels like a threat and loss, a tunnel into the underworld. I found myself choked up at the grouping of names by one of the airlines, where someone had gone through and put a small set of airline wings into the names of each of the flight attendants or pilots, and for the three unborn children they had carried.