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To: TobagoJack who wrote (9534)	9/16/2001 10:55:01 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi Jay - It was another beautiful day today, so I took the kids into DC to see it - didn't want to say for the last time but you never know. We do feel sort of like we're at Ground Zero. But this is where we are and this is the life we chose. From now on I will look at everything I love as if it were the last time. First was a drive past the Pentagon. The first wall we saw was the one that was hit, and the first thought was that it looks much worse than it does on television. But we kept driving, and the rest of it looked unchanged. It's a huge structure, and massive. Not a superlight structure of glass on steel, it's made of stone and steel and concrete. Most of the ugly damage is smoke damage, the rest looks like someone cut a narrow slice out of a massive loaf of bread or a huge wheel of cheese. Nothing compared to the WTC. We drove into DC, past the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Reflecting Pool, the Viet Nam Memorial. We then drove past the Capitol and the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court building. All have special significance for me, but if we lost them, life would go on. We went to Union Station, which has a flag shop, looking for more flags. My husband wanted a "Don't Tread On Me" flag, which I found, and the kids wanted flag patches for their backpacks, which I found. I wanted a flag for my antenna and was disappointed, but not surprised. I got a tiny one, just a few inches, and that will do until I get a bigger one. Then we went to the zoo and saw the pandas, which we hadn't been to see since we got them. They are very cute. They were wrestling when we got there. The larger one is the male one, and he had the better of the female one, but she held up pretty good. Then they got tired and sat down on their rear ends and plucked grass from the ground with their paws and ate it, like humans eating stalks of celery. Very, very cute. We ate out, and went to a shopping mall. It seemed like a normal Sunday, only with more flags. But the big change was on the radio. National Public Radio was covering memorial ceremonies. I listened to a special mass for the lost firefighters and policemen at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Mayor Juliani was there and Governor Pataki, and the Pope sent a special message, and all of that was very nice and what I would have expected. The unexpected thing came from the orchestra and the choir. I have never attended a church large enough to have an orchestra and a really good choir - I don't know if what I heard is normal for St. Patricks but I expect not. The Agnus Dei was the most profound musical moment of my life. Not that Agnus Dei means anything to me, in particular, and I don't know who orchestrated the version the orchestra played and the choir sang. I did play French horn in school, so I always find French horn pieces particularly moving, and I counted at least four French horns, which is a lot. Of course, we have to understand that the Irish community in New York was always well represented among the police and the firefighters, and the mass was for them, and as you know, St. Patrick was the patron saint of Ireland. It's a church that the Irish especially love and feel welcome in. The deep, dark, raw anguish, that was tranformed and elevated by the belief in the hereafter, was the most profound expression of human emotion in music I have ever heard. I sat in my car, having sent the boys into the shopping mall, and cried. Those people were in pain, and yet were able to transform their pain into something that transcends human words. I work with words. I can't say what they conveyed in a way that would do it justice. I just sat in my car, listening and sobbing. Peace, brother. We'll see what happens tomorrow.