It's funny in a way that in the last nearly forty years, I've perhaps spent a total of fifteen hours in Manhattan as my life and loves have taken me in so many other directions but my fascination and affection for it have never wavered.
About three and a half years ago, our son, Patrick Michael and I spent a Saturday downtown on the peripheries of the first wave of Occupy Wall Street. It was a brilliant day, weather-wise and in terms of sheer adrenaline a Top Ten. Having the chance to share one of my favorite places on earth with one of my favorite people still makes me smile.
Less than two years ago, I joined my wife and our daughter, Michelle, in Thelma and Louiseing the Christmas displays and, more somberly, part of the nearly completed work at Ground Zero in a day trip I fear they both think of as "One of the Muppets Tried to Take Manhattan." Admittedly I needed a haircut and let's leave the discussion there.
I don't expect it will be all that long until we do that day tripper thing on Metro North again as the 9/11 Memorial Museum officially opens tomorrow. I will not be amazed if it supplants the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building as "the stop" for visitors as long as those of us who go there respect the memory of all those who remain there from a workday on 11 September 2001 that never ended.
This may be a good way to make sure in a nation that, to me, too often seems to have the same sense of history as a cat, all future generations remember not only the heartache but the heroism, both the atrocity and the altruism, the senselessness and the selflessness. The soul of America.
-bill kenny
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