It was a “bluebird” sky kind of morning.
That’s what one calls that color of blue in the sky out West.
On 9/11, having just relocated our family one month prior from Utah, it wasn’t a common sight for us to see that vivid clarity of color in the New Jersey sky. Yet, there it was, a piece of home, a “bluebird” sky.
Indeed, it was a beautiful, still Tuesday morning as the school bus rounded the corner to take our oldest daughter to kindergarten at Grace Norton Rogers Elementary School.
The excitement of the new school year was still in bloom as the gaggle of kids and parents greeted each other at the bus stop. The freeze-frame snapshot of that morning had an innocence and uncomplicated beauty that would forever be changed with unseen actions already en route high above.
After the bus stop, sitting at my kitchen table having coffee with my new friend and neighbor as our preschoolers’ played together, I received a telephone call from my father-in-law in Utah.
There was a tense urgency of tone in his voice as he asked if his son had left for his flight out of Newark yet. I relayed the information that he was slated to leave in the afternoon. He told me the incomprehensible news of a plane hitting the Pentagon.
I didn’t think I was hearing clearly and had my father-in law repeat what his words again. The information made no sense to me. To say that I found this news stupefying was an understatement.
The unfolding unreality of that morning still resides within me. A radical shift occurred with a totality of depth in which nothing would ever be the same again.
As the days continued, I reflected about that fractured Tuesday morning with the disparity of the new life our family was privileged to experience and the irrevocable change, loss and shock of September 11, 2001.
Those devastating events in some manner touched us all.
May our energies and prayers continue to support and bless those thousands of families whose lives have been so radically affected by such senseless hate.