Dennis Kennedy

As I mentioned last year, I've been working on-site for a client and my highway exit (O'Fallon, Missouri) has a small 9/11 memorial with metal building structures from the World Trade Centers. It's called "Spirit of Freedom 9-11" and, to quote from the link above, "Thirteen tons of twisted steel from the September 11, 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center in New York dominate this compelling monument in the median at Winghaven Boulevard and Highway 40-61."

I drove by this morning, noting that the flags were at half-mast in the wind, and also noticing that the sky was very blue. It's the cloudless blue sky that I'll always associate with 9/11. And it made me a little uneasy as I noticed, as I walked from my car, that from my vantage point there wasn't a cloud in the sky. The helicopter that flew over about that time didn't help either. I was reminded of the 2003 post I wrote on 9/11.

This evening, I stopped for the traffic light and looked out my window and was face to face with the metal structural elements and the engraved stone monument at the exit.

There are many pieces of public sculpture these days that include rusting metal as a component. I can appreciate them intellectually, but they don't really do much for me. This rusting metal, so inexplicably place at a highway exit in Missouri, has great immediacy and power.

Many posts about 9/11 passed through my newsreader today. I'll single out this one from Marty Schwimmer, a revisit to his earlier classic post, in part because we talked about it and the fighter jet he mentioned when I visited him and his family this summer, and in part because I thought about Marty, that post and that conversation this morning.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Technorati tag: 9/11