Try to Remember the kind of September

Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
when grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
when you were a tender and callow fellow,
Try to remember and if you remember the follow.

My parents' 40^th wedding anniversary would be today. They got married forty years ago at St. Joan of Arc in Lisle, Illinois. The reception was at Willoway Manor, an elegant reception hall on the then outskirts of Naperville, IL (it's now a tapas restaurant I believe).

I found some better pictures than the scans I made, so I've updated this and replaced the photos.

Try to remember when life was so tender
that no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender that
dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender that
love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.

My father was in real estate in DuPage County, my mother was an accountant and finance specialist for the Village of Downers Grove. My father died in 2000 after several years of recovery and set-backs from heart-bypass operation. My mother died in 2004 after twelve years of deteriorating respiratory problems due to exposure to toxic chemicals at work in 1992. Both were relatively young at their deaths, both from a perspective of modern lifespans as well as the life spans of members of either family.

Deep in December it's nice to remember
altho you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
without the hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
the fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December our hearts should remember and follow.

Forty years is a long time, and a short time as well. I'm not quite there yet, but can vividly remember watching Apollo landings (though I'm never quite sure which ones), or destroying the typewriter with a hammer when I was two, or the first time I got to use a computer when I was, perhaps, five.

I first came to New York thirty four years ago, in September 1972. My father was then a manager for Pinkerton's. My father, mother and I drove out to New York for a week (I missed the first days of kindergarten!) while my younger brother stayed with family.

I don't remember much about that trip. I've only found a few photographs, me on the Liberty Island ferry, me in front of the U.N., my mother and I in front of an "Oriental Phonebooth" somewhere in the city (I assume Chinatown but can't really tell). I remember the Central Park Zoo (where I dropped a hot dog and a "bum" asked if he could take it. Was the source of stories about New York for years to come).

I remember sirens, countless sirens all through the night. We stayed at the Commodore, which is now the Grand Hyatt New York.

I don't remember much else. I don't remember Wall Street (have no idea if we walked through there), I don't remember the subways (I'm fairly certain we didn't take any).

I don't remember the World Trade Center, the towers of which would have been rising but not quite complete that fall.

We stayed for a week, my father working somewhere on Franklin Street while my mother and I did various touristy things. On leaving the Commodore I remember getting my foot stuck in the door and a bit of a kerfluffle occurring.

For years afterwards there'd be talk about our week in New York, the various trials and tribulations of driving into the city (my father would claim that he hit every borough trying to get from I-80 to the Commodore, a tale which I now believe to have been slightly fabricated or enhanced). The bum in Central Park, the Rabbi and the Priest who bracketed our climb up the Statue of Liberty.

But I don't remember what the city looked like. Little snapshots of street scenes, invariably fixed by the few photos that my mother took. Which is sad because I love living here now, in Brooklyn, and want to be able to reach back and claim "I was here and I remember" but I do not.

Updates: fixed typos. The lyrics are from The Fantastiks which held the record for longest running musical in New York until 2001 when the post-9/11 box office crash forced it to close.

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Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I don't have much to write, it sucked then, it still sucks now.

I am very lucky, I lost no one, I moved out of my Battery Park City apartment a year before, I was uninjured (physically). Yet to this day I can still feel the clump-clump-clump as the floors collapsed into each other, I can still smell the acrid smoke in the air over the house, I can still picture the glinting glass in the smoke and dust.

And still I hear the sirens. And the disquieting silence of no sirens, no traffic, no noise, no nothing after the fall.