Happy Monday! I’m traveling–again–so I missed last Monday, but I hope all of you had an enjoyable Labor Day break. My sisters and I traded texts remembering how Labor Day was often a day of visiting our aunt and cousins in northern Ohio for a cook-out. It was usually the last cook-out of the year with them as the schoolyear started a few days later and the weather shifted from summer to fall. We, sisters and cousins, miss those gatherings. I hope your festivities included family and/or friends.

As I mentioned, I’m traveling again, this time to my Midwest roots. Friday evening while having supper with my youngest sister, we caught the reflection of flashing blue and red lights through the restaurant window. We all know what those mean! Yes, they were cruisers, but there wasn’t an accident. In my small hometown when there’s a home football game, the local police escort the high school marching band from the school, down a small stretch of a main highway, into and through the park, to the football field. The drummers beat out a cadence as the other members marched with flutes, French horns, tubas and trumpets held in position, so they were ready to play as they entered the field. Flag girls held their flags, so the evening air caught them and sent them waving. When my sisters and I were younger, our dad took us to the field during halftime so we could see and hear the halftime show. I’d like to think there were moms and dads with their young ones on Friday night lining the street so they could see and hear the band.

Though I wasn’t at my window last Monday, I was thinking about today’s post, specifically the connection between Labor Day at the beginning of the week and the 25^th anniversary of 9/11 at the end. I’m sure most of you caught at least one of the specials commemorating the event. It never gets easier to watch the images and hear the stories. Each year some new tidbit touches me in a different way, even though the information itself isn’t new. This year there were two and they’re somewhat connected. Both came from the ABC News special with Robin Roberts and Michael Strahan.

Both were about the ordinary.

The first tied directly with Labor Day we’d just celebrated, a day originally set aside to honor blue-collar workers. During the special the hosts of course did a segment on the first responders and the unbelievable work they faced, their dedication, and their own losses. Then they also did a segment on the city workers and again, I knew they were there but sometimes news sounds new. The anchors talked about the number of city electricians and manpower hours it took to make sure there were lights going 24/7 so rescue workers could see what they were doing. The other utility workers–gas, water–who worked on lines graphing through the rubble to make sure valves were shut off; construction workers doing the sacred work of removing remains of the Towers, and remains. I thought of them on Labor Day, wondered if the holiday holds a different weight for them, knowing how their work was elevated on that day and for months after.

The second new awareness came from a comment about the generations born after 9/11 who have no idea what the United States and the rest of the world was like before the Towers came down. Homeland Security didn’t exist as a department on its own, it’s made up of 22 other federal agencies that President Bush merged into one. The TSA wasn’t a thing, but now no one flies without being screened. Until then, families walked loved ones right to flight gates for long goodbyes and last-minute hugs. Now we most often drop-off and pick-up in a line outside the airport with the car still running. Devices like doorbell cameras, Flock cameras, and being scanned just to enter a venue are accepted as normal for those born after 9/11. They still aren’t normal for many of us who remember.

That musing led me to some of the more common comments about how people went to work in the morning never suspecting they’d not come home. How we all woke up that Tuesday morning never suspecting our world would change. How so many think of September 10^th as the last ordinary day.

I don’t.

While making notes for this post, I wondered what people thought after the firing on Fort Sumter on April 14, 1861, starting the Civil War. Did they ever imagine fighting against their own families? How that war upended the American caste system that had been in place since before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Did people look back on April 13 and think of it as the last ordinary day?

The attack on Pearl Harbor. The dropping of the atomic bomb.

These other events do not take away from the tragedy of 9/11. I remember my grandma talking about Decoration Day and going to the cemetery to place flowers on graves. Very few people today talk about that commemoration. I don’t ever want our commemorations of our generation’s most horrific event to lose their importance and power. But recalling those other events as history also reminds me and gives me hope that we have the strength and ability to move forward. May we do that united.

As my sister and I drove through the park back to her home, we heard the band and the roar of the spectators. This is ordinary.

My prayer is that no matter what is going on in the world, we will hold onto these moments of ordinary and draw strength from them. May we never experience a last ordinary day. May your week be filled with ordinary blessings.

Photos of Friday’s football game were taken by my classmate Don Tudor, and lifted by me with his permission. Thanks Don!