Maybe eight years is enough.
Maybe doing anything more than, say, handing out preparedness fliers on the 16th Street Mall is way too much and just milking things.
I tend to pay scant attention most days to the calendar. But even I know what the date is today.
I remember exactly what I was doing eight years ago, which was nursing a wicked hangover after breaking in the new football stadium. I got a call to turn on the TV.
I picked up my jaw, scrambled into my clothes, stuffed my bird gun and a couple of boxes of shells into the trunk and headed into work. I wrote words to the effect that life as we knew it was way over. You needn’t be Einstein to figure that one.
Young boys not quite out of high school pressed their folks to let them join the armed services and the fight that surely was on.
Two years later, I would sit in tents, Humvees and stench-filled holes with some of them. “Why are you here?” they would ask. I would toss the question right back at them.
“9/11,” most of them said.
What gets to me today is that some of those very same soldiers are now dead. Most of the rest are civilians again, some wrestling hard with their war demons, their bristling, wide-eyed post-9/11 patriotism a long-ago memory.
We all arrive at this date with different memories and emotional baggage. The above just happens to be my own. So it has meaning.
And meaningful dates, I believe, should be marked by meaningful activity. So what to do?
I snagged the 2009 9/11 calendar from work. It listed but eight events, significant I suppose, but solely from a numerological standpoint.
Most of them involve school events. These are good things. Most of today’s students were in diapers or not yet here on that awful day. They should know.
And then there is the West Metro Firefighters, Local 1309, who is hosting a “Community Memorial Stair Climb” at Red Rocks. They are going to do nine laps — from the stage to the top, a 110-story equivalent — to honor the 343 firefighters and 2,631 others who lost their lives that morning.
All good stuff, and it costs $15 to register, with the proceeds going to the Twin Towers Orphan Fund. I don’t figure it’s for me.
A different group of firefighters will twice climb all 55 stories of the Qwest tower. Good for them but, again, not for me.
What is new is that the president has declared Sept. 11 a Day of Service and Remembrance, a day of volunteering your service.
I figure this is a better deal.
So I looked everywhere for something I could get my head and emotions around. I went to , which is supposed to list different projects for which we could volunteer.
The only one I had the time and patience to find was the preparedness-flier handout that Denver police and the governor were signed up for on the 16th Street Mall. Still not my thing.
What is my thing is remembering in my own way the 2,974 people who died that morning eight years ago.
It is remembering how our world has changed since then, and the considerable lessons to be gleaned from it all.
My thing today is remembering the 4,343 men and women who have died as of this writing in Iraq and the 742 who have perished in Afghanistan, all of them since that awful day.
That is 8,059 lives, folks. In exactly eight years.
No, handing out fliers on the mall simply isn’t going to cut it.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
