NEW YORK — Volunteers marked the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks Friday by tilling gardens, writing letters to soldiers, setting out flags — and, at ground zero, joining the somber ritual of reading the names of the lost.
President Barack Obama, who observed his first Sept. 11 as president by declaring it a national day of service, laid a wreath at the Pentagon and, with wife Michelle, helped paint the living room of a Habitat for Humanity house in Washington.
“We honor all those who gave their lives so that others might live, and all the survivors who battled burns and wounds and helped each other rebuild their lives,” Obama said. He said the day was meant also as a tribute to the “service of a new generation.”
Memorials in New York, at the Pentagon and at the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania all took place under gray skies. A chilly rain fell in lower Manhattan, and those reading names at the World Trade Center site spoke under tents.
“We miss you. Life will never be the same without you,” said Vladimir Boyarsky, whose son, Gennady, was killed. “This is not the rain. This is the tears.”
Volunteering across America
Across the country, Americans marked the anniversary with service projects.
Volunteers in Boston stuffed packages for military personnel overseas. In Tennessee and West Virginia, they distributed donated food for the needy. Community volunteers in Maine worked on a garden and picnic area for families transitioning out of homelessness.
In Chicago, they tilled community gardens, cooked lunch for residents of a shelter and packed food for mothers and babies. And on the lawn of the Ohio statehouse, volunteers arranged nearly 3,000 small American flags, in a pattern reminiscent of the trade center’s twin towers. At the top was an open space in the shape of a pentagon.
“It’s different than just seeing numbers on a paper, when you actually see the flags. It’s a visual impact of those lives,” said Nikki Marlette, 62, of the Los Angeles suburb of Palos Verdes Estates, visiting Columbus for today’s Ohio State-Southern California football game.
At a plaza adjacent to the World Trade Center site, volunteers — from soup kitchens, advocacy groups, Red Cross, United Way — joined relatives of the lost to read the names of those killed in the twin towers.
“I ask that you honor my son and all those who perished eight years ago . . . by volunteering, by making some kind of act of kindness in their memory,” said one of the readers, Gloria Russin, who lost her son, Steven Harris Russin.
Renewing what has become a poignant tradition, some relatives at the World Trade Center site called out greetings and messages of remembrances when they reached the names of their own loved ones.
“We miss you”
“We love you, Dad, and we miss you,” said Philip Hayes Jr., whose father, long retired from the fire department, rushed to the site that 2001 morning.
Moments of silence were observed at 8:46, 9:03, 9:59 and 10:29 a.m. — the times that jetliners struck the north and south towers of the trade center and that each tower fell.
In Shanksville, Pa., bells tolled for the 40 victims of the fourth hijacked jetliner, which crashed there.
Eight years after 2,974 people died in the attacks, Obama declared himself “mindful that the work of protecting America is never finished,” and said he would “never waver” in his pursuit of al-Qaeda and other extremists.
“Most of all,” Obama said, “on a day when others sought to sap our confidence, let us renew our common purpose. Let us remember how we came together as one nation, as one people, as Americans, united not only in our grief but in our resolve to stand with one another, to stand up for the country we love.”
George W. Bush, whose presidency was defined in part by that day, had no public appearances planned.
The New York Times contributed to this report.
