AM
At the police barricades at 161st Street and Ruppert Place in the Bronx, the lieutenant did not like what he saw. "What's this?," he asked, holding the all-access credential, a laminated piece of gold in baseball circles, but meaningless to the cops. "No picture on this? That's Bull. They could shoot him, steal this, and get in."
The younger officers seemed to be stifling laughs. The guy wearing the credential - me - agreed that photo ID's were the future in sports but if the lieutenant was going to describe me getting shot by some unknown "they," would he please be so kind as to not refer to me in the third person, as if I were already dead.
Inside Yankee Stadium itself, an Officer MacCrimmon chuckled at the story. "Things are still crazy here. I'm getting asked for my autograph by kids." A colleague had a better anecdote. "Cal Ripken's farewell today and some of his teammates came over to shake our hands." MacCrimmon had to laugh. "Doesn't do me any good, I'm a Met fan."
Two rivers west, at Giants Stadium, they were not laughing. The first football game since the catastrophe and there were empty seats. No-shows? Possibly. But as Giants' owner Wellington Mara noted with sadness, 28 customers had their season tickets sent to addresses... at the World Trade Center.
And the shock waves from September 11th continue to move slowly but devastatingly through every part of this community.
PM
Memorials and funerals for six more firefighters were held this morning and this afternoon. On the eastern side of Central Park, under a white tent and a persistent drizzle, the 700 and lost employees of the Cantor-Fitzgerald bond firm were remembered in a gathering of family and friends. Those lost from the staff of the restaurant atop The World Trade Center, Windows On The World, were eulogized in late afternoon. This is now the city of mourning.
Three weeks after, and it is still papered with photographs of the missing. The first shrine at Union Square is still filled with them. So too part of the Times Square subway station. And streetlights, and hospitals, and construction sites, and boarded up storefronts just blocks from The Trade Center.
As a move to collect and preserve them in a city museum suggests, these 'Missing' posters continue to resonate in an almost unspeakable way. It is the rare and fortunate New Yorker who is not halted in his tracks by one of them.
You do not have to know any of the men and women depicted to feel the pain. But when you do, there is shock upon shock. On Canal Street, today, a black and white photograph of one of those Cantor-Fitzgerald employees, a smiling Mike Tanner. I went to college with him.