![]() On September 10, 2001, Todd and Lisa had just returned home from a trip to Italy. The Beamers were an ordinary young family living an ordinary but good life. In the summer of 2001, Todd and Lisa found out they were pregnant again, this time with a little girl. The Beamers had their first child a few years into their marriage, and David got a little brother two years later. They moved to New Jersey, where Todd got a job with Oracle that saw him travel frequently. Todd and Lisa graduated in 1991 and were married three years later. Todd decided to return home to finish his college experience at Wheaton. It did not take his life, but it did take away his future in baseball. Like my brother, his time at the university was cut short to a terrible automobile collision. Todd had grown up in Wheaton but left the area to attend Fresno State, where he hoped to spark a professional baseball career. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake…Ībout a decade earlier, a young man named Todd rubbed his eyes groggily and awoke somewhere on campus in a dorm similar to mine and headed off to his first Wheaton classes. That was when news of the second plane hit. So I wandered down the hall to Mike’s room, where we watched grainy footage with a TV antenna. There weren’t Facebook feeds or phone notifications, and none of us had cable in our dorm. ![]() In 2001, there was no Twitter to jump on for breaking news. Eventually, once my opponent relented, my brain had woken up enough to realize this airplane thing was pretty bizarre news, and maybe I should see what was going on. Truthfully, I don’t think I had ever really heard anything much about the World Trade Center before that. … And then I went back to playing Madden. “A plane just hit the World Trade Center.” Mike from down the hall, getting a drink at the fountain outside my room. And like any good male college student in America, I was playing video games before heading to breakfast.Ī silhouette appeared in my dimly lit doorway. It was a Tuesday morning and I didn’t have class until late that afternoon. ![]() If you’re in your 30s or older, you remember where you were That Day. The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want… All I wanted was another chance to say goodbye. It wasn’t fair, and it turned my life upside down. I suppose you never really expect to lose a brother. You don’t expect to lose a brother when you’re a senior in high school. He had finished his service in the Navy and just made the Dean’s List his first semester at college, and he and his wife were expecting their first child. One minute, we were celebrating with him over Christmas dinner. I lost him eight months earlier in a car wreck. Turns out 2001 was a pretty big year, for me and for many of us, and for a lot of reasons. It was impossibly far into the future, a real life space odyssey away. Back then in the late 80s, it might has well have read 3001. It represented the year I would graduate from high school. When I was a kid, I had a black shirt with tiny neon yellow children on it holding up the numbers 2–0–0–1.
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