Josh made baked stuffed tomatoes and tabouleh tonight for dinner. I am the luckiest girl in the world. It was very yummy, indeed.

***

I never wrote anything here on September 11th, four years later. What I remember about September 11th is not the terrorism or the subsequent military efforts in Afghanistan or Iraq. I remember walking into Union Station in New Haven, Connecticut, about an hour after I got an email from Josh’s mother - our first correspondance with each other - asking me to go get him. I remember my cell phone’s battery dying as I desperately tried to check my voicemail and the circuits were still so busy, over twelve hours after the towers fell.

Just a few days before that, I had dropped him off at the same train station, after our first weekend together. I remember seeing him into the station and waving goodbye, and driving home by myself, the car suddenly quiet.

Anyway, on the evening of the 11th, I drove into New Haven and ran inside where I saw Josh sitting on a bench, wearing greyish jeans, an old black Giants sweatshirt, a Giants baseball cap, clutching his iBook and his address book. He looked exhausted. We spent the week after, huddled together in my little suburb, away from big buildings, and fell in love.

***

We count August 27th as one of our anniversaries - the day we both screwed up the courage to say that we liked each other and “officially” became a couple. For me, September 11th and the subsquent days are the ones I’ll remember as an anniversary of when we fell in love - a bittersweet date, yes, but one I’ll claim nonetheless.

Like many others you’ve read online about, I can’t stop clicking online and on television about the devastation and horror of the last week or so in the Gulf Coast. I rant and rave and cry and shout and the armchair quarterbacking, it is in full force. It’s easy for me to do that - the armchair quarterbacking - since I’m here, the weather has been great and I have a home and electricity and a toilet. I’m angry at what everyone else is angry at, I’m sure, but that is for another ranting and raving.

My friend and her sister are two people behind the rolling duffel project - putting together rolling duffel bags full of supplies for folks displaced by Hurricane Katrina and the floods that followed. If you are looking for a worthy cause to donate to besides the Red Cross, the United Way, etc., here’s your chance. I am so proud that this woman is my friend.