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I commuted to NYC (Jersey City PATH train to WTC or Amtrak to WTC) daily for quite a while. And for a while I worked in a building with windows facing the WTC – watched the window washers swaying on the upper floors with fascination and dread.

WTC was really a very unpleasant building to be in. At the subway level, and the level of the shops just above, it stank of urine and the homeless who lived there were in terrible shape.

And yet that absence on the skyline tugs at my stomach every time.

On 9/11/2001 I woke up to NPR re-broadcasting the planes heading into the WTC; spent the whole day hoping our younger one hadn’t heard anything about it at school, but of course she had.

I didn’t even try to get hold of my many friends in NYC until Sept. 12 and when I did the phones were all down and emails were not returned, sometimes until weeks later.

One friend, Tom, FedEx-ed me, at my request, the black-covered New Yorker magazine that I for some reason desperately needed to read. My friend, Elizabeth, told me of the terrible filthy smoke and the smells that persisted for weeks.

Now I see that this terrible event has been used to justify all kinds of other really inexcusable incursions into our rights and the rights of others around the globe.

So far, I see very little good that has come out of this and that makes it all the sadder.

In the words of one of my Twitter pals, @pourmecoffee:

Let’s all remember to honor America [on 9/11] by dividing it into groups and being openly hostile to the ones we’re not in.

Or, commemorate @markos birthday and Sept. 11, 2001 in a meaningful way by buying @markos book: American Taliban

Some of my favorite reflections on 9/11:

• “It seems like at a certain point of density of flags you’re making more of a statement if you DON’T have one.” — David Foster Wallace
• David Bowie’s great rendition of Paul Simon’s “America” at Concert For New York City Tweeted by @hush6
• And @hush6′s blog post for today Blog post I hadn’t planned on writing
• Wondrous humor in adversity by The Onion:
  • Bush Sr. Apologizes To Son For Funding Bin Laden In ’80s
  • God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule
  • U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We’re At War With
  • A cornucopia of Oniony 9/11 goodness: Throughout the day, we remember our historic 9/11 coverage.
  • We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage vs. We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage
• Tweeted by @pourmecoffee: Tomorrow is 50th anniversary of JFK’s “separation of church and state is absolute” speech.
• Tweeted by @TimothyS: 9/11 set off capitalist frenzy-making $$ from national security. Carlyle Group first.
• Re-tweeted to me by the brilliant @drmstream Angels leave pennies.
• Tweeted by @HarrisonSolow Just felt like posting this obscure and minute example of an innate American spirit, on this day
• Re-tweeted by @juanviejo, from @mozaffar The story of the Muslim Prayer Room on the 17th Floor, of Tower 2.
• @SarahPalinUSA How dare you & @glennbeck turn the death of 3,000 Americans of all faiths into a moneymaking event! VILE.
• Budweiser tribute to 9/11

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Freaky lyrics in this Dar Williams song.

Are they about loss of memory or just about getting to the point in a relationship when you forget all the good things that you enjoyed together?

Even after the anger, it all turned silent
And the everyday turned solitary, so we came to February
First we forgot where we’d planted those bulbs last year
And then we forgot that we’d planted it all
Then we forgot what plants are altogether
And I blamed you for my freezing and forgetting
And the nights were long and cold and scary, can we live through February?
…
And February was so long that it lasted into March
And found us walking a path alone together
You stopped and pointed and you said, “That’s a crocus”
And I said, “What’s a crocus?”,
And you said, “It’s a flower”
I tried to remember, but I said, “What’s a flower?”

Full Lyrics

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Some musicals strike us as perfect, or at least nearly perfect. We’ve seen Into the Woods nearly fifty times and would be willing to watch it weekly or more if we could afford to. The book is interesting to us, most of the lyrics are clearly intentional and speak to us, the music is complex and beautiful. Sure there are songs that we think could go, or be improved, but still.

Rent seems terrifically unfinished to us. My teenage daughter who did not experience the 1980′s when AIDS first began to wreak havoc with so many lives and who had never heard the acronym AZT was utterly confused by the initial half hour. (We paused the DVD to explain what was happening and why.)

We admired Rent as an impassioned, furious, context-free snapshot of that awful time. The performers on the DVD are gorgeous, with voices to match. But the music and lyrics don’t rise to the cause they represent. The perfect song that Roger runs away to Santa Fe to write is not.

Wonder if perhaps, if the creator, Jonathan Larson, had lived to see the show on Broadway, he would have refined it further.

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I sent the following out to my Freecycle group the other day, Day 7 of our latest Amish Friendship Bread adventure:

My daughter’s friend met her the other day, and, smiling, said, “I have something special for you.” and handed her a bag of Amish Friendship Bread starter. Which means that said well-intended friend is not very far along in her Amish Friendship Bread journey.

So we now have a starter at Day 7, and in about 4 or 5 days, it will split into four little babies, each of which will multiply like bunnies and pretty soon our home will be overrun with fattening cakes and the smell of cinnamon. Which is why we have resolved to terminate this particular branch on the Amish Friendship Bread family tree quite abruptly, after we’ve baked the first iteration. UNLESS some of you fine folks would like a packet of starter when it next becomes available, which will be soon.

Please let me know if you would like to at least experience this interesting flashback to 1950s America.

Also serves as a GREAT lesson in exponential growth.

You would need to take possession of the starter promptly when it becomes available. What you do with it once it’s yours, I do not need to know.

Freecyclers from near and far responded, mostly with condolences.

One helpful soul pointed out the obvious: We did not have to keep a starter for ourselves. We COULD just bake all the babies into tasty coffee cakes and freeze what we could not eat.

We would then have NO STARTER to foist upon an unwilling Universe, but we would have many yummy cakes to eat when we are hungry.

So here we are, on Day 10: Baking Day

• One bag of starter is going to an intrepid Freecycler who has promised she knows exactly what she's getting into.
• One bag is going to a friend who, I fear, is in denial about what she is getting into.
• One bag was used to make two yummy coffeecakes, one of which will soon be given away. I found a recipe that does not require me to use vanilla pudding mix. Vanilla pudding mix, in fact, pudding of any variety, is not an ingredient I would ever choose to have in my pantry.

• I will (!!!!) keep one bag of starter, since I now know I can and will kill it off and eat it at any time I care to.

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When @johnnyfuncheap tweeted that there was going to be a free juggling and unicycle show in Berkeley this weekend, we were torn, torn, torn.

We don’t much enjoy driving to Berkeley and we always dread the drive back. It’s a long drive for us, we who have a very painful personal history with bridges letting us down hard (literally), and the Bay Bridge has not been retrofitted, etc., etc. But we nearly always have a great time when we get to Berkeley.

The fire juggling show at ten was what compelled us, and so we dragged ourselves to the Berkeley High School Jacket Gym to see what it would be like.

Our festival experience did not start all that auspiciously. We have never SEEN a high school that big. But beautiful, very, very clean. Nicely laid out. Big though. We drove around, drove around looking for parking. Eventually, we DID find a legal parking space very close by.

We arrived at the huge, huge gym and found it absolutely PACKED with incredible jugglers. There was a guy juggling miniature toilet plungers. There were large groups hurling pins at each other. There were folks with rhinestone-encrusted hula hoops. There was a guy spinning balls on his fingers. There was a woman in a purple t-shirt who kept doing incredible juggling things while the expression on her face implied that nothing whatsoever was going on. We kept having to dodge out of the way of stray pins and lurching unicycles.

I said the gym was PACKED with incredible jugglers, but that was a lie. About a third of the gym was dedicated to a ferocious game of unicycle basketball. Some of the players were on normal unicycles, some were on taller ones. Each rode with a unique style. It was simply amazing that in all the time we watched, no horrendous crashes occurred. We noticed that traveling with the ball seemed to be legal, as did handling the other players pretty roughly, and we also noticed that players fell off and go back onto their unicycles as if rolling out of and then back into bed.

Well, we talked with a bunch of the talented jugglers around us, watched jealously as a tiny, tiny boy getting his first unicycle lesson on a tiny, tiny unicycle, and gawked at the wide array of missiles soaring from hand to hand and at the apparently never-ending basketball game. After about 45 minutes or so, my daughter said, “We don’t know how to do these things. We don’t belong here.” It was still an hour until the fire show.

And then, who should take us over? Dan Chan, Magic Man. He asked my daughter if she knew how to juggle. She answered, “A little.” He offered her a lesson. She shyly refused. Dan did not give up. He asked ME if I knew how to juggle. I said, “Not a bit.” He said, “Are you willing to learn? Come over here.” So I went. And my daughter followed.

Dan handed me the most enchanting juggling balls you’ve ever felt. They are called GBallz and they are made of buttery leather and stuffed with millet. They seem to be the perfect size for any hand. They have a very reassuring weight as they drop into your palm. When they fall, they make a very, very quiet, non-embarrassing splat and THEY DO NOT ROLL AWAY.

So poor Dan started to teach me to juggle. I was an attentive but inept student. And by then Dan could see that my daughter was begging to just hold the GBallz, let alone learn from Dan. He looked at my daughter and said, “She’ll be juggling in 20 minutes.” He gave her three GBallz. (We later learned that this was very kind, since they are very expensive and we were sorely tempted to take them home so we could keep juggling them all night and for the rest of our lives ….)

Dan is just a fantastic teacher. He shows you something, and then he lets you try it and gives you feedback. Then he says something like, “Do that ten times and then you’ll learn something else.” Then he walks away and shows back up a little later when you’re ready to learn more.

I learned to juggle two balls fairly well considering I have no talent in this area. My daughter was juggling three pretty nicely before an hour or so had passed. People whose juggling we admired kept walking up to us and giving us helpful tips.

In no time at all, the incredible, wonderful, exceptional fire show was on. At fire show, there was a guy on a unicycle making origami from burning paper, shouting in Spanish and English for us to cheer him on. There was a guy with a burning whip. There were several flaming unicycle-riders juggling fire. There was a fire-eater and a fire-dancer and the music was great and the space in which we watched was comfortable and beautiful.

The Berkeley 2010 Juggling and Unicycling Festival runs through tomorrow, Sunday, July 11. If you can go tomorrow, go. If you can’t, look for it next year and go to their workshops. (Everything except a show on Saturday night was free, far as I know.)

My photos are here:

• Juggling and Unicycling
• Fire Show, mostly