Every year with only one exception, since that fateful year 2001, I have posted my memorial to two friends that lost their lives in the World Trade Center disaster. The fifth anniversary was turned into a governmental media event to justify a war based on lies. Victim families still did not receive promised help or compensation. I wasn't going to participate in the circus and give the warmongers a chance to manipulate the memory of my friends for their Machiavellian ends. My memory of my friends, Glen and Dennis, is too precious to be commodified.

When I posted last year, after putting up the pictures published by the New York Times Portraits of Grief, I realized that these were pictures of men I never knew. They had families and careers that I heard about but never shared. They had bellies like me and had lost some hair (not like me). I didn't really know the men in those pictures.

So this year I present my friends as I remember them. The boys that I grew up with, played soccer with, discovered girls with. The friends that helped shape my view on life. Glen Wall is on the left, picture is from 1975 I think. We were 13 years old.
Dennis Buckley is on the right from recreational soccer team that he captained (I was on a different team) in 1973. He was 11.

I am dedicating tonight's Literary Cafe Poetry Reading to them. If you come, try to remember that the victims were kids once, too.