When the Smoke Clears

In tribute to the victims of 9/11, many of us are taking one or two and writing about them. Some of us can find information. Some of us, such as Michelle, have very close ties to many who were killed that day.

I’ve heard from other places that it is time to get over this, time to move on, put it behind us as a nation. Our grandparents didn’t mourn Pearl Harbor every year for years afterwards, they say. Actually, they did for a while. And they also came together as a nation to fight a war to rid them of the enemies. We seem to be fighting an internal war to forget the enemies and undermine the fight, our courage left behind. And for the most part, almost none of us make any real sacrifices for this war. We wrap ourselves in the cloak of self-victimization as if we gain some moral supremacy because we had to wait through airport security. Even worse, those of us who dishonor the memory of our fallen and injured for dishonest reasons, serving our own political agenda which actually undermines what they were fighting for, and puts their brothers left alive in further jeopardy.

That’s why we have to remember Isidro.

Unfortunately, there is not much to be found about Mr. Ottenwalder. He was nearly my age when he was murdered, probably single, like me. Judging from the few comments left at memorial sites by distant relatives, some who never knew him, he was of both Spanish and German backgrounds, probably an immigrant to our country who had distant relations here. He could have been from Europe, or South America just as easily. And he worked at the Windows on the World restaurant in the Trade Center Towers.

Each day that he went to work he must have been fascinated and appreciative of where he was, living in New York, working at a place where he was able to meet and greet people from all over the world, and having a constantly commanding view of all around him. He was doing his job, pursuing a plan, and he was in America, contributing to what we are. To work at such a place means he had to have excelled at his work. Such a restaurant is a far cry from a chain restaurant in the food court of a shopping mall. He was an individual, perhaps not even a full US citizen yet, but wherever he was from, he was in a unique place. There was nothing else in the world like the top of one of the Trade Center towers, except, perhaps, its twin next door, both a memory.

I wonder if he saw what was coming. I hope he did not suffer. I pray each time I think of those so desparate, the images almost NEVER displayed though they should be, of our fellow men and women deciding to jump to their deaths rather than be burned alive. Those are the images I remember most.

But I will not forget. I am not nurturing wounds, but am full of determination that, however I can, I will not let myself lose sight of the type of people who murdered him and so many others, ever vigilant, ever pursuing the next step in the war, protecting those I can, serving those who protect me.

But this is about Isidro and the others like him, who went to work one day, with hopes, fears, fantasies, worries, but never imagining what would happen that morning, life interrupted for no reason other than an accident of location when men so wrapped in dogma committed evil. On this, there is no debate.

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