Omaha kept Patriot Day. Governor Jim Pillen had United States and state flags at half-staff from sunrise to sunset on Friday. Mayor John Ewing’s Heartland Honors 9/11, eleven days of service across the metro, closed that morning with an honour guard in Council Bluffs, a memorial mass, a hundred flags at Friday football. A stair climb is still set for Saturday. The Playhouse is inside Come From Away, the Gander story, through the weekend.
A flag that flew over Ground Zero has been walking Greater Nebraska. That was the city on the date. Not a headline about a chase. A city keeping a promise.Twenty-five years ago the same date arrived there as cancelled boards at Eppley and two big screens at Mutual of Omaha. Creighton students held each other after a noon vigil. ConAgra’s flags went to half-staff the next morning.
The University of Nebraska Omaha already had a Centre for Afghanistan Studies; after that Tuesday it became a place the country kept asking questions of. None of that needs dressing. It is the local record.Far from that river, on the same afternoon, a shop in Paarl stopped selling. The wall of sets changed colour. The street went quiet. We have told that story on this site. The point of telling Omaha’s morning next to it is not to borrow grief. It is to say the glass was shared. A reader in the Missouri valley and a man at a counter in the Boland were given the same picture at different hours. The names read at the Memorial pools are the names a Nebraska flag is lowered for.If you are in Omaha this weekend, the honour is still in the streets.
If you came here first because a Paarl floor sounded like a room you remember, this page is only the other room. Same day.
Same refusal to forget.
