From Earl Snyder 9/11/2001 I had been thinking about what I would post to pay tribute to those we lost on 9/11, 25 years after that fateful day. It seemed nothing I scribbled down gave it the credence and respect this historical event deserved. Everything I typed seemed to fall short of satiating my desire to express my feelings. All my writings seemed hollow and unreal. Knowing there are a lot of people that weren’t yet born or were too young to remember that horrible day, I felt obligated to at least shed some light on those events and their impact on the average person. Those in the category of too young, please keep in mind, the iPhones were still 6 years away and social media was an embryo. All immediate information came from radio and TV. My experiences on September 11, 2001. It was Tuesday morning the week after Labor Day, and I was getting used to having summer give way to fall. I remember driving to work listening to the radio. As I pulled into the parking lot, the DJ interrupted a block of Styx songs and said a plane had flown into the World Trade Center towers. I immediately thought this couldn’t be right. I brushed it off and walked into the office. There was an odd sense of vacancy in the building. I was wondering where everyone was. I grabbed my mug and headed to the break room for some coffee. The break room was jammed-packed with all the missing workers huddled around a 20-inch TV watching the news. No one was saying a word. There was a video showing smoke billowing out of one of the towers. I thought to myself, ‘that is a lot of damage from a small plane’. I grabbed my coffee and went to my desk and began to work. About 20 minutes later, I heard someone say a second plane had hit the second tower, and this was an airliner, not a private plane………My mouth dropped……What were the chances of this being an accident?????? I couldn’t connect the dots. Then word came that a third plane slammed into the outer ring of the Pentagon. What? My disbelief turned into fear. There was an anxious pit in my gut and a level of panic I had never experienced. My boss came into the office and said we were closing and we should go home to be with our loved ones. In a daze, I started to drive home attentively listening to the news on the radio. The commute was surreal. There was no traffic. My normal 15-minute commute only took about 7 minutes but in my mind, it seemed to be an hour. At the time, I was living about ½ mile from the St. Louis Airport. I had lived by the airport most of my life and had gotten used to the noise of jets taking off and landing. In 2001, St. Louis Airport was the major hub for TWA. Southwest was constantly expanding its service. There was never a break in the noise level from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m.. That day on the ride home, I heard nothing!….. I rolled my windows down in the car and there was nothing but the sound of my tires rolling on the highway. The silence was deafening. I pulled into my driveway and ran into the house. My wife and my mother-in-law were watching the TV. A look of horror was on their faces as the first tower collapsed. My wife looked at me for answers as to what was happening. I tried to assure her we’d be alright, but that was futile as I had no clue whether we were going to be or not. Just then, the newscaster announced a fourth airliner had been hijacked and it was on its way to Washington DC. The military was scrambling fighters to shoot down anything in the sky that was in a rogue trajectory. We were under attack. Then the second tower collapsed. Then we heard the fourth plane had crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Our world would never be the same.

From Crazy Uncle Earl’s Attic: A Hump Day Pondering!! A picture’s worth a thousand words……. This adage has been around for a long time. Some say a newspaper editor coined it in the early 1900s. Some attribute it to Confucius. Regardless of who said it, it is genius. The sight of seeing something for the first time is like smelling salts to the brain. It stimulates synapses, creating memories and mind art that is permanent cave painting on the walls of your conscious. As I was a kid, and when we took a rare family vacation, my big sister was designated the family archivist. She was the keeper of the family camera, a seafoam green Savoy by Imperial that used 620 film that had 12 pictures per roll. She would LOAD UP her camera bag with the 3 rolls of film for a one-week vacation. Thirty-six photos were more than enough to capture our journey. When we returned from our vacation, we’d drop off the film at the local drug store to be sent off to be developed at some photo lab somewhere in some exotic location like Peoria. Ten to 14 days later, we’d go back to the drug store. When the clerk handed my dad the three photo envelopes containing our vacation memories, we young-ins began to ricochet off the walls. The trip home from the drug store seemed like an eternity. All of us were in the back seat of the Hudson Hornet bouncing around like a gross of ping-pong balls being dropped down an elevator shaft. Once back home, we’d race into the house and sit at the kitchen table waiting to grab a glimpse of the photos. Our anticipation was palpable. We were like a school of piranhas waiting for its next morsel of flesh. To tease us, Dad would slowly open up the envelope of photos and pull them out one at a time. He’d further instigate our fervor by inspecting each snapshot, then very slowly passing the photo over to my older sister for her to see. As my sister grabbed the photo, the feeding frenzy was underway. All of us kids were swarming around our sister just to see the photo that would unleash the bubbles of time bottled up since we came back from vacation. The other day I ran across some photos we took in 1962 on a vacation to Calumet Horse Farms in Lexington, Kentucky. I opened the photo album and instantly traveled back in time over 60 years. That picture of my brother, sister, and me standing in front of some nondescript roadside plaque sparked memories of acres of green rolling fields, miles of bright white wooden fencing, and pastures of thoroughbred horses. All the photos from my childhood were “keepers”. All photos were purposeful. When you went to an event, you were fully engaged in the event. The sights…the sounds…the smells… When you wanted to capture a memory on film, you tried your best to capture the moment. If by some chance you missed the shot with your camera, your mind lens had already stored it in your memory. I miss that in the digital age we live in now. Not one moment of our lives is unrecorded. Unless your phone is off and you’re by yourself in a cave somewhere, your image is being captured by numerous devices from multiple angles. Is this necessary? All of these images being captured and stored in the cloud or relegated to social media where they live digitally in perpetuity to be accessed by no one and everyone. If we are anywhere, we make sure we hold the phone up in front of our face and hit the capture button. But I wonder what memories are being captured in the hard drive in your head. If heaven forbid, the “cloud broke”, what memories would be in our minds? What experience did we have? What was the takeaway of this moment in time? If ten thousand years into the future, will extraterrestrial anthropologists be scouring our digital archives and wonder what kind of strange species we were?