Wife & I woke up to it all, made a few posts here, then had the job of going off & helping elementary school kids understand (Teacher's at the time) what was going on.  

Wave,

I can't even imagine what it was like being as close as you were that day.

Thanks for your service.  I think about you guys all the time.  It takes guts and dedication to keep up the good fight.

Be safe...you are in my prayers.

Never forget.

Quoted: Who would have guessed what would happen the very next morning? Rest in Peace my Brothers and Sisters. Heros to the very end...

+1

How quickly some forget .

I too took the day off and my grandmother called when the first one hit. I saw the second one on TV live. Man I though that was it, confusion, fear, sadness, anger.

I was driving to work on that day I was making a left hand turn on to the side street when they announced on 77WABC that a plane flew in to the first tower.  I thought it must have been an accident, a cloudy day a small Cessna or something flew into the tower.  I had no idea at that moment how bad it was.  I can not recall when they said that second plane hit the other tower but I must have said something is up.  When I heard on the radio that a plane had hit the Pentagon then it hit me like a ton of bricks.  I said "Oh Shit we are at War".  At this time I was working at a gun shop/army navy store in NJ.  We had people coming in and buying up ARs, Mini 30, and ammo was going by the case and what ever we had in gas masks was going out the door.  When I heard that the first tower had collapsed I was shocked.  At that time I had not seen anything on TV and did not fully under stand what was going on.  I had thought it fell over and crushed many buildings.  Until I saw it on TV I then knew it just fell down on it self floor by floor.  For the rest of the day I was scarred and angry.  Trying to get home was difficult I normally drove though FT DIX.  It was the only way I knew I had only moved to Central Jersey on July 31st.  I eventually drove around and ended up on the reservation, went by a side road across from the front gate.  They had concrete dividers in the road and were directing traffic around them.  That was my first time going through a military check point.  

On Monday the 10th I had went up to North Jersey to get some things I had stored at my Aunt’s house.  I drove through Chatham the town I grew up in.  On my way through there is a main road called Fairmont Avenue, along Fairmont there is a cemetery on top of a hill and on a clear day you can see into NY.  Well that day was pretty clear with very few clouds, I looked out and saw the WTC as usual and said that is a nice picture!  Who would have known that the last day I saw the WTC was the day before the attack and I was looking over a cemetery to see it.  That still bothers me to this day.    

NEVER FORGET, GOD BLESS AMERICA.

I feel like I lost a friend. Growing up in lower Manhattan in the late 60's early 70's I watched the towers being built. I remember this brownish red skeleton getting taller and taller every week. I was amazed at the cranes on top of the building lifting materials and the tarps covering parts of the building.
We moved to Brooklyn in 1971 and I missed watching the towers being built right outside my window. When it was completed in 1973 I believe, I thought it was the coolest thing. I went to the observation deck many times and was amazed from the view.
After I moved to Minnesota in 93 I would drive back on I-80 and see the towers from NJ and knew I wasn't far away from the city.
The last time I drove back was in 2003 and not seeing the towers was scary and at the same time pissed me off

9/11 2001 -- 3 YEARS -- NEVER FORGET














They started it:




We're finishing it:






Mullah Omar & buddies lost their jobs...
(I'd post something for that, but cameras wern't on the Taliban's good side...)

66% of Al Queda's leadership is either captured or eliminated...

And this guy took over:

I'll never forget it.  I heard/saw it here first, as I was surfing ARF at work and drinking coffee that morning.  One of my friends called me about 30 seconds after the first plane hit, and I spent the next hour on ARF getting updates.  Then I left for home.

Do you guys all still remember where you were when you first heard about it?

I do...and it still amazes me watching those videos to think that it actually happened.  Watching it on TV makes it almost seem sureal.  

Did anyone get to see it firsthand?

Quoted: Do you guys all still remember where you were when you first heard about it? I do...and it still amazes me watching those videos to think that it actually happened.  Watching it on TV makes it almost seem sureal.   Did anyone get to see it firsthand?

My sister came home from U. Wisc Whitewater (class was canceled) and said 'New York's been bombed'

I said 'Oh great... We're going to war...'

RIP and pray our war will be over soon.
FREE

Quoted: I was sitting on the pier, next to my old boat (ssn-761) after just finishing a reactor startup. The attacks went down, we almost immediately pulled away from the pier, loaded live torpedoes (Mk48ADCAP) and set out to sea to patrol the long island sound/east coast. That was one day I was especially proud to be in the military.

WE were proud of you too. Still am.
Thanks,

Bob

Quoted: I feel like I lost a friend. Growing up in lower Manhattan in the late 60's early 70's I watched the towers being built. I remember this brownish red skeleton getting taller and taller every week. I was amazed at the cranes on top of the building lifting materials and the tarps covering parts of the building. We moved to Brooklyn in 1971 and I missed watching the towers being built right outside my window. When it was completed in 1973 I believe, I thought it was the coolest thing. I went to the observation deck many times and was amazed from the view. After I moved to Minnesota in 93 I would drive back on I-80 and see the towers from NJ and knew I wasn't far away from the city. The last time I drove back was in 2003 and not seeing the towers was scary and at the same time pissed me off

I saw the towers for the first time from a Southwest Airlines jet. We were flying into Albany, NY from Louisville, Ky. The pilot took us over Manhatten and pointed out the towers on our right. I thought it was so cool to see them up close. It was late June, 2001.

The next time I flew to Albany it was in October of 2001, the pilot was pointing out the hole in the ground below us. It was a heart wrenching moment that I will never forget. He even banked the plane in straight flight so we could all take a look to remind us of what had happened.

It was a short trip to Albany for me and a few days later I was on my way home and the flight had a scheduled stop in St. Louis. We were boarding the plane and all of a sudden there was a series of loud roars outside of our plane. The Captain came over  the PA system and said, "Please excuse the noise, that is the sound of freedom overhead". It was the MO. NG carrying out whatever orders they had at the time. The entire plane cheered and clapped at the same time. At that moment everyone in that plane remembered, and we were at war, and united in our purpose.

Today is a little different. Thanks for this thread.

Bob

Growing Up Grieving, With Reminders of Tragedy By ANDREA ELLIOTT, The New York Times   Talk About It       · Chat | Post Messages · Top News Boards     (Sept. 11) - The bone brought sad finality to everyone but Brendan Fitzpatrick. It was proof that his father had died on Sept. 11, 2001. But for Brendan, who is 5, the news that a piece of Thomas Fitzpatrick's humerus had been recovered was vexing, at best. "Can we get all the pieces and put them together?" he recently asked his mother at their home in Tuckahoe, N.Y. "So he could be alive." In Harlem, a different puzzle unfolded for Samuel Fields. He was 10 when the towers collapsed, and knew his father was gone. But he could not cry. He jumped off the steep rocks in Central Park, punched a classmate and, the following summer, wound up in jail for pelting cars with stones. It was only then, after his mother yelled, "Would your father want this?" that the first tears fell.   New York Times Samantha and Danielle DiMartino, left and right, whose mother died on Sept. 11, watching television with their cousin Jacqueline Puma.     Brendan Fitzpatrick and Samuel Fields belong to the vast tribe of young children who lost parents on Sept. 11 - an estimated 3,000 boys and girls who are all working through their own painful puzzles of bewilderment and sorrow. From the start, there were grim forecasts for this group, and rumors: there would be scores of orphans, permanent trauma, a generation forever marred. Charitable foundations were set up, scholarships created.   Families Cope         AP From providing books for homeless children to treating victims of mass violence in Africa, see how the families of 9/11 victims are remembering their loved ones. Story · See a List of 9/11 Memorials       But for all the dark assumptions and the outpouring of sympathy and money, the children of the dead receded from public view. Their families protected them. Journalists shied away from them. Social workers struggled to find them. And psychotherapists confronted a novel clinical challenge: how to treat children who have suffered a loss so brutally intimate yet spectacularly public. Some of the nation's best trauma experts set out to study the group, but struggled merely to diagnose what they encountered. Even identifying the children, determining how many there were and where they lived, took years. Only now is a portrait of the children emerging. They cut across class, ethnic and racial lines but share similarities: most lost a father, and a majority of the children were of grade-school age or younger. If the father who died coached soccer, chances are his son stopped playing. School is avoided on the anniversary. A low-flying plane can send hearts racing. Television is a minefield. Work is identified with death. Many of the surviving parents have quit their careers. With four major studies under way, it is too soon to know the full effect of Sept. 11 on its legacy of bereaved children. Some of the children appear quite resilient, while others are visibly struggling. But patterns have surfaced, ranging from symptoms of anxiety and depression to violent outbursts and social withdrawal. Those in treatment are faring better, though many have avoided it. Teenagers, in the age-old effort to fit in, are most prone to keeping quiet about the horrific way their parents died. And in one of the most powerful and challenging experiences, hundreds of the youngest children - those who were toddlers three years ago - are only now grasping the meaning of death, the fact that their missing fathers and mothers will never return. But all of the children of Sept. 11 are bound by at least one thing: the burden of mourning a private loss that is, at least for this country, historic in stature. Many of the children watched the attacks on television. Year after year, they are confronted with an ambush of reminders - at the movies, in classroom banter, on a poster at the supermarket. To the children, these are not the well-worn images of towers falling and planes crashing, but the deeply intimate, devastating scenes of a parent's death.   More on This Story       · Nation, Families Remember Terrorist Attacks · Bush Attends Prayer Service · WTC Agency to Sue Saudi Arabia for Damages     "It was seeing my dad die over and over and over again," said Sarah Van Auken, 15, whose father, Kenneth Van Auken, worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. Exactly how these children will compare with those who have lost parents in other traumatic events - from car crashes and natural disasters to genocidal wars - remains an open question. But even the most basic facts about the Sept. 11 children remained elusive for years: an estimated 1,459 people - more than half of the victims - were parents, and they left behind at least 2,990 children who were under 18 at the time of the attacks, according to preliminary data compiled by Dr. Claude M. Chemtob, a clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The children span 14 countries, but are concentrated in New York and New Jersey. Among them are 47 pairs of twins, one set of triplets and 81 stepchildren. Their average age at the time of the attacks was 8 1/2. The data were compiled by a team of researchers who began in April 2003 with the city medical examiner's list of the deceased and then culled through thousands of newspaper articles and recruited the help of government agencies and organizations assisting the families. The result is the first known registry of bereaved children; it includes children of the parents lost on the four airplanes and at the Pentagon. More than 100 of them had not yet been born when their fathers died. The registry is still incomplete, and the true tally likely exceeds 3,000, Dr. Chemtob said. (An additional 478 people between the ages of 19 and 56 at the time of the attacks lost a parent, according to the data.) Among the more ambitious goals of Dr. Chemtob's study is to monitor and aid the long-term recovery of the younger set of children. One of the central questions surrounding the Sept. 11 children is how they will fare over the years. Comparisons have been made with the 200-plus children who lost a parent in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. One study showed that exposure to television reports of the bombing was linked to post-traumatic stress symptoms in Oklahoma's bereaved children. But little is known about how well that group recovered in the long term. "Sept. 11 provides an unparalleled opportunity to examine this over time," said Dr. Betty Pfefferbaum, chairwoman of the psychiatry and behavioral studies department at the University of Oklahoma's Health Sciences Center. More is known about the trauma of children in war-torn countries and the young survivors of natural disasters. The Armenian earthquake in 1988 killed some 25,000 people. Investigators from the Trauma Psychiatry Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, tracked 218 of the surviving children for more than five years. They found that those who were given early treatment for trauma symptoms showed significant improvement, whereas those who went without therapy did not measurably improve. The same may hold true for the cohort commonly referred to as the "9/11 kids." In a continuing study of 203 children whose fathers were uniformed service workers - firefighters, police officers, security guards and paramedics - the children who have received treatment are improving substantially more than those who have gone without therapy, said Dr. Marylene Cloitre, a research psychologist and director of the Institute for Trauma and Stress at New York University's Child Study Center.   Project Rebirth         Getty Starting in the spring of 2002, one filmmaker has been using time-lapse cameras around Ground Zero to capture the rebuilding process there. When it's finished, you'll be able to watch the entire rebuild in about 20 minutes. Story · Watch It in Real Time Watch Video: Tracking the Rebirth       "They are suffering in ways that are not currently captured by any diagnosis," said Dr. Cloitre, who has been following the children with a team of colleagues since February 2002. Perhaps the greatest surprise has been that post-traumatic stress disorder has affected only some 12 percent of the children, while the most prevalent problems can be categorized as disruptive disorders, problems with mood and conduct. Moreover, Dr. Cloitre found, the surviving mothers are faring worse than their children. The most pervasive fear among another group of children who lost parents on Sept. 11 is that something will happen to the surviving parent, said Dr. Cynthia Pfeffer, a psychiatry professor at Cornell University's Weill Medical College who has been following more than 70 of the children. "Some of the children have told us they were afraid that Osama bin Laden was lurking in their backyards," she said. Such fear breeds separation anxiety that, for surviving parents, is hard to assuage. "I kind of hold my breath because I don't really know and I can't make promises I can't keep," said Kim Statkevicus, 33, whose son Tyler struggles when she travels without him. Her husband, Derek, was an equity analyst on the 89th floor of the south tower. The experience of the Sept. 11 children falls under the mental health rubric of "traumatic bereavement," a combination of the two greatest crises for any child: trauma and grief. The field of traumatic bereavement studies is growing, and though debate continues over how children grieve and recover from trauma, there is growing consensus about some things. A range of studies of traumatically bereaved children - from those exposed to domestic abuse deaths to the survivors of chemical disasters - show that one of the great challenges is to separate the good memories of the parent from the scene of his or her death. "When you think about the person, your mind goes automatically to the horrific circumstances under which they were killed, and that interferes with the goal of grieving, which is to positively reminisce," said Dr. Alan Steinberg, associate director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. The Sept. 11 children have the added burden of sharing their grief with millions of strangers. "The public wants a heroic memory," Dr. Cloitre said. "The private memory is much more complex." It is common for children to feel anger, resentment and even jealousy toward a parent who has died. But this compendium of emotions is absent from the patriotic, one-dimensional representations of grief assigned to Sept. 11 victims on television and in political speeches. There are few cues that allow for a more complex sorrow. And what should be a personal journey, the process of grieving a parent, is confusingly public.   You Said It           "These kids can't walk from their middle school to the deli to buy a Snapple without seeing 15 references to Sept. 11: the signs in stores, the bumper stickers," said Chris Burke, founder and president of Tuesday's Children, a nonprofit organization that serves 1,200 victims' families. "And when they're in line to buy that Snapple, there's the whisperers. They can't escape it." Grieving in Stages Marianne Fitzpatrick knew her children would ask many questions, and no matter how hard it is to answer them, she always tries. One recent summer day, it was she who began the conversation that is now a central theme of their lives. "Where is Daddy?" "Daddy's in heaven," answered 3-year-old Caralyn, her blue eyes watching for an approving nod. "How do you get to heaven?" "Somebody kills you," answered Brendan. Brendan was 2 when his father, Thomas Fitzpatrick, died in the World Trade Center. Mr. Fitzpatrick worked on the 104th floor of the south tower, as an investment banker for Sandler O'Neill & Partners. Three years later, Brendan is entering the age when children begin to grasp the finality of death, usually between 5 and 7. Some 520 children who lost a parent on Sept. 11 are at this stage, according to the Mount Sinai data. At the cusp of it, Brendan wavers between hopeful confusion and sober resignation. Just when he seems to understand that his father is gone, another cascade of questions begins. It is the physicality of his father's death that has proved most vexing. Last year Mrs. Fitzpatrick, 38, learned that the medical examiner's office had identified part of a humerus as her husband's, prompting Brendan to ask if they could find more bones and bring his father back to life. Another day, as he and his mother were watching television, a panned shot of ground zero appeared. Brendan insisted that they keep watching. "He said, 'I might see Daddy,' " recalled Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who lives with her children in a brick house in leafy Tuckahoe. On other days Brendan asks why he did not witness, first hand, the planes hit and the towers fall. He seems to think that if he could see it, he could make sense of it. "What children struggle to do is to understand what happened and what it means, and then try to solve it," said Dr. David J. Schonfeld, an associate professor of pediatrics and child study at Yale University's School of Medicine. Lately, Brendan has been fixated on a character from the cartoon program "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy," a skeleton that walks and talks. "He's dead, and he came back alive," Brendan said while playing with a toy tool set one afternoon. "But you know that can't really happen," Mrs. Fitzpatrick said. "It can," he said. Perhaps the most trying thing about watching children grieve is that it happens incrementally: they grieve as they grow. Every few years, children reprocess the death of a parent in ways that match their newfound stage of cognitive development. This reprocessing becomes especially arduous for the Sept. 11 children.   More From The Times       · 'Apprentice' Is Learning the Trump Style · Kerry Invokes Bible in Appeal for Black Votes · Republicans Riled by Two CNN Hosts     "They're not only revisiting the loss of the parental figure, they have to revisit the whole horrific way their parents died: the smoke, the people jumping out of the buildings, some people not recovering the bodies," said MaryEllen Salamone, president of Families of September 11, a nonprofit organization. Mrs. Salamone, whose husband, John, worked on the 104th floor of the north tower, has three children under age 9. "It's kind of like a domino effect. They're reminded of the loss, how that loss occurred, how scary it was." The youngest children, like Brendan, also face another kind of loss: the fast-fading memories of the parent who died. "He desperately tries to remember the little bit that he has in his mind," Mrs. Fitzpatrick said. "We have to work on creating the memory, keeping him alive in their eyes." But the preservation of memories can complicate the instruction of death: photographs and stories almost compete with the notion that the person is irreversibly gone. Brendan and Caralyn love most to watch videos of their father - they offer a three-dimensional picture and a voice. For the same reason, they are too painful for Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who usually leaves the room. More commonly, the children stare at a cardboard memorial filled with their father's likeness, which Brendan keeps in his room. One afternoon, they sat huddled beneath the array of photographs: Mr. Fitzpatrick at the zoo, getting married, holding baby Brendan. "Dada! Dada!" cried Brendan, reaching toward the photos as if to touch his father. "There's Dada." Learning to Cry The fight began with a simple but cruel taunt. "You're going to get your father?" Samuel Fields recalled the boy saying. "Oops, I forgot. You don't have one." Fights brew among fifth-grade boys in Harlem. But conflict was a rarity in Samuel Fields's world, one defined by a father who listened to the Beatles, went to church every Sunday and quietly delighted in helping with homework. That man, a 36-year-old security guard also named Samuel Fields, entered the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and never re-emerged. The four children and pregnant wife Mr. Fields left behind sat huddled in their Lenox Avenue apartment for days, fixed on the news. It was the last time any of them watched a news program. Samuel, the oldest child, stood by as his family grieved. He could not cry. And away from home, he kept his ache quiet. But when Mr. Fields's body was identified three months later, word spread at Samuel's school. Then came the taunt, and the answer in Samuel's fists. "I beat him up," he said. And there began one boy's leap from 10-year-old child to man of the house. There was no father to defend him anymore. No man to help his mother run the house. No one to protect his siblings, fend off the ghosts at night, make everything O.K. With a stoicism rare for any child, Samuel filled in. He mopped the floors, gave baths, enforced the rules. That February, his mother, Angela, gave birth to her fifth child. And by the end of the school year, it was clear that Samuel would have to repeat the fifth grade. For all the help he offered at home, Samuel was rebelling in the world outside. He threw his grief into the fights at school, the rocks at Central Park. And then there was the arrest for throwing stones at cars (though Samuel says his friends did it, not he). Like plenty of other Sept. 11 children, Samuel had become a premature parent in a house undone. Taped to the wall of his bedroom is a hand-scrawled schedule of the tasks he shares with his mother: "6:30 a.m., have clothes ironed," "6-7:30 p.m. bath time, 30 min. each child." At first, he reacted with anger and a lack of inhibition, behavior that mental health professionals studying the Sept. 11 children are struggling to understand. "Is it a feature of bereavement or is it a feature of the loss of structure in the environment?" said Dr. Pfeffer, who is conducting the study at Cornell University. Grief is expressed in a range of ways, and while there are stages of sorrow, no two people mourn identically. In Samuel's family, the death of Mr. Fields is an unspoken thing. A poster-size photograph of him, framed in gold, hangs in the living room, taken six months before he died. He is smiling gently, hands folded, in a new white suit. "We don't talk about it," said Samuel, who is now 13. "Everyone says, 'Don't talk about it, that way you won't remember anything.' " Samuel, two of his brothers and Mrs. Fields, 38, have all seen counselors. But many of the Sept. 11 families have shied away from therapy, partly because of the stigma attached and also because traditional psychoanalysis was thought to be insufficient for the Sept. 11 victim families. They needed not just to explore their feelings, but to learn practical coping strategies: how to be a single parent, begin dating, organize the finances. Addressing these burdens is crucial to bereaved children because past studies have shown that they fare only as well as their parents. Mrs. Fields may return to therapy, and her children are improving every day. But perhaps none have come as far as Samuel. A taller, calmer, more confident boy, he is now entering the seventh grade. In the three long years since his father died, several things have happened that made life better. He discovered music. He got a tutor. And he met John Danny Madden, a music producer who became Samuel's de facto big brother, through a program that matches adult mentors with the bereaved children of Sept. 11, coordinated by Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City. "The kid that I met was quiet, somewhat afraid, somewhat shut down," Mr. Madden said. "Samuel now is a thinking child. He can talk about what he feels." Samuel began writing lyrics two years ago, and he recorded one of his songs, "Thinking About You," for an album produced by Mr. Madden. The song is about his father. Among the lyrics is a reference to something Samuel finally how learned to do: There are times when I cry, And all I have to say is I've been thinking about you. Facing Change Not long ago, Danielle DiMartino came crying to her father. She told him she dreamt that a woman entered the house and started changing the furniture. "I know there was no dream," said Joe DiMartino. Three years after Danielle's mother, Debra Ann DiMartino, died at the World Trade Center, her father had finally done what seemed impossible: he had fallen for another woman. Mr. DiMartino tried to reassure his daughter, who is now 13. No one could replace her mother, he said, and no one would touch the house. But as life pushes on for thousands of families like Danielle's, change is inevitable. It is also, for bereaved children, perhaps the greatest crucible. For one thing, change represents a form of death. It is also a reminder, with milestones like graduations and weddings, that the deceased parent is no longer there. "Leaving home isn't just about leaving home, it's about leaving their mother who was left by their father," said Dr. Cloitre. "Every teenager goes through a difficult period when they first fall in love and lose that love, but what is it going to be like for someone who has lost a parent? They know the worst that can happen when you lose someone." Danielle's parents were married for 16 years. A photograph of the night they became engaged hangs in a hallway, the young woman's eyes red with emotion. Their final picture together, in a frame, shows the cruise they took with their daughters, three weeks before Mrs. DiMartino died. "I was on the phone with her when the plane went through the building, watching it," said Mr. DiMartino, 46. His wife worked on the 89th floor of the south tower, as the vice president of equity trading for Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Instantly, Danielle entered a motherless world. She was among some 340 other children who lost a mother that day, according to the Mount Sinai data. For weeks, she slept on the den floor, alongside her 4-year-old sister, Samantha, and their father. He never returned to his job as a foreman at Pepsi-Cola. "In their young minds, she went to work and she never came home, so going to work is a possibility of never coming home again," Mr. DiMartino said. Danielle is a deeply pensive girl. Long wisps of curly hair swallow her face. She has a runner's temperament, steady and quiet. For four years, she ran track with a team her mother coached. When Mrs. DiMartino was killed, Danielle quit running. Work stopped. Track ended. For a long time, everything halted in a house that became consumed with the act of memorializing. Their street, Sharrotts Road, was given the second legal name of Debra Ann DiMartino Way. "Deb!" was programmed onto the large screen of their television. A wood-carved memorial of the World Trade Center hangs framed in their living room, dedicated to Mrs. DiMartino. A silver mercy bracelet bearing her name circles Mr. DiMartino's wrist. Everything remained: Mrs. DiMartino's doll collection, the marble-pink acrylic she chose for the kitchen counter. A row of green hearts that she had started painting, Danielle later finished: they now border the girl's room. Over the summer, Mr. DiMartino fell in love with Marisa Bringmann, the best friend of his neighbor's wife. But the change was not easy for him, either. "That first kiss I gave her was the hardest thing in the world," he said. He does not plan to live with Ms. Bringmann unless they marry. But recently they chose a new bedroom set. One afternoon in August, Danielle was sitting at the pink kitchen counter, thumbing through catalogs. Samantha and two cousins leaned in to admire some pens Danielle had bought for school. One of the pens could light up, prompting a cousin, Jacqueline Puma, to share a small anecdote, which began, "My mom was in Staples, and she was looking at all the school supplies " If stories that begin with somebody else's mother still sting, Danielle does not show it. She stared unflinchingly at the catalog, turning the page. When the coterie drifted out of the kitchen, the topic turned to the new bedroom set. "I don't want the upstairs to change," she said. "But he's gonna change it anyway." She offered a small smile. Recently, it turns out, she told her father that she wanted him to be happy. And a funny thing happened at the start of the school year. Danielle joined the track team again. 09-11-04 10:10 EDT Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company.