In this weeks edition:

September is not my favorite month…
September has never been my favorite month. It started when I was a child. My father died, unexpectedly at a very young age, in September. It became a difficult month for my family. Over time, unfortunately it seems, it’s not a very good month for the rest of our country either.
Today we remember 9-11. It was a tragic day in our history and the pain is certainly still prevalent even 16 years later.
9-11 is one of those events that you always remember where you were and/or what you were doing when you heard the devastating news. I was walking by the firehouse on my way to the post office to collect the office mail, when a fellow fireman asked me if I had heard the news. Like most American’s I spend the next several days glued to the television trying to figure out the details and make sense of the tragedy.
This year, with just a few day of September in the history books, we have our second hurricane wreaking havoc on millions of our citizens in Florida. We have not even begun to recover from the damage that the first hurricane of the season inflicted on Texas and Alabama.
At this writing I don’t have a good understanding of the severity of the disaster in Florida as I haven’t had time to watch the national news or other forms of the media during these final hours of our production schedule. As soon as the paper goes to press, I’ll correct that.
I’m sure there are hundreds, if not thousands who are experiencing that same emptiness and despair that my mother, brother and I did in 1967 when we lost my dad. Do we wish there was something we could do to fix it? Yes, most do. The truth is we can’t.
However, life does go on and while we didn’t realize it then and most suffering today won’t, it does get some better. I can’t say it’s easy, but we are the type of people who somehow… manage to survive whatever we must face. We all have our way of coping and we will witness many examples of that fortitude in the coming days and weeks. Just like 9-11 we will somehow go on. But, the scares will never go away…