fire island

Jennie and I are quite sure that the time before the WTC were the "Glory Days" and that in the future it will be remembered as such.
I caught her digging through the neighbors paper recyclry today, lately she's been looking through old magazines. The old, "before WTC" world. She says that she can't help reading about those "innocent days", I think she reads that they were not as innocent or necessarily 'Golden' as she remembered. My well tanned, well educated, prolific friend has come to the only conclusion that those days before were, well... stupid. I know she'll keep reading, hoping to find a better definition.
(I mentioned to her today that even the New York gossip columnists have joined the blood lines in Manhattan, and that no one knows what to think.)
We are all looking for definition.
Artists are frantically searching for a symbol to replace the American flag for our grief and remembrance of this tragedy.
Name this deceased era, the one only two weeks dead.
I am searching for more words, a new vocabulary, since nothing before can describe the shock, the gut sensation of 15 semis or fire trucks heading down Broadway. The silence in the streets, the burnt smell wafting all the way uptown weeks later, the faces of pain walking past, which I TOO FEEL. Nothing can describe the unified gasp within and beside, a picture of a north bound truck hauling away the exoskeleton of the familiar giants.
Taking them away.
This is a new time, something I cannot explain, something I cannot protect from my dearest friend who reads pages of innocents of a summer now vanished.