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Yipes. I saw something awful in the paper yesterday. It was our local free weekly paper -- the kind of plastic-wrapped, smells-funny-when-you-first-open-it publication that all non-city-dwellers find in their driveway once a week whether they want it there or not. Ours is called the "Community Life." I usually enjoy looking it over. Gardening tips! Recipes! But, especially, local small-time politicos and their rustling, mumbling Angry Mobs, who get thoroughly apoplectic over perceived Serial Offenses by whomever is on the "opposing side", and routinely raise horrible shitstorms over tiny little issues that mean nothing to anyone but them and their idiot friends. It's entertaining -- till, of course, it spills over onto your own front lawn the way it sometimes does -- and it can go on for months and months. In fact, the recent Schwarzenegger Silliness in California didn't make us bat an eye here. A gubernatorial recall is, of course, a big deal on a big scale; but we have a recall election -- with all the attendant vitriol, slander, libel, and property damage (seriously) -- every couple of years or thereabouts. I wish these people would find themselves a fucking hobby or six and stop lobbing ungrammatical salvos (salvi?) at each other in the local paper, inbetween the photos of smiling third-graders at the Woodside School Hallowe'en Picnic. Okay, anyway, that's not what I'm here to talk about. My eyes were just drifting aimlessly over a piece about a memorial plaque or something, being placed in Park Ridge NJ (the town I grew up in, about three miles from here) for a woman who had died in the World Trade Center attack on 9/11. That's odd, I thought -- much had been made, back in those awful weeks following that awful day, about which local residents were lost or missing. My town (River Vale) had exactly one. Park Ridge, though, had a whole bunch of them, a large number for a small town of roughly 8000 people. But this woman's name, the one the new memorial was dedicated to, did not ring a bell. And that was weird, because the BIG LIST OF NAMES showed up in the papers time and again following the disaster. So I read the article instead of skipping over the rest of it. And that's when I found out why she hadn't been mentioned previously -- she hadn't lived in the area for over 20 years. Turns out she was one of the many heroes during the disaster -- she got safely out of her 90th-floor office, and then instead of just leaving the building immediately, went UP the stairs to try and shepherd some of her co-workers out. She managed to make a phone call to her husband, telling him about this, all before the second tower was hit and everyone still thought it was a horrible accident. And that was the last that he or anyone else ever heard from her. Tower #1 came down shortly afterward, with her still inside. And I was just about to stop reading the article when they finally mentioned her maiden name. Alayne Friedenreich. A good friend of mine in high school. I had completely lost track of her, as long ago as 1974. But the girl was as unforgettable as.....well, as the name "Alayne Friedenreich." I know there are thousands upon thousands of folks with stories just like this one -- it just felt terribly weird to have it come to light two years after the fact. Alayne was two years younger than I, Class of '74. I went back to my own yearbook and found a picture I had taken of her......  This was the only time I ever saw her without a smile on her face, and I'll blame it on the bubble gum. (Sorry about the purple deal....this was actually considered kind of cool in 1972, when they were too cheap to let us use actual color photos in yearbooks -- or, had color photography not yet been invented? I forget......) Love you, Alayne.
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