Misreading, out-of-context sentence, and a firetruck kicked my ass

First, the misreading: I was skiing yesterday (yay me!) and saw someone wearing a zippered hoodie that I thought said, in big college block letters, “COLD RADIO”. I spent a fair amount of time wondering if it was a band, or a radio station, or just what, and whether it was a cool phrase or not, and then I got close enough to realize that in fact it said “COLORADO”. I still like Cold Radio better, and it might make a good name for a band.

And that band’s debut album might be named “No One Misses The Dragon,” a random sentence from my fifth-grader’s reading homework that I rather appreciated, for when you think of it, a dragon is probably not a good thing to have around, and I imagine that, once gone, no one would miss it.

And then there was the firetruck. Stuck with meetings all day, but had a quick few minutes to kill so I walked over to the State Museum to see the permanent exhibit on the World Trade Center. It’s fairly small but quite well-done, lots of artifacts and information, and I was okay with all of it until I had to look at the firetruck (something of the elephant in the room), and, just as it did when I saw all the crushed firetrucks stacked like cordwood at the landfill, that image struck me hard and took my breath away for a minute.

One thing that was odd about the exhibit was that there was a display of newspapers from around the country from Sept. 12th. Odd to think of what that must have been like to watch from a distance — we were so close, and so immersed in the response, that it must have been very odd to see from somewhat afar. Also, I don’t remember seeing the papers in the days that followed, although we probably did. Most of the news came in from CNN, as it usually does on fast-breaking tragedies. The curators also highlighted a copy of the Daily News from Sept. 11, found in a police car. How odd to think of that paper, which no doubt thousands of people were carrying around that morning, and yet which no one would ever think to look at again. The headline was about the city’s mayoral primary that day, and Mark Green’s chances, as I recall.