I went downtown on September 11th, the flags were up to commemorate 9/11, it’s a lot of years later now but I still remember that day clearly. I was in London, day off from my full-time summer job of being a tour guide on the open-top buses in London, a couple of weeks before I was set to move to the south of France for a year. The radio when I woke up that morning was all about the economy and how we didn’t know what was going to happen less than a year into the Bush presidency, and well they weren’t wrong, they didn’t know what would happen next. It was some time in the early afternoon I think, I was listening to music in my bedroom and for some reason I decided to turn the radio back on, when I heard they were talking about the news of a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers in New York. I had just dreamed about flying over New York a few days before, having always wanted to go there. Like most people I thought it must be just a strange and terrible accident. I turned on the TV just as the second plane hit, and then knew it was something far worse. Well we all saw the rest, that horrible day etched in memory, at least those of us that were around then. The next week in London was surreal, New York being like a sister city to us, with extra security everywhere, and my bus tours were full of stranded, slightly bewildered Americans unable to fly back home. When I moved over here, 9/11 was still relatively fresh, Bin Laden hadn’t been caught yet, and over the years it’s become one of those events from the past like the Kennedy assassination, or Pearl Harbour, or Chernobyl (which along with the Challenger explosion was the big disaster event of my childhood; I had the newspaper clippings on my wall, next to posters of Michael J. Fox and Glenn Hoddle). It’s a little mind-blowing to me that this was before the memories or even births of many people I meet today, but that’s how the world works isn’t it, a lot of history happened before I was born too. Spurs winning the league for example. Anyway, enough history talk. I was downtown on this 9/11, the flags were up, and I stood on 3rd Street outside the Manna Korean restaurant (I’ve never actually eaten there) next to Zia’s Italian Deli (been in there many times, especially at Christmas for my panettone). This is a typical downtown Davis view, if I am ever to do a book this would probably go in there, this is the Davis you recognize every day.