The New York Times finally ran the profile on Doug Ketcham, my friend from Monroe Hill at Virginia who was in the World Trade Center when it collapsed. As should surprise no one, Tin Man wrote a much more evocative eulogy for him two months ago…. It still doesn’t seem real. I had lost touch with him after graduating and didn’t even know he was working in New York. Seeing it in the Times just adds to the unreality.
A more appropriate time to be re-reading The Waste Land than I had realized. From “The Burial of the Dead” (which is ironic since Doug is still officially “missing”):
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.