W-2001RUSL-DM.doc

Extracted from Darrell & Mary 2001 activities file

Bobbitt Reunion St Louis: We attended the Bobbitt family reunion in St Louis in Sept. during which the cousins spent some time at the Morris home. They have a lovely three level home, shown in the photo, with a small creek in their back yard. Alan grows bees, and traps critters along the creek, later releasing them out in the country. They feed the local wild life and are rewarded by a family of raccoons that come up on their back porch to partake in a cat food feast. While there we toured the St Louis Arch and the Budweiser brewery.

WTC 9-11: We stayed over as Judy and Alan Morris house guests an extra day, scheduled to fly from St Louis to Santa Ana CA at noon Sept 11 -- thus it was that we watched the unbelievable events of airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center towers – followed by the towers collapse. For all of us, life has not been the same since. I found myself glued to the TV with my mind trying to grapple with it’s full meaning. At first I was amazed the towers absorbed the impact – I was late in anticipating the collapse, but huge amounts of fuel ablaze heated the steal beams, their collapse was inevitable. After the collapse and the impact had sunk in – my thoughts changed from pessimism to optimism – I was convinced those people had not died in vain. The world had long been in need of facing up to terrorism.