Monthly Archives: September 2026

On 25th Anniversary of 9/11, Some Reflecting

by Woody

In remembrance of today’s 25th anniversary of 9/11, here is my column that originally ran in 2015 following a road trip up and down the Eastern Seaboard…

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The Smiling Pool from a series of children’s books by Thornton Burgess is aptly named because its curved shape, when viewed from atop an overlooking hill – as Burgess did often during his boyhood in East Sandwich, Massachusetts – resembles a smile.

Indeed, it remains a happy place to sojourn as I learned during my recent tour of his home-turned-museum.

My emotions were completely polar at the next pool of water I visited. Actually, pools plural: the twin reflecting pools at the National September 11 Memorial in lower Manhattan. The Crying Pools seems apropos.

Each reflecting pool is nearly an acre square and situated on the footprints where the Twin Towers once majestically stood. Water pours over all four edges of each pool at a rate of 3,000 gallons per minute, forming waterfall curtains, before disappearing down a small square abyss at the bottom.

The symbolism of the flow rate is heartrending because nearly 3,000 lives disappeared in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and Feb. 26, 1993. The victims’ names are inscribed on bronze panels on the parapets surrounding the pools. Visitors’ eyes, in turn, often become miniature reflecting pools overflowing with tears.

This was my first return to the site since Tuesday, June 11, 2002 (I still have my “WTC:00 Viewing Platform – 2:00-2:30 pm” ticket), nine months to the day after the World Trade Center became Ground Zero.

I remember very little from those 2002 NBA Finals I covered, other than the Los Angeles Lakers played the New Jersey Nets. But the sight of the steep-sided square hole in the ground remains unforgettable. It looked like a gargantuan grave.

Inside the completed 9/11 Memorial Museum the somberness is even more overwhelming than at the twin reflecting pools. Boxes of tissues are placed liberally throughout and empty quickly. My wife teared up within the first two minutes of entering the exhibition; I did so even sooner.

To tour the museum once is a must, I believe; I believe also I could not bear to do so again.

To describe the experience would require a dozen columns. Instead, I will share a single image that most profoundly punched me in the soul. It is the transcript of a phone call from Brian Sweeney, a 38-year-old passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 175, to his wife. Julie was not home, so he left his last words on their answering machine:

“Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good. Go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you and I’ll see you when you get there. Bye, babe. I’ll try to call you.”

At 9:03 a.m. the plane crashed into the South Tower.

My trip of the Eastern Seaboard had earlier taken on an “author” theme with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Thornton W. Burgess playing roles.

However, I believe Brian Sweeney’s words – composed with no time for writer’s block, no chance to revise and edit and polish – are as potent and poignant as any left behind by the above literary masters.

After telling my son, whom I was visiting, to “do good” and have “a good time” and that I “absolutely love” him, I hugged him goodbye while blinking repeatedly to keep my twin reflecting pools from overflowing, and boarded a jetliner so similar –and so polar – to the one Brian Sweeney took.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Rivers Run Through Him

by Woody

“What really knocks me out,” Holden Caulfield, the narrator in “The Catcher in the Rye,” says, “is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

That perfectly sums up how I felt when Roger W. Thompson’s debut book “My Best Friend’s Funeral,” a coming-of-age memoir, came out a dozen years ago.

As luck would have it, the author lives in Ventura and so instead of making a phone call, for I had never met him, I attended one of his book signings and asked if he wanted to get a beer sometime.

To my great luck, he did.

To my greater luck, we hit it off like trout and mountain streams and ever since have enjoyed “Beer Thirty” (to use Roger’s term) happy hours because (to use my late mom’s reasoning about why weddings should commence on the half-hour) time slows down when the minute hand is sweeping uphill.

Author Roger Thompson at play…

Roger’s second book, a travel memoir titled “We Stood Upon Stars,” made me fall further in love with his elegant prose that makes time seem to slow down as you savor the rhythm and cadence of his sentences that flow like burbling brooks, with eddies here and gentle riffles there, bends and pools elsewhere and hidden beauty and depth beneath the surface.

The above description of Roger’s writing came to me while reading his brand-new book, “The Wisdom of Rivers: Family, Friendship, and the Fly-Fishing Life,” that once again knocked me out.

I am therefore thrilled to be moderating a public conversation and Q & A with Roger at his book launch signing this Tuesday, September 8, from 6 to 8 p.m., at Iron & Resin at 324 E. Main Street in Downtown Ventura.

Norman Maclean’s masterwork “A River Runs Through It” has long been my favorite fishing-themed book, but it now shares top-shelf billing with “The Wisdom of the River.” With both the former novella and the latter memoir, one need not be a fly fisherman-or-woman to be hooked and enthralled.

More than about fishing, “The Wisdom of the River” is about Friendships, Fatherhood, Love, and Faith — these being the four tributaries this hardback gem forks into. Each section features a handful of themed essays, all of which carry faint echoes of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, and prove the truth of this line by the Muir-bearded Thompson: “In every good fisherman, there is a better storyteller.”

A tall accomplishment considering Roger, a zealous angler since boyhood, has trout streams coursing through his veins.

“Our lives are filled with more important things than fishing,” Roger writes. “Sometimes, it take fishing to figure out what they are.”

“The Wisdom of the River” is filled with important things.

“What began as mine is now ours,” Roger further shares, speaking about teaching his wife, Melissa, and sons, Austin and Hayden, to fly fish. But this Angling Apostle is also talking to all of us who read his poetic prose and vicariously join him on a fishing (and life) journey by turning these pages — “Book Thirty” pages, because they are best read starting on the half-hour so they pass by more slowly.

Yes, what began as Rog’s writing is now ours to relish.

Me, I am doubly blessed because I get to have 16-ounce conversations whenever I feel like it with my terrific friend who wrote this knockout book.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.