MY DAD’S HANKERCHIEFS
Sebastian Weinberg, whose parents Samari and Len Weinberg ran Hands On! A Musical Experience, the children’s music school on Warren until 2015, has a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer on personal items from 9/11. His story is especially moving, and sadly ends with the death of his father in 2016 from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the lung disease that has killed many first responders as well. Sebastian’s memento are the handkerchiefs his father always kept on him and used that day, as he and his wife ran from the dust cloud that enveloped them as they walked to work that morning.

“In my recollection of that story, it was always that my dad gave my mom his handkerchief to put over her face to help stop the smoke. But talking to my mom, 20 years later, it was actually my mom telling my dad to take out his handkerchief and use it himself,” Sebastian writes. “It probably helped my personal narrative — my dad giving a little bit of his life to my mom while the world was crumbling around them. But it was my mom, as always, looking after him.”

ORDINARY HEROES AND A MEMOIR OF 9/11
The Times reviews “Ordinary Heroes | A Memoir of 9/11” by Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer, whose book is a way to “learn the words to express the spiritual, professional and personal crises 9/11 caused him.”

“On this 20th anniversary of 9/11, we need to do more than remember. We need to ask what we learned. Pfeifer’s record of that day and its aftermath surely enters the canon as one of the necessary documents of 9/11. But it’s his inclusive sense of public service, one that values the heroism of those who do ordinary things in extraordinary times, that makes ‘Ordinary Heroes’ a book for today.”

TRIBECA GRILL ON 9/11
NY1 talks to Tribeca Grill’s Drew Nieporent, who flips through scrapbooks of news clippings and photos from the days following the Sept. 11th attacks, when the restaurant was feeding rescue workers. Tribeca Grill was closed at the time of the attacks, but starting the next day he dedicated his restaurant to helping the first responders. “I think it was more of a knee jerk reaction — let’s do something, food’s going to go to waste. We made sandwiches and soup,” Nieporent said.