“I usually stuff the squid-head with breadcrumbs and put it right on the grill. It’s my own recipe.” Somehow our waiter at the Times Square Olive Garden thought we’d be interested in knowing that as he placed the calamari on our third floor table overlooking Broadway. That was the second grossest thing during dinner, just edged out by a hair in Jessica’s Shrimp Scampi. We were in too much of a hurry to make a stink about it, but the Olive Gardeners threw us a $20 gift certificate for our hairy situation.

Nine hours earlier a yellow taxi dropped us in the historic Chelsea meatpacking district. We were there to visit the Ground Zero Museum Workshop and we had about an hour before our scheduled appointment. Nature had granted us a beautiful and unseasonably fair day, so we just started walking. We’d only strolled about a block and a half when I saw an interesting and artsy doorway that was very active opening and closing for people of all shapes and sizes. We had no idea, but as their website describes, we’d “stumbled upon the heart of Chelsea, a one stop culinary food shop, a gourmet lover’s wholesale-retail wonder world, and an energetic, industrial-chic hotspot…” We’d entered the Chelsea Market. It’s a winding corridor of history, art, charm and shops lit by local art students sitting and sketching every few yards like candles lighting the way between florists, restaurants, bakeries and wine merchants. Practically perfect in every way…

The museum was in a small second-floor loft, and very well done. It contained WTC artifacts collected (not personal belongings) and poignant photographs taken by Gary Suson. One piece was the most chilling for me. It was AA11 aluminum fuselage melted into a warped Dali-like mutation. One photograph portrays a firefighter holding a book with his finger marking a passage. My mother told me not to miss it on the audio tour so I figured it was some biblical thing. In fact, the book was one in the Harry Potter series that his son, also a firefighter, had read to his two young children on the evening of September 10th, 2001. The son never got to read any more…

We walked quietly for a long time after visiting the museum, none of us speaking much. About an hour later, after walking a sun-drenched few miles along the Hudson River, Kyle and I were looking into the pit where the dust of the dead still rustles in the fall breeze. We grabbed a cab and got out of there.

The curtain rose at about 8:04 with chimney-sweep Bert alone on the stage. Two hours and forty minutes later Mary Poppins slowly glided off the stage and disappeared into the balcony above us. It was the last night of Kyle’s 14th year and it was one he’ll always remember. I’ll remember it too, but I’ll remember to read him Harry Potter even more.