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When I was 15, I went on a very popular six week teen tour to Israel. It was the summer of 1982, only weeks after Israel invaded Lebanon. It was probably safer then than at any time in the recent past. Israel cleaned the PLO (the resident terrorist organization at the time) out of the area and chased them all the way to Beirut. We even went up to the Lebanese border and could see the ex-PLO fortifications up close, went to a fair with captured military equipment, and got a first-hand lesson on how the media distorts the news to increase sales or pitch a particular point of view. To this day, those six weeks represent the most significant time of my life, not counting marriage and children.
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On the day in 1989 when Robert J. Gschaar proposed to his girlfriend, he showed her two $2 bills. "It was a second marriage for both of us," Myrta Gschaar recalled last week. "It was our second chance at happiness. That's what the $2 bills represented."
They both tucked their $2 bills in their wallets, vowing never to relinquish them...... Their future together ended the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when Robert Gschaar, 55, called his wife in Spring Valley after the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. He said his Aon office on the 92nd floor of the south tower was being evacuated. That was the last she ever heard from him..... Now, Myrta Gschaar knows for certain that her husband perished along with 2,748 others that bloody day. His remains have been positively identified through DNA testing..... In addition to having his remains, she also was given his wallet, which was recovered from under tons of debris at the World Trade Center site. The battered brown wallet, caked with dust and grime, contained the ordinary objects of a working person's life — a driver's license, credit cards, tickets for the Red & Tan bus Gschaar took from Rockland into the Port Authority every morning, a library card from the Finkelstein Memorial Library in Spring Valley, a picture of his wife, a Pathmark savings card. And in the wallet Myrta Gschaar found the final, incontrovertible proof that her husband was gone: his $2 bill.
Full article here. After having been unemployed for four years, Gschaar began working for Aon in July 2001.
1 comment:
I don't know how to begin this comment except to say that the story about Myrta and the late Robert Gschaar unleashed something in me that I haven't found in the nearly five years since 9/11/2001. I've been floundering since that morning, unable to deal with the loss, unable to quiet my fears. I am miserable on the subway, where everyone is a terrorist to me, and the sound of an airplane overhead makes my heart accelerate and my stomach drop. I know I am not alone, but something about the Gschaar's story gave me a kind of support I desperately needed. Is it resolve? Maybe I feel I have to live with vigor because those who were murdered that Tuesday cannot. I cried for I don't know how long when I read about the $2 bills Robert and Myrta exchanged-- cried like I haven't in five years-- such a personal intimate detail-- sweetly trite until it's examined in retrospect. I felt compelled to write this because the Gschaar's story somehow unburdened me-- in a way that gave me new life, and I'm not sure why. But I had to write-- if there is any chance that Myrta will read this, I want her to know that I never met her husband but I will never forget him. Every time I visit a 9/11 memorial I will go first to my sister's name and then to Robert's. Thank you for sharing your story.
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