Sept. 11, 2011 began exactly like Sept. 11, 2001: I was hitting the snooze alarm and listening to WGN, trying to grab a few extra minutes of sleep before getting up for work.

Even the late summer morning was almost a carbon copy of the one ten years ago: brilliantly blue, a gentle breeze fluttering shirtsleeves, with only a few white puffy clouds in the sky.

The thoughts of where residents were when they first learned that America was under attack weren’t far from their minds at Sunday’s dedication ceremony of the 9/11 First Responders Monument.

Some, like me, were getting up. Others were dropping their children off at school, driving to work, sitting in cubicles or classrooms, or toddling in preschool. Others weren’t born yet. Wherever they were, the evil wrought on our country ten years ago when so many of us felt wounded, but undeterred, came full circle at Sunday’s dedication ceremony.

The beams from the fallen World Trade Center at the center of such chaos on a morning not so long ago seemed at peace at the Oak Lawn Metra Station. 

Already, the monument by sculptor Erik Blome has taken on an aura of its own, as if connecting with the souls lost on that day: a tear naturally formed in the eye of the police officer on one of the bronze spires.