Looking at the Eighteenth Anniversary of 9-11

         

Ginger Ormiston

 
    Some years ago, when I was in high school, I was involved in musical groups and in singing, and gigs outside the realm of school. Even in my teens, I spent some time working for New York based record companies. For a time, most everything I did revolved around music. In school, I was in the accelerated classes for everything, including math class, which probably hadn't been the wisest placement for me. Just because I was articulate, didn't mean I was particularly mathematical or even logical at the time. I clearly remember one day when the instructor had spent too much time explaining that day's math to me, that one of the stars of that class, a lovely blonde girl named Ginger, told me that I should spend less time writing music, and more time on my math.  Of course, she was right, but I was fourteen at the time and couldn't envisage ever using the type of math we were being taught. Later that semester, I was eventually dropped to an average level math class, a placement  I sincerely deserved at the time.

           Of course, I moved on. Life went so quickly. Before you knew it, I was in college, then graduating, then in a first and second job. Then, getting married, then having children. Then, I worked in a number of careers, and I have worked hard to explore a number of things which interest me.  Although I have kept in touch with a few people from high school, and a few from college, I haven't spent much time looking back. The present has always been busy enough.  

          There are certain days where most of us remember where we were when they occurred.  I remember 9-11 quite clearly, as do many people. I was assembling documents for a trip to Russia and I had paperwork all over our bedroom, when I saw the first plane hit the first building on television that morning.  My husband called me just after from work in Virginia, just after it happened. The news just got worse and worse that day. I listened to everything on the news. I had grown up forty miles from The World Trade Center, in a rural area where a fair number of people commuted to New York City for their jobs. It was likely that I knew some of the people who'd died.  I prayed for them, and I listened, but I never heard names I thought I recognized. 

          In the days that have passed, we raised our kids, sent them to college, built two farms, lost both sets of our parents, and have both enjoyed and endured the challenges life brings to most of us. Many changes, positive and negative ones have since taken place in our country.

           It has only been in the last few weeks that I realized that a number of classmates from high school have died.  While googling a picture of one of those high school classmates, I saw a perfect picture of Ginger, the young girl whose sage advice regarding her favorite topic,mathematics, I had not heeded until later in my life.

             I looked for additional information, and I found that another former classmate of mine, now a writer, Bonnie Brewer Cavanaugh, had written a lovely article on Ginger.   Known to me as "Ginger O", Ginger was truly a gifted student in mathematics. In high school she was a stellar student and was also in band. She was an exchange student to Puerto Rico, I believe. After high school, she attended Rutgers University and got a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. Afterward, she attained a Master's degree in the same, at Cornell. She had a number of great jobs before marrying her husband Jim Kenworthy. They had a son and a daughter, and settled in a loft they bought in New York City. Jim was still taking one of the kids to school that day while Ginger went to her fairly new job on time. Jim wrote that he saw the first plane hit the building while he was walking to work.  Had he been on time, their children could have lost both of their parents that day.

               When terrorists attacked that day, they took Ginger from her husband Jim, from her son and daughter, from her parents, from her two sisters, and from countless people who's gone to school, worked with her, or knew her from her other activities. She became an exceptional woman, and her life was cut too short.

 

The Kenworthy Family

 

               Tomorrow, when we talk, once again, about 9-11, and grieve it once again, please think of Virginia Ann Ormiston Kenworthy, and pray for her and her family. I read that last year, Ginger's mom died, and so now she is with both of her parents.

               I wish blessings and especially comfort to all who are missing  friends or family as a result of the happenings of 9-11, that day and afterward.
           



     This is Bonnie Brewer Cavanaugh's article on Ginger Ormiston-Kenworthy.