I know the national news has moved on

but here in Lexington we still have our flags at half-mast, the funerals are just beginning, and a pall of mourning hangs over the town in response to the crash of the plane at our airport earlier in the week. Local coverage continues, and the Herald-Leader has an excellent overview, including profiles of those aboard in a sort of memorial page, so if you are still interested, there's an excellent resource.

The crash and its aftereffects have featured highly on every front page of the paper since the accident. Today's photo was of the wife of an off-duty pilot who had been travelling to his next assignment, carrying her 16-month-old son, who was wearing his dad's pilot wings & epaulets on his tiny white shirt. For whatever reason--I seem to tear up at the least thing these days--that one photo brought tears to my eyes. He'd kept touching his dad's uniform, his mom said--as if looking for the father he'd never see again.

So, just as the tragedy is still real to the relatives who are left behind, we as a city continue to see images and profiles of the people we--and most were living in Lexington or surrounding counties--lost, and it's still real for us, too. As they work to figure out what series of events led to this--and it's generally not a single cause, but a conjunction of several, I'm sure even it will fade from the news. But, the sense of tragedy will remain. I've noticed that Lexington doesn't let go of its losses. The paper still prints follow ups to the story earlier this summer of the pregnant woman killed by falling concrete. People want to remember and celebrate the lives around them. That's one of the nice qualities about the city. I remember a former friend from New Jersey making fun of us for having things like car crashes on the evening news--he thought they were minor and would never had made it onto New York City's airwaves. But for us, it is news, it is a life lost, a reminder of the sweetness and transitory nature of life. And it makes me glad that I live somewhere that cares.