Different types of 9/11 memorials across the U.S. all have heartfelt meaning

FENTON, Missouri – There are two kinds of hotels in road trip America: those where the breakfast sausages look like skinny hockey pucks, and those where the sausages are shaped like an ogre’s little finger.

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Both are fine.

Over the past four mornings, I’ve stayed at two of each, eating roughly 48 pounds of free sausage. I’m not proud of that, but it’s what happened.

I bring this up because there also are two different types of 9/11 memorials – those created in the first year or two after the attacks, when feelings were raw and not yet totally expanded to include politics and culture, and those created a few years later, when the “meaning” of 9/11, whatever that is, began to drift.

The iconography is similar in both. There’s usually some metal from one of the towers, some rendition of the towers and references, either graphically or in writing, to the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania where Flight 93 crashed.

It’s a testament to the horror of 9/11 – or maybe to my own sappiness – that these memorials, individually and collectively, are still moving.

But the early-era memorials tend to stop with engraved messages from city officials or entire towns offering heartfelt support for the victims and their survivors and the heroes. They’re repetitive, sure, but they’re clean; decency itself etched in granite.

The later ones – including the one we saw Monday in legitimately beautiful Fenton, Missouri – are all that and something else: marketing opportunities. The Fenton City Park memorial has two towers, a granite pentagon and engraved reference to Pennsylvania. It’s also got a globe water feature. You can push it and your hand gets wet. Some chips in the globe look like they seem to represent French Polynesia.

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There also are logos. Best Buy and Anheuser-Busch are etched in stone. Daimler-Chrysler is referenced as a donor, also engraved forever. Same for the local Chamber of Commerce and a few other corporate sponsors.

This is where I’m supposed to bash the second kind of memorial. The logos are, frankly, cheesy.

But why bash? Who am I to say how anybody should grieve?

Besides, by Sept. 10, 2005, the day Fenton christened its memorial, the public was probably a lot less inclined to pay for one than they had been two or three years earlier. What’s more, the Fenton memorial is fairly spectacular as these things go. It’s big. It touches all the elements. It’s earnest.

And, if you want something truly American, it probably should include some kind of corporate sponsorship.

So the corporate money was well spent.

Probably.

Early Monday, Sept. 7, recently retired Paul Deckter was in a parking lot near the memorial, fixing his road bike. He said he uses this park a few times a week as a staging ground for long, flat rides. Coming and going, he said, he’s ridden past the memorial several thousand times, sweaty and otherwise.

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I asked him what he thinks of it.

“It’s fine.”