such a long, long time to be gone

so last night while having a few well deserved beers post train, I sat in my bar listening to Robert Hunter and thinking about his impact...….I seemed to remember a story about him singing on a rooftop in lower Manhattan in the days after 9/11.....I wondered if I had imagined the whole thing or if someone had told me an urban legend....thankfully after an exhausted search I found this excerpt from a Robert Hunter Journal / Blog.....it made my day, this is how I choose to remember the man that penned the soundtrack of my life.

Robert Hunter Journal Entry
September 24, 2001

After dark fell, I sat alone on the roof, fifteen stories high, of a building in Soho commanding a panoramic and unobstructed view of the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan and the lights of the bridges. I had my guitar in hand and felt moved to sing "Terrapin Station" to the City. While I sang, rain began falling - I stood and edged around to the other side of the roof, still singing, to the corner of the roof facing the World Trade Center, some fifteen blocks away, where the sky is bright with floodlight illuminating the work of the excavation crew. A great plume of smoke continues to rise from the site of the devastation. As I sang, a powerful wind blew up very suddenly - wind so strong it threatened to rip my guitar out of my hands - reminding me of the storm in which I first composed the words I now sang. I wondered if I was involved in some kind of sacrilege, singing like this in the face of all that had gone down - the wind roaring increasingly louder and stronger, as though filled with spirits, as though trying to blow me over, make me stop. I kept singing until the end, repeating the "hold away despair," expressing all the sorrow I felt for the lost loved ones and for the healing of this magnificent and resilient City. I hope it helped. Helped me, anyway.