Too much dejà vu: Meandering musings on an odd news day

It's almost too many coincidences to be real. Instead of 9/11, it's 10/11, and another plane slams into a Manhattan building. Only this time it really IS a small plane. Again we have reports of an intact passport being found on the ground. Only instead of allegedly belonging to a terrorist, this time it belongs to Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle, who was the starting pitcher in last Friday night's playoff game, giving up three earned runs in 1-1/3 innings.

Echoes of 9/11/01. Echoes of Thurman Munson's 1979 fiery crash death. Echoes. It hardly seemed possible for either scenario to happen twice, and yet here we are.

Upon hearing that the crash wasn't terrorism-related, but really WAS "a bad pilot", it was easy to make jokes. Mr. Brilliant, who had landed at LaGuardia from Durham, NC on the morning of 9/11/01, shortly before all the airports closed, e-mailed me: "Nyah nyah....missed me again." I replied cheekily, "Do you think Steinbrenner put out a hit on Cory Lidle?"

But once the initial shock passes, we're left with a young widow, a 6-year-old child without a father, and a twin, Kevin Lidle, without his very real other half. As shocking and frightening as yet another day of footage of firemen entering a building where a fire burns fiercely on a high floor may be, and as difficult it is to imagine that a man in his mid-30's who pitched less than a week ago is gone, those are the facts.

I used to watch Cory Lidle pitch for the Mets during the late 1990's, back when it seemed they could do little right. Back then he seemed like a glimmer of hope that the Mets might emerge from the Suck Years, which they did in 2000, but only after Lidle had been snatched by the Diamondbacks in the 1997 expansion draft. He seemed at the time to be a cute kid with a good future, but spent most of his career being traded around the majors.

Tonight it even seemed as if the very heavens decided that the Mets shouldn't play tonight out of respect for the little pitcher who broke in from their minor leagues after being the proverbial bat boy and a box of balls in a 1996 trade with Minnesota for Kelly Stinnett, who ironically ended up back with the Mets this year. For tonight's game 1 against the Cardinals was rained out.

There is a Chinese proverb, "It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period." Between North Korean nuclear tests, a U.S. president without a clue, a sex scandal that has Republicans defending pedophilia, a potential "October Surprise" invasion of Iran, and a new book claiming that the Christofascist Zombie Brigade has been played for fools by the Bush Adminstration, today's New York City crash would seem to be insignificant, were it not for its many synchronicities.