On 9/11/2011, a Sunday, I decided to start a long-procrastinated project: Going through all my book boxes and cataloguing all my books in a spreadsheet, with ISBN number, title, author and category.

I have a habit of using things like airline tickets and receipts as bookmarks. My bookmarks usually stay in the books until I have finished reading. If for any reason I abandon a book, the bookmark may remain there forever.

As I went through the first box, I found some books that still had bookmarks in them from many years ago.

In 1990, when I still worked for Vektronics (which now no longer exists), I did a lot of work at the McDonnell Douglas Apache helicopter plant in Mesa Arizona. Sometimes we would need to ship urgent machine parts and we used airline counter-to-counter services. You could drop a package off at the counter and ship it to another city, and pick it up at the counter there. I am not sure if this is still possible after 9/11.

Here is the amazing coincidence:

On 9/11/2011 I opened a book with a counter-to-counter receipt from Southwest Airlines of a package I picked up in Phoenix on 9/11/1990, 21 years to the day earlier.

This is a remnant from a world where 9/11 didn’t mean anything important or significant yet.