A Mantle On His Shoulders

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Atlanta, Georgia – September 11, 2006

Shari Melillo had complications. She also had reservations.

"My due date was September 12, but the doctor wanted to move it up a month. I was all wired and hooked and tubed and ready to go when I just said 'wait, this isn't right. This child is not ready yet.'"

And so they agreed on the morning of September 11.

2001.

Still, the gods toyed with Shari and her husband Steve. The Caesarian section was scheduled for 9 a.m. Eastern time that fateful morning, and Shari was up early, her mind racing, her stomach churning, when she went into early labor.

She called her doctor from the car as they raced across the James River Bridge from their quiet home in Smithfield, Virginia, to the hospital ten miles away. The C-section was moved up an hour.

You're starting to get the drift, I'm sure.

"I delivered at 8:10 that morning," she says today, five years later, "and I was a basket case full of emotions, a first-time mother full of pride and wonderment and joy.

"But as I was in the recovery room, trying to regain the feeling in my lower body, I heard the radio in the next room. It was one of my favorite morning shows, but there was no laughter, no joking, very somber, and I couldn't figure out what was going on.

"My nurse finally told me."

As Shari Melillo – and perhaps another thousand other women across America – brought forth children in that hour, they introduced them unwittingly to a world changed forever.

"I held him, forcing myself to take my eyes off the television set in my room to focus on him. Here I was, a brand new mother, just learning how to nurse, for crying out loud, and planes were attacking my country. I must admit, the guilt was overpowering for a while. What had I done?"

Academy Award-nominated composer Stephen Melillo views the birth of his son on the morning of 9-11-01 as a symbol of hope & light.

"Fortunately," laughs her husband now, "she got over that soon. We both decided very early that there surely was a reason for Spencer to come into our lives and into this world at that precise moment – just minutes before the first plane hit." Steve Melillo is an internationally-renowned composer and conductor. His work, written for bands, has been nominated for countless Grammys, and he has scored several films. But that work took an abrupt and very overwhelming turn in the hours after his son was born and 3,000 people died. He began to feel the power of those moments and translate them into hugely emotional productions, working with bands as far away as Japan, in the process.

"We may never know the real reason Spencer came to us at that precise time. But I can honestly tell you he is here for a purpose and perhaps through our music, we can show the world."

Tough enough showing the neighborhood.

9/11 is not simply a set of figures any more, no longer a date, one of 365 on our annual tour of duty. The day is a symbol that will affect the world in one way or another forever.

A large mantle to place on a little boy's shoulders.

"Funny," says his mother, and she means peculiar, "I can tell a lot about people just by the way they react to his birthday. There have been some whom I've told Spencer was born on 9/11, 2001, as the planes were in the air, and they react 'oh, I'm so sorry. That's just so sad.'

"And I will tell others, and they will say 'that is magnificent. What a source of hope and joy for all of us.'"

Spencer Melillo is in the opening stages of kindergarten. He seems a perfectly normal, healthy boy with an appetite for cookies and a nose for the living-room piano. That he was born in that moment of our time, when the world seemed ready to explode in anger and frustration, surely is nothing more than coincidence.

But he has a new brother, Shafer. Born on a routine day in August a year ago.

A big boy, though.

He came into the world weighing 9/11.

You knew that, though.