Luis Gonzalez | September 10, 2026

It’s been nearly twenty-five years since I wrote the story of my struggles to locate an American flag on sale, anywhere, in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Those days when everyone seemed to walk around staring at something a thousand yards away, as if we were all trying to make sense of something that we couldn’t wrap our minds around.

If you are old enough, you know exactly what I am talking about: the sense that even the world had somehow lowered its volume in respect.

There were no flags to be had anywhere.

Then an old friend handed me Jimmy’s Flag.

Graphic: Author via AI

It was into that world, into those muted dawns of September 2001, that I hoisted my old friend’s flag, raising a fist to the world, swearing that WE WOULD NEVER FORGET!

Jimmy’s Flag flew proudly against an American sky for years.

We relocated, not once, but twice since, and the flag sat forgotten in a dusty moving box labeled “OFFICE,” tucked away in a corner of the garage among all the things we keep simply because we can’t quite bring ourselves to throw them away.

Graphic: Author via AI

I found the box last week, buried under a decade of things we swore we’d use again, and dug out the case. I removed the back from the flag display case. The stars looked a bit frayed, the thread showing signs of age, the edges more tattered than I recalled. There was dust on the colors, thick along the canton where the stars sit, and I ran my hands over it, wiping it away in slow strokes, half expecting the years to have dulled what was underneath.

Brilliant blue and red and virginal white had never lost their shine.

I sat and stared at the folded memory in my hands.

What’s happened to us?

Everybody had banners on their cars in those days. The Stars and Stripes flew from millions of homes across every........

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