Utah's remembrances have many looks but one heart

They could scarcely hear the singers on stage amid the chilly rain at Franklin Covey Field late Wednesday, so Chelcey Maughan, 13, and Samuel Hawthorn, 10, made their own music.

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"God Bless America," brother and sister sang.

Rain seemed the right weather for the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. It felt like tears — and like the relief the country needed.

The storm that had gathered all afternoon didn't deter the few hundred who walked from the City-County Building to the ballpark Wednesday evening.

Bagpiping filled the ballpark as the procession arrived. Then, as the "Concert for Freedom" began, orchestral music replaced the rain. As the Utah Symphony played Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," a blond teenager put her head on a friend's shoulder. Shane Hawthorn, a Gold Cross Ambulance medic, and his wife, Idamae, a schoolteacher, looked across the ballpark.

"I've never seen the nation come together like we have in the past year," Idamae Hawthorn, 37, said. The pain of Sept. 11 "has brought people closer together."

Utahns observed the anniversary in many ways Wednesday.

• Prayer and patriotism were combined at a noontime remembrance service at Temple Square. Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd at the Tabernacle, President James E. Faust, second counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said the terrorist attacks reawakened Americans' appreciation of the their country's freedoms and "endless" bounties.

The Tabernacle Choir sang traditional hymns as well as "America the Beautiful."

President Faust said Sept. 11's greatest tragedy was the loss of human life. "The death of even one person among our citizenry is incalculable. As a wise teacher tells us, 'One human life is as precious as a million lives, for each is infinite in value.' "