Pilgrimage to Ground Zero

What follows is a personal friend and mentor's reflections of his visit to New York City mere weeks after the tragedy of 9/11.

Thirteen years ago, October 3, 2001, Jo Ann, and I returned to our home in California from New York City importantly different from the city we have so often experienced and unabashedly love.  For four days, we had been bombarded with images, expressions, smells and sounds.  With our son Brad, a resident of the city, we walked the streets and tried to absorb some sense of the pain that held New York in its grasp for the past 32 days since the morning of September 11, 2001.

Not as on-lookers but as pilgrims, we went to Ground Zero.  The combined effort of the best of TV anchormen had failed to communicate its tragic reality.

With hundreds of others we talked along lower Broadway, stopping at barricaded intersections patrolled by NYPD officers and personnel from various military groups.  At every barricade there were signs, letters, flowers and remembrances attached to the chain-link fences transforming them into falls of compassion.  We walked past a church across the front of which the resolute congregation had placed a banner that informed the population of a wounded city that it would reopen its doors and do it soon!  We walked around to the west side of the ruins and passed a child care center not a block away form where trucks were removing rubble and ambulances were removing remains.  We expressed to each other our concern for those children and wondered painful wanderings.  We were later informed that the caregivers in that center had safely escorted all the children away from the terror and, amazingly, that all the families of those children had been reunited. 

As we left Ground Zero, Jo noticed a fine collar of white ash on the lack collar of my coat.  The three of us were carrying away on our shoulders the residue of terror.  As we walked through South Liberty Park, a small, tranquil walkway, harshly juxtaposed against what we were trying to leave behind us, through the trees, partially engulfed in the smoke issuing from the remains of the twin towers, we saw the Statue of Liberty standing Phoenix-like in the harbor.  In that instant she became a needed symbol of stability in the midst of such an absurdly

The Following morning we went to see a fire-fighter friend, Al Schwartz, on duty at the Midtown Station just off the cacophony of Broadway.  As we approached the station house we saw thousands of messages from people around the country plastered on the outside brick walls.  We stopped to read some of these expressions of thanks and support.  There was a message scribbled in crayon from a confused child in Biloxi, Mississippi.  There was a message hand printed on a beautiful card by an empathetic woman from Honolulu who remembered Pearl Harbor.  There was another from a teenager who had never been out of Whitefish, Montana.  And one in particular I shall never forget.  It was typed on important looking letterhead from a New York businessman who had suddenly been forced into recognizing an indebtedness he had long neglected to acknowledge. 

Inside the Fire House in the company break room were boxes of cookies, fresh cakes (some beautifully decorated), and cases of soda, all expressions sent by Manhattan dwellers that, I can only assume, needed to do something tangible to say thank you and to help overcome their own sense of helplessness.  On one filing cabinet, lying among piles of un-filed papers, there was a wilting handful of flowers the guys in the company had just been too busy to throw away, or simply didn’t want to.  Al shared with us that, “Tomorrow I will march with our NYC Fire Department Pipe Band in three funeral processions.  It’s been going on like this for days.”  Jo asked Al how he managed to get all the other, everyday stuff done, like fighting a recent fire on 53^rd Street.  “We just do it,” he answered in exhausted resignation.  All has become, for us, a symbol of all the courageous professionals in New York City who did their jobs.

As we left the station house we stopped to look at the Fire Station “Wall of Heroes”.  Surrounded by garlands of red, white and blue ribbon were the pictures of 16 of Al’s buddies from the Midtown Company who had died in the World Trade Center Tragedy.    

While we were there I sensed a city trying to regain its equilibrium. The Yankees beat the Mariners three out of four. “Phantom of the Opera” was still running at the Majestic Theater, even though the cast had to take a 25% temporary pay cut until more tourists came back. The 

Lincoln Center shimmered in a sophisticated light while down in the subway station at Time Square a not-so-good violin player sawed away in hopes that we would drop a buck or two into his open instrument case. I doubted that New York City would ever be “back to normal”. I was certain however that it would find a “new normal” for a different time.
Wisdom tells us that the intensity of our sympathy must lessen if we are to live lives of sanity in the present. Lessen,
yes, but eliminated… never. Compassion tells us that two things must never be eliminated: our God given responsibility to confront bigotry with unfailing resolve, and to liquidate the ignorance that sets one people or one faith against another.

That was a year ago. Today some of us will stop for a brief while and revisit those moments of insanity. We will try once again to understand a hate so engrained that it would cause people to kill themselves that they might kill others. And we will probably fail in our effort. Today, some of us will gather with others from our communities and symbolically weep. We will remember TV images we wish we could forget. We will remember a fireman carrying the body of a small child and we will remember the crying. And we will remember the aftermath of silence.

That is as is should be.

Then we will leave and return to our status quo. Our memories will be some how muted for they will be a year removed from the intensity? When we go home and read the box scores of the Yankees we will less clearly see those who have missed every baseball season in the new house that Ruth built. When we open our date books we may not even think about date books that have remained closed since 9/11/01.

That too may be as it should be.