A Late-in-the-Day Word about 9/11

Smoke rises from a building and we think of them. It can be any building, anywhere. A plane rises from the ground and we think of them, and pray they did not see death rushing toward them.It is so hard NOT to imagine their final moments, our minds somehow veer away from them, so heart-breaking are they to contemplate. Instead I find that my mind has hovered around another event these last few days, one that took place nearly 100 years ago, also in lower Manhattan:A fire broke out on one of the top floors of the Triangle Shirt Factory on March 25, 1911. The workers trapped there, with flames raging behind them and firefighters’ ladders far too short to reach them, leaped to the sidewalks below and met death there.There's a poem called “Shirt,” written by Robert Pinsky, that touches in part on this tragedy. He speaks of a witness in the building across the street, who watched a doomed young man help first one girl and then another step up to the windowsill, “as if he were helping them up to enter a streetcar, and not eternity.“ Before jumping himself, he held these two girls out, away from the wall, then let them drop. “A third, before he dropped her, put her arms around his neck and kissed him.”Then he held her into space, and dropped her too.Some say the only way out is through; that if we are to find ease on the other side of sorrow, it will only be by allowing ourselves to feel that sorrow wholly.In studying this other tragedy, I have been able to get at the pain I feel over its modern counterpart.Those families must have felt things very much like the families of the September victims. The next morning’s New York Times said “grief-stricken crowds gathered at the site of the factory, crying the names of their loved ones.”I looked up these names: Julia and Lizzy and Abraham, some of them were, Anna and Rosie and Jacob.Not a week after the attacks, I attended one of the strange memorial observances so common that autumn. Like most of the others, it was a wake without a casket, a funeral without an interment. At the Mass’s end, the priest bent into a microphone. “Take some flowers,” he told us all - because there was no grave on which to lay them.There will never be graves for many who met death that day. Met it at the Pentagon or in the Towers. Met it in the soft soil of Pennsylvania, where thousands of our Civil War dead met death too.I think of Walt Whitman, who during that war came to the Capitol in Washington expressly to nurse and comfort the sick and dying soldiers filling its halls. In “Leaves of Grass,” he spoke of the “beautiful uncut hair of graves.” Whitman could see beauty anywhere. And he knew how to befriend death, as we all must learn to do, early or late.I think of the weather we had that week, the way each day dawned so clear and brimmed with a crisp pale-amber light.There is that light to think of now.And there is that image, given us by our own modern poet.I refer to the kiss, and then the letting go.All the ones we have ever lost: they kiss us now. They ask us to let them go.

A State of Mind and Not a Day

The Fourth of July is never only the Fourth. It’s also a state of mind.When I was young, people dressed up for The Fourth. Back then you wouldn't dare reproduce Old Glory’s design in clothing  and so…. you improvised: You could don a pair of blue shorts; then your top could be white; then the red would come from your socks or shoes - sporty Keds if you had a pair -  or, if you felt bold enough and could take the teasing, a bright red scarf like the one the Lone Ranger wore.Anyway, that's how I remember July Fourth the summer I woke up inside my life.I say ‘woke up’: I mean when I first noticed I was living it, which  happened as I was walking my decorated if slightly fender-dented two-wheeler to the big Bike Parade being held on the Boys’ Side of the playground of the Oakland School.“I'm nine years old.” I remember thinking.  “It's almost summer. And I'm walking all alone on the sidewalk."That year, as with all the years of my childhood, July Fourth brought out talk at the family table about the  latest war.There was only that one war we kids heard about then and it was Big War, the ‘Good War’, the Second World War as they called it in our history books which seemed to me to gloss over the sad fact of the war just before it, the war that was meant to end all wars.Our grownups spoke of this last war only, the gasoline rations and the saving of tinfoil and so on.To us kids though it was just one other thing that had happened to THEM, those inscrutable adults, those foreign beings. It was a thing as far removed from our modern lives as the gramophone.And yet.And yet.Somehow we could still feel its enormity, mostly from the things we came upon: That trunk in the cellar filled with Army Green trousers and tunics stiff now with age.That picture of the day it all ended and there was our mom, young, along with half the town riding on top of their cars and laughing  and throwing their hats in the air.But then there were those other pictures that my sister and I found in the wooden chest buried under our uncle’s tool bench. He had presided over a military court in Sardinia as we later learned, and the pictures were of dead civilians stuffed into narrow raw wood coffins in their blood-splattered clothes, all staring sightlessly upward. His job had been to bring their civilian killers to justice.“What was this war?” we asked each other.  “What happened in it?“Something big, we knew that much. And maybe we even sensed that this ‘something’ was what purchased the safe and happy years we were currently enjoying, I'm not sure.It’s the Fourth now, the day some call the nation’s one true Holy Day.  We should pause at least for a few moments during it and ponder the many sacrifices it commemorates.