Chicken Soup for the Soul of America (11 page)

Under my bed, and yours, within the collage of time is a new ingredient. I don't mind the dinosaur bones. They were over and done long ago. I have no fear of Tyrannosaurus Rex jumping out from a dark corner when my back is turned. But this new dust is different. It holds the paperwork and electronics of a financial capital, tons of steel and glass, copper wire and concrete, infinitesimal shreds of thousands of lives and the potent, microscopic seed of hate.

The dust lays heavy these days. It covers up patterns and bright colors. It clouds the vision. So much is in the air. I blink it away with tears that keep coming and coming again. If ever there was a time to see clearly, it is now. Next to my bed, on my knees, in absolute stillness, it came to me. Dust needs to settle before it can be swept.

David C. Page

2

AMERICA
RESPONDS

I
cannot do all the good that the world needs, but the world needs all the good that I can do.

Jana Stanfield

THE FAMILY CIRCUS         By Bil Keane

“When I grow up I wanna be a
SUPERHERO—a fireman or a policeman.”

Reprinted with permission of Bil Keane.

©Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

The Only Thing
We Could Think Of

W
e must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.

Marie Curie

My singing group, The Sirens, was invited to New York City to sing at an awards ceremony for Helen Thomas (the White House correspondent). Only five of us could make it, but it turned out fine. We were excused from all of our classes for the day so we decided to make use of our time off. After the ceremony, we hopped on the subway and headed to Ground Zero. As soon as we stepped onto the sidewalk, the mood was completely different. It was dark, quiet and it smelled strange.

What we saw was devastating. The buildings were still burning, and the air was filled with smoke. The area was fenced off, but you could see pretty much everything. I have never seen such destruction in my entire life; not one person there could look at it without feeling horrified. There were candles, pictures, posters and letters posted all along the fence that separated us from the remains. Hundreds of people stood watching and crying. I have never felt so hopeless. We decided to do the only thing we could think of and that was to sing. We have been preparing many patriotic songs that are beautifully written and well arranged (for a cappella music).

The girls and I stood up against the wall, faced the people, and with the remains behind us, we sang for two hours. People videotaped us, took pictures, hugged us, sang with us, and about five people called home and held up their cell phones to our music.

At one point, a woman in front of us broke down and started bawling, and all of us girls felt her pain and lost it in the middle of the song. The most amazing thing was that the crowd joined in and finished it for us; it was absolutely surreal. CNN showed up and taped our group and the people responding to the music. In our last song, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” firemen began to fill the streets. There were about forty of them, and they had just walked off Ground Zero from working there all day. They removed their hats and began to cry. It was so sad; I cannot begin to describe how it felt. At the end they applauded us, and we applauded them. We walked into the streets and hugged them and thanked them. They were crying and tried to explain how horrible it is there, but told us how important it is that people support each other.

I will never forget that day as long as I live.

Elizabeth M. Danehy

Playing for the Fighting 69th

A
fter silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Leonard Huxley

I had probably the most incredible and moving experience of my life. Juilliard organized a quartet to go play at the Armory. The Armory is a huge military building where families of people missing from Tuesday's disaster go to wait for news of their loved ones.

Entering the building was very difficult emotionally, because the entire building (the size of a city block) was covered with missing posters.

Thousands of posters, spread out as high as eight feet above the ground, each featuring a different smiling face. I made my way into the huge central room and found my Juilliard buddies. For two hours we sight-read quartets (with only three people!), and I don't think I will soon forget the grief counselor from the Connecticut State Police who listened the entire time, or the woman who listened only to “Memory” from
Cats,
crying the whole time. At 7:00, the other two players had to leave; they had been playing at the Armory since 1:00 and simply couldn't play anymore. I volunteered to stay and play solo, since I had just arrived. I soon realized that the evening had just begun for me: A man in fatigues who introduced himself as “Sergeant Major” asked me if I'd mind playing for his soldiers as they came back from digging through the rubble at Ground Zero. Masseuses had volunteered to give his men massages, he said, and he didn't think anything would be more soothing than getting a massage and listening to violin music at the same time. So at 9:00
P.M.
, I headed up to the second floor as the first men were arriving. From then until 11:30, I played everything I could do from memory: Bach's B Minor Partita, Tchaikovsky's Concerto, Dvorak's Concerto, Paganini's Caprices 1 and 17, Vivaldi's “Winter and Spring,” the theme from
Schindler's List,
Tchaikovsky's “Melodie,” Meditation from Thais, “Amazing Grace,” “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” “Turkey in the Straw,” “Bile Them Cabbages Down.” Never have I played for a more grateful audience. Somehow it didn't matter that by the end, my intonation was shot and I had no bow control. I would have lost any competition I was playing in, but it didn't matter. The men would come up the stairs in full gear, remove their helmets, look at me and smile.

At 11:20, I was introduced to Colonel Slack, head of the regiment. After thanking me, he said to his friends, “Boy, today was the toughest day yet. I made the mistake of going back into the pit, and I'll never do that again.”

Eager to hear a firsthand account, I asked, “What did you see?”

He stopped, swallowed hard and said, “What you'd expect to see.” The colonel stood there as I played a lengthy rendition of “Amazing Grace,” which he claimed was the best he'd ever heard. By this time it was 11:30, and I didn't think I could play anymore. I asked Sergeant Major if it would be appropriate if I played the national anthem.

He shouted above the chaos of the milling soldiers to call them to attention, and I played the national anthem as the men of the 69th Regiment saluted an invisible flag. After shaking a few hands and packing up, I was prepared to leave when one of the privates accosted me and told me the colonel wanted to see me again. He took me down to the War Room, but we couldn't find the colonel, so he gave me a tour of the War Room. It turns out that the regiment I played for is the Famous Fighting 69th, the most decorated one in the U.S. Army. He pointed out a letter from Abraham Lincoln offering his condolences after the Battle of Antietam . . . the 69th suffered the most casualties at that historic battle. Finally, we located the colonel. After thanking me again, he presented me with the coin of the regiment. “We only give these to someone who's done something special for the 69th,” he informed me. He called over the regiment's historian to tell me the significance of all the symbols on the coin.

As I rode the taxi back to Juilliard I was numb. Not only was this evening the proudest I've ever felt to be an American, it was my most meaningful as a musician and a person. At Juilliard, kids are hypercritical of each other and very competitive. The teachers expect, and in most cases get, technical perfection. But this wasn't about that. The soldiers didn't care that I had so many memory slips I lost count. They didn't care that when I forgot how the second movement of the Tchaikovsky went, I had to come up with my own insipid improvisation until I somehow (and I still don't know how) got to a cadence. I've never seen a more appreciative audience, and I've never understood so fully what it means to communicate music to other people.

And how did it change me as a person? Let's just say that, next time I want to get into a petty argument about whether Richter or Horowitz was better, I'll remember that when I asked the colonel to describe the pit formed by the tumbling of the towers, he couldn't. Words only go so far, and even music can only go a little farther from there.

William Harvey

Reflections from the Pit

W
e have been called to heal wounds, To unite what has fallen apart, And to bring home those who have lost their way.

St. Francis of Assisi

It is exactly 227 miles (as the crow flies) from Peace Ledge, our home in New Hampshire, to Ground Zero. I know because, last night when we got home, I checked the distance on my global positioning satellite (GPS) gadget. But it might as well be a distance of several light years from here to there. The contrast between the two places is striking.

Twenty-five years ago, we named our home Peace Ledge because it sits in the woods, up on a hill, and smacks of tranquility—a place where God is very present to us. How many times we have come back to this place in fatigue, in gratitude, even in personal defeat, and found restoration here.

Peace Ledge is a dark place at night if the moon isn't shining. Only if the breeze is right can you pick up the slight noise of a truck going through its gears on Route 106 five miles away.

Not so 227 miles away. There the brilliant halogen lights shine all night long and light up the smoke still percolating up from fires deep in the rubble (someone told me the temperature in the hot spots remains at seventeen hundred degrees). The noise in the pit is constant and sometimes painful to the ears. And the constant antlike, rushing motion in the pit by hundreds of men and women leaves one in almost a manic state of mind. Here at Peace Ledge there is something akin to an oasis; there I can think of no better description than the impression I have always had of Dante's Inferno.

Yesterday we left New York and drove Interstates 95 and 93 north to our home in New Hampshire and began to unload the car. If it were not for the smells that linger on our clothes, our boots and my knapsack with which I carried special materials that Gail had purchased each day, it would be virtually impossible to believe that we have spent a week at the lip of the pit and worked with the people of the Salvation Army we've become privileged to know.

Before we left, Gail and I both spoke in a worship service at the Salvation Army Training Center. When I began my talk, I held up my Salvation Army cap that says Disaster Services, and I told the officers and cadets that of all the hats and caps and helmets I'd worn during my life, this one brought me the most pleasure. I would keep it, I said, for the rest of my life as a symbol of an extraordinary experience where I felt I saw the spirit of Jesus at work like never before.

On our last day at the pit, Gail and Colonel Rader had walked into the disaster area ahead of me. After finding a place to leave our car, I followed. Having the required credentials, I decided to walk through the pit (sort of a shortcut) from one entrance point to where our station was located. On the way, I stopped frequently to talk to men and women and prayed for a few who seemed particularly open to speaking to a “chaplain.”