Re: Merry Christmas
My sentiments exactly, harry.
Happy holidays, folks. May 2002 be the turn around year, in more ways than one, that we're hoping for. Let us also remember those who'll never see it. I wrote this for another board and since I've been so sparse here, I thought I'd share it.
Musings on my visit to Ground Zero
Had some friends in from Las Vegas and we all drove into NYC on Saturday night. The occasion seemed to need to be remembered and shared.
Driving south from the midnight revelry of Rockefeller Center where tourists now snap photos posed with New York City's finest, down through the delightfully manic lights, camera, action of Times Square, and even through the old neighborhood in The Village where I used to live in an apartment above a gay headshop and an S&M store, we ended our drive in the area where I used to work, The Financial District.
Only in New York could I ever sample so much in one drive...the past, present, and future.
Not knowing exactly what to expect or where we'd find a view, while busy looking for a parking space we all at once gasped in unison as, unexpectedly, a wide driveway between two guardian buildings revealed their ward...a hazy, gray plaza bathed in blinding, bright lights; the centerstage backdrop was the twisted, melted and contorted skeleton and guts of a once occupied building. Introduction to Ground Zero 101. It's a heart stopper.
We found a parking spot on a side street that led to the truck entrance for Ground Zero. The entrance was, like all peepholes to this other world, between buildings and cloaked with taut blue tarmacks. Because of these tarmacks, there's little looking directly ahead nor looking down. At Ground Zero, you just can't see the ground. There's only looking up. Looking up you can see all of the surrounding buildings and surmize by the huge distance between their encirclement the magnitude of destruction. Injured but still standing they are all shrouded in construction netting which they wear like mourning veils.
We moved on to the area we had glimpsed from the van. It was then that I realized that I had been so dumbstruck by the previous vision this spot offered that I never noticed this was also a memorial site. One of the guardian buildings was a church whose fencing was covered with tributes and flowers, flags, and stuffed animals, gestures of love, messages of support and saddest of all the original "Missing" photos of lost loved ones.
Nobody was there to gawk, to rubberneck so to speak. We were there to pay our respects...to be humbled by our fragility, the fragility of seemingly once mighty towers, and moreover the fragility of peace even on our own once untouched shores.
An hour before we arrived they had removed the last standing structure of one of the towers. An hour after we left they removed the body of a police officer. And the night was marked forever in my mind.
Meme
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