Chicken Soup for the Soul of America (15 page)

Then, the firefighters came . . . not to tell us we were a fire hazard, but to park their massive trucks on each side of the corner. We cheered these symbols of American heroism and shook their hands. The ladder truck started raising its tall ladder with a big American flag at the top into the night sky. It swung out over the street as it extended and the flag waved. We cheered as the firefighters climbed to the top of the ladder. Cops drove by, honked and turned on their sirens. The corner was ablaze with candlelight and we kept singing. People who never knew the words, learned them. People I'll never see again sang them with me. More people came. The blare of continuously honking horns filled the air as flag-decorated cars drove by and approved of our demonstration. I spoke to a female firefighter who had just returned from digging for survivors for two days in the rubble of the World Trade Center. She needed to see this kind of support, and we were happy to give it to her.

Later, I met a young woman who had been eating at a restaurant across the street. She saw our group, went home to get her flag and returned. It was a huge flag and she could only hold up one end of it, so I took the other end. We stood in front of the people lining the street, waving the flag. We joined others chanting “U.S.A.!” and singing “America the Beautiful” and “Grand Old Flag” as more fire trucks passed and briefly put on their sirens.
CNN News
showed up and started shooting, a news helicopter circled overhead, and the ABC and CBS local vans pulled up. Photographers from many papers took countless pictures.

I hope those images are part of a huge patchwork that stretches across America to other cities and all the countries of the free world—to other corners and other strangers standing strong, defiant and steadfast together, heads and flags held high. Despite our many nationalities, religions and political differences, we are united in a sorrow, anger and determination that no ragtag army of madmen can ever defeat. This was a night I'll never forget, part of a time in history when, no matter how diverse, the people of Los Angeles were one . . . on one corner . . . where only a few had stood only a short time before. That's what the madmen didn't count on and what will, in time, defeat them.

Lynn Barker

The Cops from
Madison, Alabama

Y
ou cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wondered when I would finally feel the sadness. I wondered why other New Yorkers I passed in the streets of Manhattan looked so pained while I felt so numb. I really began to wonder if I was human. I felt nothing at all. Nothing.

It started several days after the sky fell on September 11, when I looked out my living room window in Westfield, New Jersey, and saw friends and family visiting the pregnant wife of a thirty-one-year-old man who was missing in the rubble. I tried hard to cry, but—as much I would like to say I felt courage and resolve—what I really felt was an almost paralyzing fear brought on by the sheer audacity of the acts.

At work in Manhattan, I found it even harder to feel pain and sadness: I work across from the Empire State Building, and that building's new status as New York City's tallest skyscraper gave all of us in the surrounding neighborhood a case of the jitters. It's hard to feel sad when you keep looking up at the sky waiting for something to come crashing down.

Several days later, my wife and I attended an interfaith service. I passed a sign with the names of a number of those from my hometown who had been lost. So many were parents of young children. I could feel a little lump forming in my throat. But I still could not cry.

The pent-up emotions finally hit like a ton of bricks when I least expected it: I was out walking in front of the Empire State Building. I wanted to simply be in the presence of the New York City police officers now guarding that building. And as I drew closer, I saw that the building's entrance was being protected by police officers from Madison, Alabama. And I lost it. I ran upstairs to my office and finally shed the tears that had eluded me for three weeks.

You have to understand. Most New Yorkers are hopelessly provincial, still living with the illusion that they live at the center of the universe, as if this wonderful complex, diverse universe could even have a center! Some are even still fighting the Civil War, with a view of the South that is as up-to-date as a Matthew Brady photograph. I know people who never even leave Manhattan, as if—having found paradise—they have no reason to go anywhere else.

Yet there they were out in front of the Empire State Building, a group of wisecracking, cynical New Yorkers who had surrounded these officers and were looking at them with the reverence usually reserved for members of the clergy. And these big, strong, confident, reassuring police officers from a place that no one had ever heard of were actually calming the nerves of people who had seen things that no one should see and felt things that no one should feel.

I don't know where Madison, Alabama, is. I don't know how many people live there. I don't know what petty disputes are currently being fought out in its city council, but I bet some group of citizens has been making a lot of noise lately about the lack of a stop light at some especially congested corner. I don't know if a peaceful river runs through town or where the lake is in which you can fish and swim. I don't know where in town you can taste the best barbecue, and I certainly don't know a soul that lives there. But I do know that on a fine, sunny day in my hometown, three weeks after it seemed like the world was collapsing around us, a bunch of courageous and compassionate cops from Madison, Alabama, were just what we needed at precisely the moment we needed it.

To the good and decent people of Madison: thank you for your sending us your bravest and finest. Just the sight of their Madison shoulder patch and the decency and confidence they demonstrated gave me an incredible dose of hope that—whatever comes along—our almost instinctive compassion as a nation will overcome any adversary.

And do me a favor: Promise that someone from Madison—wherever it is—will get in touch with me the next time a river overflows (is there a river nearby?), the next time a fire leaves some people homeless, the next time—God forbid—that a place of such obvious kindness and decency has its reckoning with pain and loss. I'd love to help.

Steven M. Gorelick, Ph.D.

In light of recent events, we're all New Yorkers . . .

Reprinted with permission Jeff Parker. ©2001
Florida Today
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Given the Choice

I
will never look at a firefighter the same way again. What is in someone, hundreds of them, to compel them to run into a burning building while everyone else is running out, just to save people they don't even know? Their bravery has become part of our collective national legacy. Their bravery dignifies us all.

Reverend Bill Hybels

Somewhere in the darkness between Two Falls and Ogden, I eased my Ford F-250 off the freeway. I'd been driving nonstop since leaving Seattle, and I was tired. In the waning hours of September 12, I laid my head on the steering wheel for a few minutes rest.

When I closed my eyes I could see it clearly, jutting into the cobalt-blue Rocky Mountain sky. I'd known of the I.A.F.F. Fallen Firefighter monument for years but had never visited Colorado Springs until September 1995. My first visit to the national memorial had come as the result of a fiery warehouse collapse that took the life of my friend Jim and three other Seattle firefighters eight months earlier.

Every September thereafter, I'd trek back to “the springs” for the annual memorial observance. I'd always find a quiet moment to stand below the monument and gaze up in awe at the bronze image of a firefighter descending a ladder, cradling an infant in one arm. I'd run my fingers across the new crop of names etched on the smooth, black granite wall fronting the monument. Behind the wall, an American flag flew proudly, often at half-mast. Memorial staff members would lower Old Glory to the position of tribute each time a firefighter gave his life. A new flag would be hoisted and flown for each fallen firefighter and presented to the public servant's family in a triangular oak case at the September observance.

I lifted my head off the steering wheel and put my truck into gear. The diesel growled as I accelerated back onto the freeway toward Colorado.

Several hours later I was south of Ogden, finishing yet another cup of lukewarm coffee. In a moment of fatigue, a wave of selfish frustration passed over me. I seethed that terrorists on the other side of my continent could carry out such cruelty and simultaneously toss my life into such chaos. I had planned to make this year's trip with my wife, Kate, but our flight had been canceled along with everyone else's.

In the softly breaking light, my eye caught a solitary American flag fastened to a lonely fence post by some defiant patriot, hanging loosely in the predawn stillness. From Seattle southward I'd seen stars and stripes everywhere—stapled to car antennas, hanging from farmhouse rooftops and slung from office windows. As I considered the thousands now dead, their shattered families and the hundreds of sacrifices made by fellow firefighters, my frustration evaporated, and in its place I felt shame for my selfishness.

In his dying, Jimmy had given me a wonderful gift. For years I'd guarded a secret. I was a closet poet. After a particularly tragic accident or difficult shift, I would write, for hours on end sometimes, to soothe the pain and restlessness in my own soul. Ironically, it was at Jimmy's funeral, while reciting one of my poems that his mother had requested, that I discovered my fireground songs resonating in the hearts of many other firefighters.

Word traveled quickly, and soon I was wearing the nickname “firehouse poet” with a combined sense of embarrassment and awkward pride. In the years that followed, the I.A.F.F. Memorial had used several of my poems during their annual observances. They'd even published several on plaques. I was honored, but never more so than after the 2000 observance. The memorial's director had approached me with a special request. With the existing wall of honor nearly full of the names of fallen firefighters, a new wall was to be constructed. Would I, he asked, consider writing a poem to be etched on the new wall?

It hadn't been an easy project. For months I'd struggled to find the words, only to come up empty again and again. The question kept haunting me,
What can I possibly say to make this memorial any more meaningful?

I had discovered the answer in early April on a family weekend getaway. As I leaned against a piece of driftwood and watched seagulls ride the ocean winds, a revelation struck me: the memorial wasn't complete. It contained monuments, memorial walls and names of our fallen, but there was no parting thought, no final message. The memorial lacked a statement from fallen firefighters. As I visualized the thousands of children yet to learn they would never see Daddy again, the mothers and fathers yet to bury a child, and spouses yet to become widows and widowers, the poem I'd been looking for was born. I scratched out the two dozen lines on a wrinkled scrap of paper, tucked it in my pocket and joined A. J. and Annie, my son and daughter, as they played near the surf.

By early mid afternoon on September 13, I was an hour north of Denver. Pulling into a gas station in Fort Collins, I nearly collided with a red, four-wheel Toyota pickup. Flapping proudly above the truck's cab were two massive American flags. Instead of an obscene gesture or a glowering scowl, the driver gave me a thumbs-up. I smiled and returned the gesture. How the world had changed in forty-eight hours! I'd never witnessed such patriotism, such camaraderie between strangers. Out of unspeakable evil, good was already emerging.

Arriving in Colorado Springs, I checked into my room and tossed my two suitcases on the floor. After nearly twenty-four hours on the road, the king-size bed looked inviting, but I had one final stop to make. I jumped into my pickup once again and turned the key.

From my parking space two hundred yards from the monument I could see the bouquets. Rainbows of flowers covered the memorial grounds, some carefully lining the top of the black granite wall, others strewn at random like toys abandoned by a toddler. Dozens of hardened wax puddles littered the cobblestone walkway encircling the site, each spent candle a token of a grateful citizen's respect and remembrance. Amongst the flowers were cards and hand-written notes: “We love you,” “Thank you for your sacrifice” and “God bless your families.” Another bore a meticulously colored picture of a Dalmatian and a stick figure crying. “I'm sad you died,” it said simply.