September 10, 2011
“People love America” (Part I of a remembery)
This has to be a brilliant hoax, I thought. “Due to the national emergency,” I read, Logan Airport had been shut down indefinitely.
I’d gone to Logan’s website to try and figure out when Alice might be leaving Boston for Chicago. Alice is Jon’s cousin; we hoped to see her at the memorial service for Leah on September 14. Leah was Jon’s mother.
I got a similar message at the O’Hare website. Something wasn’t right.
I checked a couple of news sites, then turned on the TV. Then woke Jon.
Later, he said, “I heard you say a couple of planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I didn’t realize . . . ”
” . . . that the World Trade Center no longer exists?”
No out-of-towners made it to the September 14 service for Leah.
At the luncheon afterward, I sat with two women who had looked after Leah and her home during the final year of suffering: a Belizean woman who’d served as a private nurse during the months in the hospital and a Polish woman who’d stayed in the house and kept it clean and secure.
“I spoke with my mother,” the Polish woman told me. “Last night at midnight everyone in town went to Mass and lit candles for America. She wants you to know that people love America and that their hearts are with you.”
I paused and thought of Poland. Of the Nazis and the Soviets. Of what Poles have suffered.
“Would it be true,” I asked, “that no one in your family in Poland has escaped some very bad thing in their life?”
She nodded and smiled sadly.
A little later, after more food and booze, Jon and I headed back down to our home in the city.
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Thank you, Sheila. I appreciate the layers of this.
Thank you, Deron.
The ambulance crash comes in the second part.
A decade later and that day still seems like a dream about a bad movie.
Michael, the dream aspect of it still resonates with me. We had a good conversation among a few of us when we got together this April.
Dream aspect, for sure. Also, bad movie.