Chicken Soup for the Soul of America Page 7

  As the afternoon drags on, I cannot sit idly in my hotel room. I walk, observe people playing cards in the lobby, and make my way to the rooftop pool to look around the city. Several people are swimming, as if it were a normal day. A plane flies over and people cringe. “It’s just our fighter jets,” a man loudly calls out to the group on the roof.

  On the street corner, a family with packed suitcases holds a sign with their anticipated destination—desperately trying to find a way out of town. Several groups with their buses readily available are boarding and leaving town.

  Back at the hotel room, my coworker arranges for our own quick departure via Amtrak. There is no way either of us will get back on an airplane any time soon—especially on the East Coast. I wonder how this day has changed the world in which we live.

  I don’t sleep that night. At 1:00 the next morning, six of us pile into a taxi that takes us to Union Station to catch the 3:00 A.M. train home. The sooner we leave D.C. the better.

  Many long hours later, the train pulls into the midwestern farm town where my family awaits me. I am back home. I step off the train, grab my children and hug them . . . as if I have been given a second chance. Yes, it is going to be all right.

  Maria Miller Gordon

  Last Call

  As smoke and heat diminished from the mangled steel and glass,

  The hope of rescue workers faded in and out so fast.

  These heroes of our nation working tirelessly to find

  A sound, a breath, some proof of life, to keep that hope alive.

  The victims were so innocent, just doing their life’s work,

  In a nation called America, the most free on this Earth.

  Suddenly, a worker finds a cell phone flashing red.

  He plays the “last call” message, and this is what it said:

  “Hello, it’s me. I’m calling to tell you I’m all right.

  I’ve made it up to heaven; I tried to call last night.

  The group that I arrived with is strong and brave and tall,

  And proud to be Americans while answering God’s call.

  “I love you all and know I’ve been in all your thoughts and prayers.

  You need to know I felt no pain and safely made it here.

  Now let me say a prayer for you of closure and of life,

  Move on with courage and with faith that we will reunite.

  “I know it’s sad; I’ll age no more, but in this you can trust:

  My dreams were put back on the Earth in particles of dust.

  That dust is in the air you breathe; I’ve passed it on to you.

  So please breathe deeply every day and make my dreams come true.”

  Dave Timmons

  Submitted by Tom Lagana

  The Vigil

  In the darkest hours of the night, Judith Kaplan, dressed in her Sabbath finery, sat in a tent outside the New York City medical examiner’s office, singing the haunting repertoire form the Book of Psalms. From midnight until 5 A.M., within sight of trucks full of body parts from the Word Trade Center, she fulfilled the most selfless of Jewish commandments: to keep watch over the dead, who must not be left alone from the moment of passing until burial.

  Normally, this orthodox ritual, known as sitting shmira, lasts for only twenty-four hours, and is performed by one Jew, customarily a man, for another Jew. But these are not normal times. Thus, the round-the-clock vigil outside the morgue on First Avenue and Thirtieth Street is already in its eighth week. The three sealed trucks may or may not contain Jewish bodies. And the shomer, or watcher, is just as often a young woman as an old man.

  Ms. Kaplan, twenty, a senior at Stern College for Women (a division of Yeshiva University), is one of nine students who has volunteered for this solemn task on weekends, working in shifts from Friday afternoons until nightfall on Saturdays, the holiest part of the week. The rest of the time, the task is performed by scores of volunteers from an Orthodox synagogue, Ohab Zedek, on West Ninety-Fifth Street.

  Devout Jews cannot ride on the Sabbath, putting the subway or taxis off-limits for the long trek from Ohab Zedek to the morgue. So, the Stern students, whose dormitories are within blocks of the morgue, have filled the breach. They were recruited by Jessica Russak, twenty, a student who takes the dawn shift, peeking out of the tent as the sky brightens to time her morning prayers.

  Ms. Russak, Ms. Kaplan, and others have won blessings from Christian chaplains at the site, and their dedication has moved police officers and medical examiners to tears. The burly state trooper who guards the area has learned the girls’ names, and a bit about their religion.

  At first, the trooper demanded identification, not knowing that carrying anything on the Sabbath was prohibited for Orthodox Jews. Now, he keeps an eye on the prayer books and snacks that the Stern students drop off before sundown on Friday and retrieve Saturday night. The trooper once called Ms. Russak at home when she was a few minutes late, in case her alarm clock had not gone off.

  The young women have the full support of Dr. Norman Lamm, prescient of Yeshiva University, who agreed without hesitation that the normal gender rules—women can sit shmira only for other women, while men can sit for any deceased person—could be waived under the circumstances. The school is also providing security guards to escort those who sit the late-night shifts.

  While the tradition is a peculiarly Jewish one, Dr. Lamm said he felt that the mitzvah, or good deed, reached across denominations. “The idea that you can have companionship even in death is a very consoling thought, whether you are Jewish or not,” he said. Dr. Lamm called “the loving watching of the corpse a very human act,” and noted that the shmira is “the truest and most sublime” of the 613 mitzvahs “because there can never be reciprocity.”

  But there are other rewards, which the Stern students discussed on Friday, at Mr. Kaplan’s apartment, while preparing their Sabbath dinner—four different kinds of kugel, pepper steak and honey-glazed chicken.

  All of them had felt so helpless after the terrorist attacks. They donated money to the Red Cross, but were turned away as blood donors or volunteers because those needs had quickly been met. Then came the pleas for Sabbath shomers. “This is something I can do,” Ms. Kaplan said. “And it’s surreal. You absolutely feel the souls there, and you feel them feeling better.”

  Each volunteer said she had begun with fears about sitting within sight of the trucks full of remains. Instead, they said, they have found peace and a kind of joy.

  Ms. Russak does not sing the psalms as Ms. Kaplan does, but rather mutters them, in whatever order moves her, often starting with Psalm 130, which she knows by heart. The effect is meditative. “The meter and the rhythm one after the next after the next, it calms you,” Ms. Russak said. “That’s the magic of the psalms. They put you in the right place.”

  Ms. Kaplan made up slow, sad tunes for each psalm and sings them in a clear soprano, sweet as birdsong. If she mumbled them, without melody, Ms. Kaplan said, she might lose a word here and there and thus the full meaning of each line. By singing, she said, she is fully mindful.

  “Time completely stops,” she said. “Now I understand what it is to pray with your heart.”

  Two weeks ago, during their regular four-hour shift, Ms. Kaplan sang 128 of the 150 psalms and grudgingly gave up her place to Ms. Russak at 4 A.M., begging her to finish the cycle. Last week, determined to do the full canon on her own, Ms. Kaplan pleaded and won an extra hour.

  “It’s very completing for her,” Ms. Russak said. “Like finishing an entire book of the Torah.”

  But before Ms. Kaplan’s middle-of-the-night vigil on the brown leather benches in the tent, others had taken their turns, among them Anat Barber, the newest recruit, who was full of nervous questions. “The bodies there, do they know who they are?” Ms. Barber asked, as Ms. Russak escorted her to the site of the first time.

  Ms. Russak did her best to be reassuring, telling Ms. Barber that she would be fine, that “the irony is that it feels too e
asy.” Outside the tent, the last of the men, a volunteer from Ohab Zedek, was rushing toward his Sabbath observance in Brooklyn. It was time for the women to begin their watch, to fill the night with poetry and prayer.

  Jane Gross

  A Picture and a Friendship

  Tim Sherman spotted the photograph near the end of his first day of digging, the Friday after that Tuesday. The time of day, he recalls, was “after dark.” He had been on the move since dawn. A gang from his job at the Middlesex Water Company had come to New York to help, with strong backs and water main know-how and willing spirits. In a way, there was nothing to do.

  Around them, smoke heaved from shapes no human hand could form. However many tons of stuff were on the ground, the landscape fell heavier and longer on the eye. There is no God, he remembers thinking.

  The Middlesex crew grabbed hand tools and faced the wreckage at Liberty Plaza. Digging. Bucketing. Whatever needed to be done.

  Late that day, he raked a pile of ash, then saw the picture. Frozen in time and in eight-by-ten inches of vibrant colors, three cute kids stared at him from the ground: one boy just old enough for braces, another boy a few years younger and a toddler sister.

  The picture was sopping. He stuck it on a wall to dry, but it slid off. “If you put it back up there, it’ll just fall again and get lost,” a coworker told Mr. Sherman, so he stashed it away. “This could be the last thing a mother or father saw before they died,” Mr. Sherman would say.

  Over the next two weeks or so, the fraternity of hard work, warm meals and caring people changed Mr. Sherman’s opinion about God. Back in New Jersey, his hometown paper, the Home News Tribune, ran an article about the water company crews helping out. The paper also published the picture Tim Sherman had saved.

  All day after Brian Conroy saw the salvaged picture in the newspaper, he had a hard time concentrating on his job, managing a sales territory for Arnold Bread and Thomas’s English Muffins. He knew those faces—knew the kids. Those were George Tabeek’s children, and George worked at the Trade Center for the Port Authority.

  Years ago, a decade or more, Mr. Tabeek owned a piece of a restaurant in Edison. Mr. Conroy tended bar there once a week. The Tabeek boys would visit their dad while he was watching the register. At closing time, the two men would share a pizza and news about his children. They were good friends, but work friends, so when the restaurant closed, they went about their lives.

  Photo reprinted by permission of George Tabeek

  Mr. Conroy recalled that the Tabeeks lived in Brooklyn, and he found two listings for them. On one call, an answering machine picked up. Mr. Conroy put the phone down. At the second number, a woman said hello.

  “Yes, this is the Tabeek household.”

  Mr. Conroy explained who he was, but fumbled trying to state his business. He cannot say if his heart was pounding or had simply stopped.

  The woman finally figured out whom Mr. Conroy was talking about.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh. George. He’s right here. Do you want to speak to him?”

  Mr. Conroy fell silent. The little hairs rose along his arms.

  About ten years ago, George Tabeek took his children to the Sears where his sister worked the photography department and had the children sit for a portrait. Dana would have been about three; Steven, eleven; and young Georgie, fourteen.

  The picture of the children followed him as he moved through jobs at the Port Authority, as Georgie became a New York City police officer, as Steven went to St. John’s University and as Dana started high school at Bishop Kearney.

  Mounted in a gold frame, the portrait sat on the edge of his credenza, in his office on the thirty-fifth floor of 2 World Trade Center. Mr. Tabeek, an engineer, was one of the people with the keys to everything. When he looked out the window across the plaza to the great spread of New York, in the corner of his view was an eight-by-ten picture of his children.

  That awful morning, he had the good luck to be stopping for a doughnut in the plaza when the first plane hit. He then tested that fortune, running up twenty-two floors with firefighters to rescue people. He was inches from a fireman, Lt. Andrew Desperito, when the second building fell and took Lieutenant Desperito.

  He told all this to Brian Conroy, the old friend he had shared pizza with in the life before. Mr. Conroy then told him about Tim Sherman the water worker and the wet picture he had found buried in the ash.

  For the first time in weeks, Mr. Tabeek said that yesterday, he thought about the picture that sat in the corner of his window view, the small piece of his remembered sky.

  Submitted by Jim Dwyer

  Memento

  “I want to buy something in New York,” my friend David says, as we drive through the Lincoln Tunnel to our favorite place on earth. “You know, take something away, a memento.” This is our first trip to Manhattan since September 11.

  We park where I used to live, on Thomson Street and shop at the first place we see.

  “How about this?” I say, holding up a trinket.

  “No, it just doesn’t feel right,” he answers.

  He buys some T-shirts for his kids, I give in to my favorite jewelry vendor, but his special memento is not found.

  We walk toward Ground Zero, soon realizing that the hundred copies of “Dust,” a piece he wrote to share with rescue workers, is still in the car, which is now in the bowels of a parking garage.

  As we near the site, there is uncharacteristic silence and no traffic, except for the occasional shriek of an emergency vehicle. Police stand at barricades looking exhausted and sad. Residents of the attacked area straggle out from the empty blocks dragging suitcases, carrying stuffed animals, wearing devastated expressions.

  We stroll in silence, then stop for a drink in a corner pub and sit like we are part of a window display, watching people, talking, the lights of Ground Zero glowing in the distance.

  “I didn’t get my memento,” he says with sadness.

  On our final journey of the day, we pass the parking garage and see our car, front row center. The folder holding his piece, Dust, beckons us from the back window. We collect his thoughts, his feelings, his words, and take them with us to hand out as we pay tribute at Washington Square Park.

  We stick some under candles; wax sealing them to the ground, blurring the ink. We hand them to strangers who share stories of loved ones lost in terrorist attacks years before. We give one to a solemn state trooper from Syracuse, New York, and stand silent, listening to him tell stories of what the loss of the last two weeks means to him. We give one to a teacher from the Bronx and help him hang a long banner done by eighth graders who watched the towers burning from their school windows across the river. His friend helps us seal one to hang on the chain-link gravestone. We slip one into the crippled hands of a woman, sitting in her wheelchair in the dark, listening to the music of mourners. We give them to the police, and to gay men walking arm in arm, and to newlyweds, and to huge neckless bouncers at clubs. As we leave the city we pass them through the windows to homeless and confused and forlorn faces curbside. We hand out his words-on-paper and hugs and support until we are too exhausted to go on.

  Riding home we tell shared stories and recall the faces, the touches. He expresses despair, then resignation over not getting a memento to mark the day. He didn’t buy a shirt, or a picture for the wall, or a ring to wear, but he has his memento.

  You will hear it in the stories he writes. You will see it when he looks at a child. You will feel it in his touch. His memento won’t wear out, or fade, or tarnish. He will wear it, hanging heavy in his heart, polished and ready to share.

  Mary Sue Mooney

  Dust

  A few Fridays back I was in the car listening to the radio. A member of the scientific community, when asked what constitutes the dust we find on our tabletops and under our beds, responded with an answer that has been swirling in my mind. “Bits of everything.” he said, “fragments of tree trunks and manmade objects, even dinosaur bones. Anything
might be in that dust, from the beginning of time.”

  I’ve been thinking about this when I dust or see the tiny particles float through a ray of light coming in my kitchen window. The entire history of the universe is under my bed. The thought made me smile, until last week. To my horror, I watched the Twin Towers turn to dust across my television screen. Floor by floor they collapsed onto each other after two jets and their thousands of gallons of fuel ignited the catastrophe. There were flames and screams and falling debris and sirens and clouds and clouds of dust. People ran up the avenues and down the streets being chased by mountains of billowing dark dust. It rushed into open windows and around corners, down stairwells and into subways. It snuck into pockets and clung to shoulders and the linings of nasal passages. It balanced on electric wires and spiraled up into the wind, which carried it away.

  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.