Remembering 9/11, on the 10th anniversary of that horrific day, was no different.
For me, the day began in a children's playground that looks out across downtown Manhattan. It was a morning quieter than most Sunday mornings. Under a sky as blue and clear as that day 10 years ago, kids who were not yet born in 2001 played on swings and slides and darted between both playing tag.
It was a scene that occurs around the world and this was not much different except that the participants could have been torn from the pages of a United Nations textbook on diversity. Hispanic kids, Chinese kids, White kids, Black kids, Muslim kids. The only thing missing from this scene a company like Benetton would pay big money to photograph, a scene so feel-good perfect it was almost awkward, was perhaps a Jewish contingent. Maybe the Hassidic jogger running laps of the park made up for that to further quash stereotypes.
Later in the day, outside one of the local fire stations that dot New York City, firemen in dress uniform and women in Sunday best frocks held the hands of children as they remembered some of the 343 members of the New York Fire Department who died at Ground Zero. Some of the older kids were without fathers, their dads taken from them as they performed their jobs trying to save others.
This particular tiny firehouse lost 12 firefighters on that day 10 years ago. That was not unusual. Such was the emergency response to the alarms triggered by a plane had crash into the World Trade Center that small stations from all across the city all sent trucks. Then boom and they were gone. Fire trucks now drive around New York City with the names of their dead painted on the side.
And then, late in the day, as the sun set over New York Harbour, I could hear the singing before I saw the procession of people coming up the street. It was not triumphant but quiet, like an unrehearsed church choir. Then I saw a small group, no more than 30 people or so, slowly walking up the street waving Stars and Stripes and New York City flags and carrying candles.
They were remembering, mourning, and singing “God Bless America,” the song written by Irving Berlin that sounds more like a prayer than a melody. The key words, sung over and over by this group, go something like this:
“God bless America, My home sweet home
God bless America, My home sweet home.”
The small detail? The procession was Chinese and Mexican immigrants reminding us that people with origins in 90 countries died in the attacks. An attack on New York is not just an attack on the United States. 9/11 touched everyone in some way.
