Name by Name, Face by Face...

Last week we observed the 10th anniversary of the attacks on September 11.

As someone who was living in New York City on that day, who stood on Fifth Avenue with countless other Midtown cubicle dwellers and messengers and deli workers, wondering at the burning towers, who bore witness to mass murder with the rest of her city...

From the background, these people are right by St. Patrick's Cathedral, on  Fifth Avenue at 50th Street.  
They would've been half a block away from where I was standing.  
All of us, filling the sidewalks and even the street itself, staring up at the sky downtown, unable to look away.

...the anniversary stirred up an unexpected well of emotions in me.  I thought I had moved past most of that sadness but it hit me harder than I thought.  And I didn’t even lose anyone—I reacted as a New Yorker, an American, and a human being.

There are so many approaches to history—political theory,  social theory, et cetera.  But as I told one of my classmates at Columbia, I’m an actor and to me, history is first an aggregate of people's lives.  The collective narrative of all of us. 

There were these flyers that sprang up almost immediately all over the city.  "Have you seen...?"  "Missing..."  You had to stop to read them. But carefully.  You didn't want to start crying again on the streets.  Which we were all doing anyway, on the streets, walking to church, at your cubicle.  But I would read these flyers when I could.  I felt I had to, to bear witness.  The least I could do was learn these peoples' stories.

 Visit Pompeii and see the graffiti scratched into the wall by a bored centurion millennia ago, 

now carefully notated and photographed by archaeologists.  Every cathedral, every bridge, every pyramid, every Book of Kells and Bayeux Tapestry, all the opera magna we take for granted were put together with the collective hands of millions of men and women exactly like us, who each had their own story to tell, to question, to live.  They cared about their children and worried about the future and struggled with the larger stones and swore when they made mistakes etching calligraphy onto the vellum.

I still remember some of the faces on the flyers--one was an Asian man, a businessman, "last seen at Windows on the World.*"  I remember thinking, what a beautiful, hopeful name...Windows on the World.  Who wouldn't want to be there on such a gorgeous morning?

"It is a story," said Sara.  "Everything is a story.  You are a story--I am a story.  Miss Minchin is a story."

There was a young black woman, whose relatives implored anyone with information to call the number below, "We're very worried about her!!!"  Oh, God.  That last... 
It just breaks your heart.

Our lives become the stories that we weave...

I remember reading about a young woman, 20s, dark blonde hair with an unusual name that jumped out at me...Giovanna.

History's deconstructed essence, its atom, is one person’s story.  StoryCorps is an oral history project, dedicated to capturing Americans' lives on tape.  They have interviewed several relatives of 9/11 victims and animated the results.







When you think you can bear it, go to the StoryCorps site and watch some of the videos.  Past the sadness and grief, there is just so much love.

To Giovanna--

I remember seeing your pretty face in the flyers posted all over Midtown after that day.  
Your name stuck with me--such a beautiful, old country name.
It's obvious your family loved you very much, I saw your flyer everywhere.
Bless you, dear one.