Friday, sunset, the eve of another September 11, a day that will never again be ordinary. I was working downtown in 2001, Providence is where I heard the news, watched the towers fall over and over on TV’s and video screens in Dexter Manor, high-rise housing for the elderly and disabled. 

I took a walk downtown this evening to look at the Wall of Hope. The Wall is a series of hand-painted tiles, over 1,000, made by school children and people in the community as a response to the World Trade Center attack. The granite marker explaining the installation is almost unreadable– acid rain probably, but the tiles lining the walkway and tunnel to the Providence River are bright and unfaded. 

A man sways toward me with his hand out slurring something about food. I give him my bus fare, I can walk home and I think my RIPTIK will probably work on the return bus anyway.  A couple is strolling through the tunnel, the woman stopping to take pictures of the wall. 

I’m struck by the expressions of peace, of hope, of grief for what was done to our country and more than three thousand innocent people. It echoes what I felt and heard in the aftermath nine years ago, when the sky was blue and eerily devoid of airplanes.  For the first time the people on the street lost their categories in my mind and became, simply, American.

Walking back through the park with the grand fountain I see a man sitting on a bench, I think he’s going to panhandle me but he just smiles and flashes a peace sign. The crowd at Kennedy Plaza is, as they used to say, a United Nations. Sometimes we are a United Nation. In the days after September 11 we came together. I visited three churches the night of the World Trade Towers attack. They were lit up with doors open. I didn’t want to be alone.

Waiting for the bus at the Tunnel I see the sign for the First Baptist Church. The church that was founded by Roger Williams before the American Revolution. Still defending freedom after all these years. It was never easy. Like the saying goes, freedom isn’t free. Finding our way when there are real enemies without, and conflict within is the challenge we face. But we have faced this before. Our better angels are speaking, if we will hear them.
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David Jaffe wrote his own account, and a meditation on what we lost, Recollections of September 11.