cranes

One final thing re: last week in New York and 9/11 and then I will climb down off the soapbox and shut up about it already:

the cranes are still around.

One the first anniversary of 9/11, Grace and I wandered around the city, agog at all the firefighters and law enforcement officers who had flooded into New York to mark the milestone. We moved through the crowds, notebooks in hand, interviewing and photographing these men who called one another "brother."

There was a pack of hale and hearty firemen from Daytona Beach who had ridden their Harleys to be there. There were police officers from Indiana, Seattle, Texas, Hawaii and all over the world, a convergence that was broad and sweeping and intimate and familial all at the same time.

But what got me in the gut, what finally loosed all the emotions I had clamped down for months and months were the cranes.

The morning of 9/11/2002, a group pf Japanese firefighters appeared in front of the makeshift shrine to the fallen firefighters that had been erected near Battery Park. Each of the men held long strands of brilliantly colored paper cranes. They stood silently for a bit and then they lit incense and knelt, and a hush vibrated through the crowd. The men chanted and prayed and then they were quiet. Grace and I inched closer to watch. After a time, one by one, each man rose and approached the shrine and tenderly spread the cranes across the marble steps, then bowed. Then the group silently melted back into the crowd.

The following year, I was sad to see that the shrine had been cleared. I have often wondered what became of all the momentos, photos, prayers, love letters, candles, flowers, helmuts, badges and patches left in agony, in grief, in remembrance. I wondered the most about all the cranes.

Last week I got my answer. St. Pauls has intalled a commemorative exhibit in the sancutary of the church. There are displays there that are representative of the tons of items that were left behind by mourners following 9/11.

As I walked through the sanctuary last week, I was flooded with memories and emotions, but it was the sight of the cranes at the end of the room that made me let go of my breath and pause. Affixed to the carefully displayed cranes is a plaque that reads in part that the peace cranes were made by schoolchildren and survivors of World War II, sent from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan. The cranes symbolize peace and compassion and reconcilitation, the plaque said.