The final say

Ten years ago, after terrorists intent on mass murder cut through the clear, blue skies of Sept. 11, like most Americans my wife and I spent evenings hunkered down at home, two silhouettes in the blue glow of the television seeking clues of what this all meant for our nation and ourselves.

Probably it goes without saying that one thing can lead to another when a husband and wife hunker down together during the cold months. In what would seem mutually exclusive activities, we shuddered at a frightening future and conceived a child. Go figure. One moment we're discussing how we wouldn't want to raise a child in a world like this. The next, a ticker-tape parade in a fallopian tube. ...

At the time, the conclusion was:

Passion always wins.

The species is tone-deaf.

As winter turned to spring, we directed soft, sing-song toward my wife's expanding belly. We worried how a child would fair in a world gone so wrong. We couldn't wait to meet him.

At that time I hadn't yet equated procreation as a rejoinder to the attacks of 9/11. To that end, I had something else in mind — engaging in something potentially dangerous that didn't require going to Iraq. I joined the fire department.

In all, 343 firefighters and other emergency responders were killed in the attack of the World Trade Centers. They attempted to save lives even if it meant losing their own. In a nation that had hitherto made careless use of the word "hero" — tossing it around like an unwieldy red, white and blue medicine ball — here were real heroes, ordinary people engaged in extraordinary pursuits. For me, their actions defined what it meant to be decent.

As kids, many of us wanted to be firefighters because of the shiny, red fire engines. Here, I wanted to be a firefighter because of the shiny example. I wanted to be like them. And I wanted my child to be raised in a world filled with people like them. So I joined the brotherhood — the men and women who rush into burning buildings, who have countless nights, mornings and afternoons (meals, parties, and deep sleep) interrupted by the piercing sound of the pager and who work together to help neighbors and strangers who've been shoved into the claustrophobic confines of living nightmares.

Despite the fact we Americans, we townspeople, we co-workers sometimes drive each other nuts, what would we be without each other? What would we be without those who tend to the needs of the everyday while also building from the blueprints that make a community a community? I’m not only referring to firefighters. What would we be without the men and women willing to go to war while we stayed put; and neighbors who help each other with crappy home repair projects; and the mentors of troubled children; and the tutors at prisons; and parents who adopt; and doctors and nurses and teachers; and religious leaders who have a sense of humor; and all devotees of the disenfranchised?

I doubt men who flew planes into buildings 10 years ago ever met people like these.

So 10 years later, we've got a 9/11 child — a boy with red hair like his mother. He plays with his pack of classmates, other 9/11 children born of love in a complicated age. No doubt, they'll mature with irreducible edges honed by the blunt instrument of anxious times. 


No doubt, they'll be a discerning brood who won't be denied a full accounting of such words as terror and suicide.

But for now, they anoint our lives. They remind us of our better selves. Their lives honor the memory of the men and women who never returned home that September day. They are the rejoinder to madness, the embodiment of their parents' singular act of defiance — under the sheets and out in the streets.

And when it comes time to, say, flip steaks at a fire department summertime fundraiser, I wish above all else those terrorists could get a load of us — we, the ones who stayed behind. I'd like to think even just the simple act of flipping steaks for a good cause would tick them off the most.

Because look at us now, look at us still.

Mercy wins. The terrorists lose.