Rowland Henley, who works for Philip Morris, needed to go back to work on Thursday. “Everything seemed surreal. I thought if I went back to work, I could shake that pervasive terrible feeling of loss. I couldn’t.” Philip Morris received a bomb scare on Thursday and the building was evacuated. People poured into the streets. Some were talking on cell phones, saying good-bye to loved ones. Rowland headed south toward the Brooklyn Bridge hoping to get home. He ended up in a bar with other evacuees, a hodgepodge of humanity—professionals, cab drivers, construction workers, firemen, and emergency workers. Their common link was their need to comfort and be comforted.
Rowland, like thousands of others, felt that the only way to mitigate the sadness growing inside him was to help in some way. When his company offered opportunities for any employee who wanted to volunteer with the Red Cross, Rowland did. His job was to provide support to the workers at Ground Zero.
“We were told to make an effort to cheer these people up. ‘Ask about the Yankees, smile big, take their mind off things. . . .’ Making small talk was just that—small and these people were giants, every one of them. I stopped trying and just threw myself into the manual labor.”
Rowland and other volunteers were put to work carrying boxes of supplies, setting out food, cleaning tables, emptying trash, filling things, hauling things, doing whatever was needed to support those doing the terrible work of clearing Ground Zero.
“They kept thanking us!” Rowland said incredulously. “They were thanking us when they were the ones who should be thanked. I wanted to say something, anything that would convey to these unselfish, caring human beings what I felt.
“I thought if I could just find the words. . . .”
But there were no words.
Even when a body was recovered, when everyone stopped and placed a hand over his heart as a processional slowly brought its precious cargo to the staging area to be taken to the makeshift morgue, even when tears fell, they fell silently. There were no words.
For some, like Rowland, that silence was the worst. One young woman whose husband or lover or friend was one of those whose body had been found stood alone inside a Salvation Army tent after the memorial. She stood there a long time just staring into space. After a time, she noticed on a table in a corner, a small stuffed animal. It was a teddy bear with a red ribbon.
“I had stopped near the opening of that tent,” said Rowland. “I had passed by before on one of my errands and seen this woman standing there. I don’t know what made me stop then and watch her. But I did. And then I was glad.”
The woman picked up the teddy bear, clutched it tightly to her and began to cry—big deep gulps of sobs. It was as if she needed something to release what was pent up inside of her. That something had to be a normal thing, a soft, lovely child’s toy sent by someone whose only intention was to offer comfort, kindness, and appreciation. And, there amidst all that devastation, the bear wasn’t the slightest bit out of place. Because all the workers—those on the pile and those, like Rowland Henley who had volunteered to go to support them—were there for the same reason.
Someone had sent this bear (and I later learned that many more were on the way) in the hope that it would provide some comfort to someone, anyone, who needed it. Its softness, its bright red ribbon against the gray, sad surroundings shown like a beacon of what it was meant to show—compassion and hope.
Sometimes words aren’t enough. And sometimes, they aren’t even necessary.
Marsha Arons
Send Beauty
On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, Kate Cain-Bell was fully immersed in teaching “something important” to her first-grade class at Richboro Elementary School in Richboro, Pennsylvania.
Not long into the day, the principal asked her to step out of the classroom for a moment. There, in the hallway, she heard about the devastation in New York and Washington, D.C. It was difficult for her to grasp the news, let alone try to explain it to innocent minds, so she agreed with the school’s decision not to inform the children.
When Kate returned to her waiting students, the class work seemed to pale in comparison to the significance of the day’s events. As a deeply spiritual woman, she felt compelled to impact the world in a positive way during the time of such a crisis. An idea leapt to mind. She drew in a breath, walked to the front of the class and made a request.
“I want each of you to imagine the most beautiful thing you can think of. Hold that thought in your mind and then send it out to the world. Can you all do that?”
A sea of young faces nodded.
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
And with that, a wave of beauty was sent out into a world of ugliness.
At the end of the day, Kate wanted her class to be prepared with some knowledge that they wouldn’t be walking into the same world they’d left that morning. Another idea blossomed. She stood in front of the class again.
“Remember when I asked you to send out your beautiful thought to the world?”
After pausing to accept their nods, Kate continued. “Well, while you were sending out your beauty, someone else sent something not-so-beautiful into the world.”
Kate paused again, to see if her young students understood.
A little girl named Allie piped up, “Well, when I get home, I’ll send them something beautiful right back!”
In the midst of tragedy, triumph comes in many forms. This time, it came in the form of a young child who learned a lesson that was truly “something important.”
Send beauty.
Teri Goggin
The Crumpled Blue Ribbon
We won’t always know whose lives we touched and made better for our having cared, because actions can sometimes have unforeseen ramifications. What’s important is that you do care and you act.
Charlotte Lunsford
Mrs. Green, a fourth-grade teacher, was grief-stricken as she watched the news on TV. She had been teaching for more than twenty-two years, but she had never been faced with such disaster. She was overwhelmed with despair, until suddenly she recalled the “Who You Are Makes a Difference” story she had read in the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book, in which a fourteen-year-old boy’s life was saved when his father honored him with a blue ribbon.
“That’s the answer,” she shouted. We don’t have to focus all our energies on the terrorists. I can teach my students how to love one another and make the world a healthier and more peaceful place right now. She immediately called to purchase the “Who I Am Makes a Difference” blue ribbons.
As she held the blue ribbons in her hands, her eyes twinkled as she announced to her students that today they would not be learning reading, writing and arithmetic. Instead, they were going to have a hands-on experience of love, life and what it means to be truly a great human being. One by one, she approached each of them, telling them how very special and unique they were to her. Then she placed a “Who I Am Makes a Difference” blue ribbon just above their heart. The sadness and pain of the recent days faded.
Her students’ faces glowed, chests swelled and spirits soared. If only for those thirty minutes, the usual gloom and doom of the recent days had lifted, and she was convinced that something very special had occurred on this day.
As her students left her classroom, she handed out extra blue ribbons saying, “Go home and tell your parents, brothers, sisters—everybody—how much you love them. Tell them today! Place a blue ribbon above their heart.” The bell rang, her students raced out with a new vigor. She sat at her desk, crying with happiness. She felt such a relief. Love was definitely what needed to be taught in this world right now. At least she had done her part.
Now she hoped that her students would be able to pass on this love to others. But she could not have imagined the difference this exercise would have made to one father.
Less than a week later, a parent stormed into her classroom unannounced.
“I’m Timmy’s father,” he declared. “Was this your idea to do this bl
ue ribbon project?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Green answered.
“Well,” the father mumbled, pulling out a crumpled blue ribbon from his pocket, “my son came home the other day and told me how much he loved me and what a good father I am. I’ve come here to tell you that I’m not a good father. I’m an alcoholic. But something happened to me when my son told me how much he loved me. At that moment, I decided to go to AA for the first time. I even attended church this past Sunday. You see,” he said as he turned toward the door, “the world might be hurting, but I don’t need to add to the pain. In fact,” he said, “from now on, I’m going to become the father my son thinks I am.”
Mrs. Green gasped as she watched the father go out her classroom door, knowing that the healing had begun and the world was going to get better . . . because she taught at least one child to love.
Helice Bridges
BOWS Across America
When events occur that we don’t expect, they increase our faith, strengthen our ability to endure, and bring forth our hidden talents, abilities and strengths.
Iyanla Vanzant
Like so many of us, I was stumbling around on the Saturday after the September 11 attack on our country, wondering what to do. How could I help, and was it really true that someone had leveled the World Trade Center with a couple of hijacked airplanes?
It was not a time to sit around the house, so I headed into town. The local firefighters were out collecting money for New York, flags were flying on buildings and cars and motorcycles, and banners hung on bridges and around horses’ necks. People were walking around the lake, heads down, and the town was unusually quiet and yet just as active as every other Saturday in a tourist town in the Rocky Mountains.
I stopped at the coffee shop and went from crying at the sight of a four-year-old with American ribbons in her hair to a sudden and immense pride in the country where I lived. In a moment’s time I found myself at the fabric store searching for some way to display my American pride. One small piece of flag fabric, a pin, and some red, white and blue ribbons were left in a basket in the corner, so I bought what they had and wondered to myself why I never had owned a flag to fly. In a time of national crisis, with a renewed sense of patriotism, there was not one to be had in the entire city of Denver. I felt somewhat ashamed of myself.
The fabric and ribbons turned into a bow that I wore to church the next day. Before the service was over, ten people wanted a bow just like mine. I found myself saying, “I’m selling them for five dollars, and all of the money goes to the New York Fire 9-1-1 Relief Fund. How many would you like?”
The next day I wore my bow to work and quickly realized that this was a way I could help. After one hundred orders, I went to the nearest fabric store and bought the only bolt of flag fabric and all the pins and ribbon they had. It took three nights of making bows before I could get through the evening without tears. This simple process of creating with my hands was helping me to heal. Not that any more sense was being made out of the attacks—just that each bow represented a positive energy to replace the worn-out sadness.
This project needed a name and a mission. I woke up one morning with the acronym “BOWS Across America—Bracing Others With Support.” The mission was then to make a bow in memory of the people who had lost their lives on September 11. If we made 10 or 50 or 150,000 bows, our pride would just grow and expand, and there would be no need to stop making bows, I thought. Just as not having a flag to fly when I most needed it, why wouldn’t people display a red, white and blue bow on their chest whether it was Christmas, the Fourth of July, Tuesday or St. Patrick’s Day?
Within a week, teachers from seven elementary schools requested materials to make bows. Local grocery stores allowed the kids to sit outside their doors and sell the Patriot Ribbons to shoppers. You should have seen the concoction of bows and ribbons presented in everything from Easter baskets to shoe boxes. Some of the fabric was cut in half; ribbons were tied on the ends and in the middle and looped in long lengths to fly in the wind. Safety pins were stuck through the bow, in the front and on the back. Through it all, people lined up to buy bows. Some gave one dollar, others gave twenty dollars, but everyone gave either a smile or hug, shed a tear or said, “God bless America.”
I needed to share the idea with friends. Perhaps it would help them heal a bit, just as it had helped me. I packaged up the bows and shipped them to people requesting them in other states. One person bought a bow and shipped it to a friend somewhere else in America, and now before I knew it, the project was launched in eleven states. My dear friend in Texas said, “I wasn’t dealing with the pain and sadness. It was much too hard to bear. So I was denying it instead of trying to help someone else, as this bow has shown me how to do. We must honor the victims.”
Within a few weeks, we sent the Relief Fund more than five thousand dollars—or one thousand bows sold for one thousand heroes. Before long, new schools helped, people from other states called from churches and youth groups. People wanted to help in some way; because the “not knowing” part this attack brought makes the helplessness too hard to feel.
One thousand bows, one thousand heroes, more than four thousand additional lives to honor. God bless America.
Lisa Duncan
3
THE WORLD
RESPONDS
This is not a battle between the United States and terrorism, but between the free and democratic world and terrorism. We, therefore, here in Britain, stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until evil is driven from our world.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair
A Fishing Village Opens
Its Heart to Surprise Guests
On September 11, once government officials realized that planes were being used as missiles, thirty-eight international flights were immediately rerouted to the emergency airfield at Gander, Newfoundland, a city of ten thousand on the Atlantic coast of Canada.
Bellevue Police Lieutenant Steve Cercone, who had been in Europe for a family funeral, was one of about 1,000 passengers then driven about twenty-five miles east to Gambo, a fishing village of 2,200.
What was supposed to be a temporary layover—while governments and airlines worked out logistical details of reopening U.S. air space—turned into a five-day adventure for passengers and townsfolk alike.
They huddled around televisions; drank “screech,” the native dark rum, at the town’s one tavern; ate moose stew and cod filets; and slept in the town’s churches and schools. Townspeople quit their jobs that week to attend to the visitors.
“In the midst of this huge tragedy, we were fortunate enough to see the other side of life, the other side of human nature,” Cercone recalls. “The kindness of complete strangers who took us in, gave us showers, fed us, did our laundry . . .
“Five days in Gambo. It would make a great movie script.”
United Airlines Flight 929—London to Chicago—was 38,000 feet in the air when Cercone heard the news.
The pilot, Captain Mike Ballard, told the 198 passengers that there was a major emergency in New York City and American air space had been shut down.
Fuel was dumped because the plane was too heavy to land otherwise and the emergency landing gear dropped. “Our imaginations were running from A to Z,” says Cercone, a twenty-year police veteran and former supervisor of the Bellevue SWAT team.
The small ground crew at Gander, used to a quiet routine as a cargo-plane stopover, was suddenly welcoming 6,500 passengers.
“Around midday, we were told that planes were coming out of the skies and to expect some of them,” says Claude Elliot, Gander’s mayor. “We had an emergency plan, so we put everything in motion.”
Churches, schools and civic organizations opened their doors. Elliot went on radio and television, urging people to donate clothes, bedding, food, pillows and sleeping bags. The city’s bus drivers, who were on strike, put down their picket signs and offered to fer
ry the passengers around.
“Everyone watched the news that morning, everyone knew that these people were stranded from home or had loved ones working at the World Trade Center,” Elliot says. “We just tried to make their stay as comfortable as we could.”
Gander took in the bulk, about 4,200 passengers. But some of the burden was shouldered by satellite towns—Gambo, Glenwood and Benton.
The strangers began arriving in Gambo that afternoon, four planeloads, still reeling from news of the attacks.
They were divided up quickly among the Society of United Fisherman, Smallwood Academy, the Lions Club and assorted other churches and civic groups. Passengers from Flight 929 slept on cots and pews at the Salvation Army citadel.
The town’s population had just jumped by 50 percent. And the world had become a little closer.
“We saw it that morning on TV,” says Wycliffe Reid, Salvation Army captain. “But like everything else that happens in the U.S., it’s at a distance. On the same day, these people are here, right here on our doorstep, and now we’re involved. We’re called on to provide a service. We became a part of these people and what went on.”
But first, Reid’s immediate concern was: How are we going to feed them all?
Donations came from grocery stores and restaurants. Fishermen donated 150 pounds of cod.
The Home League Ladies, two dozen strong, prepared and served the meals.
“We understood the severity of the situation,” says Kevin Noseworthy, Lions Club president. “We just got together, pulled down a shift. Someone would cook one meal, someone would cook another. It was overwhelming at times. But we got through it.
“When I’m older and in the rocking chair, it will be a highlight. I did something good for mankind.”
The town’s only tavern is a single-story bungalow called the Trailway Pub.
Graham Thompson bought it three months ago and was remodeling Tuesday afternoon—moving the bar from one side of the cabin structure to the other. Suddenly, twenty-five people walked in, then twenty-five more and twenty-five more after that.