Soul Food

Michele Marr

“We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the

love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.” -

William Gladstone

A couple weeks ago my vacuum broke. So I loaded it into the trunk of

my car and took it to a local appliance shop to be fixed.

From the parking lot in front of the shop I noticed the message on the

reader board sign at California Bank and Trust. The big black letters on

its marquee read, “Our prayers are with the victims of our nation’s

tragedy.”

A man getting into the car next to mine followed my gaze to the sign.

“You’d think they’d have taken that down by now,” he said.

I smiled and shrugged. It did surprise me to see the message this many

months after Sept. 11, but I wasn’t thinking it had been left there too

long.

Tuesday will mark the ninth month since the dawn of that abysmal day.

That’s a long time in our hurry-up culture, to be sure.

And maybe those of us here on the West Coast are far enough from the

epicenter of that tragedy to forget the magnitude of its destruction more

quickly than those who are closer to it. But every day many people still

struggle to go on in the wake of its damage.

In April, when I visited our nation’s capital, that became clear to

me. Security officers were omnipresent. Huge drop cloths on the Pentagon,

there to contain the debris of reconstruction, hung in the cityscape like

shrouds.

With a stroke of bittersweet serendipity I arrived at Arlington

National Cemetery with my sister and her son during the last day of a

traveling exhibit called “The September 11 Photo Project.”

The project, which will come to the Armory Center for the Arts in

Pasadena in late June, is a collection of more than 4,000 photographs and

written notes. Each is an intimate portrait of the experience, pain and

consequences of Sept. 11.

The exhibit began with a few hundred notes and photographs displayed

near Ground Zero in Soho, New York.

My sister, her son and I began our walk along the wall of photos and

notes together. Soon, though, we had drifted apart. Every visitor’s walk

through the exhibition is destined to be unique.

It is impossible to take in the contents of every photo and

handwritten entry. One here and one there, a scrawled message or an image

pulled me in.

In one snapshot, the camera has captured a man braced against a sunlit

wall. A cell phone at his ear, he weeps. On a piece of notebook paper

7-year-old Nayala Smith has written her

story.

“My school bus didn’t show up today. There was a big explosion. Me and

my mom and dad ran out onto our terrace and we saw a really big hole in

the World Trade Tower with lots of smoke and fire. We started to pray for

the people in that tower.”

A few feet away someone from Arlington, someone named R. Bobington,

has pinned up a photo of the Statue of Iwo Jima. It was taken at night

under a rain of fireworks. At the bottom of the image Bobington has

written two words, “Let’s roll.”

Photo after photo shows people running, or standing dazed, in a

downpour of dust and paper and glass. Pinned among them is a photo of a

newborn. In someone’s cursive hand it says, “Ryan Matthew Thomas -- born

9/11/2001, 5:10 p.m.”

Nearby a woman named Diane Perez has left a Polaroid of a bike, a bike

chained to a pole, a bike that waits for her brother who will never come

back.

No, I don’t think California Bank and Trust has left its September

message up too long. Maybe its message will continue to remind us there

are victims of that national tragedy who need to be kept in our hearts

and prayers for a long time to come.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for as

long as she can remember. She can be reached at o7

michele@soulfoodfiles.com.f7