Jeff Keating

I was doing fine, really, until it came time to pray.

The newsroom here at the News-Press was thrown into a whirlwind Sept.

11. Like every other news outlet in America, we ditched all our best-laid

plans and started from scratch, collecting local reaction to the East

Coast terrorist attacks for three papers -- this one and our sister

publications, the Burbank Leader and Foothill Leader.

Every reporter at all three papers was given beat-specific assignments

about reaction to the attack, and forced to turn around two, three and in

one case four stories apiece in a handful of hours so we could print

three newspapers that night. Laid-out pages were taken apart and built

all over again. Stories that 24 hours earlier were front-page news became

Page 5 filler, if they got in the paper at all. We were scrambling.

Yet in the midst of all that activity -- right on deadline, as a

matter of fact -- about a dozen people from the newsroom gathered in our

smallish conference room, bowed our heads and asked a higher power of our

individual understanding to take care of the families of the fallen,

welcome the souls of the departed, make room in our hearts for

forgiveness of the evil done, and offer us some small peace of mind in a

world gone suddenly, horribly wrong.

I was surprised, impressed and gratified by how many people took part.

Journalists as a group have a reputation for being cynical and unfeeling,

but the truth is that we keep our defenses up, and admittedly indulge in

a lot of gallows humor. This is not because we’re cold people, but

because a lot of what we see is the worst in others and the sad results

of their bad behavior. Our callousness, if you want to call it that,

generally is a defense mechanism more than an ingrained character trait.

So we prayed. Mostly we were quiet. A few of us said short prayers out

loud. Some of us wept.

And after a day of keeping my emotional distance, it all got to me.

All day, I had watched, over and over and over again, the surreal images

of the second plane flying into the World Trade Center and of the towers

collapsing, of people running for their lives down the streets of lower

Manhattan, of debris-covered rescue workers and civilians tottering away

from the ruins like survivors of a shipwreck crawling onto the beach.

As we bowed our heads, I started to think about my father, a U.S. Navy

pilot who lost friends in military accidents and in the Vietnam War, and

who himself was in harm’s way more than once during his 21 years of

service to his country. He would have known what to say, my dad, some

thought that would have helped put my heart and mind at ease, something

that would have made everyone around him feel, if not better, at least

more centered.

But I think he had a bigger job that day, one he was called to just

about a month prior. My father died of a massive heart attack in early

August, an event that shook me like nothing in my experience. He was the

rock at the center of my family’s life, the gravity that always seemed to

hold things down, and after his breathtakingly sudden departure, we all

were floating for awhile. It was a sensation that hadn’t really gone away

when Sept. 11 rolled around.

So as I and my colleagues prayed that day, I realized Dad was

someplace he could help others. He was welcoming the victims of the East

Coast attacks, showing them around, making them feel at home, telling

them it would be OK. It’s what he’d done my whole life. He helped out.

I knew then that I’d unconsciously been telling myself all day that it

was appropriate for me to keep my distance, that the events of the day

were not about me or my life, but about the victims of a horrible,

violent injustice and how our country was reacting to it.

I was right. And I was wrong.

Sept. 11 was about all of us. It was about my father. It was about my

colleagues and friends. It was about the people of this city, this state,

this great, flawed, spectacularly beautiful mess of a nation. It was a

shock to the system, a reminder that being free and rich and powerful

does not exempt us from the violence attached to things and people we

don’t understand. It was about thinking we know so much, then realizing

we know so little, and for all our power are still subject to moments of

stunning powerlessness.

It was about remembering that we all need to help each other out.

So I prayed, and wept a little. I stopped floating for the first time

in a month, and came back down to earth, back to where I could help out

in whatever small way I was able.

It’s what my father would have done, had he been here.

And then I was fine. Really.

JEFF KEATING is the News-Press managing editor. Reach him at 637-3234,

or by e-mail at jeff.keating@latimes.com.