Morning Surprise

I've been in my own little world, lately; concentrating mostly on surviving and making it from work to the Ren Fest to work to the Ren Fest and so on. Going a month without a day off tends to make you focus on just getting the hell through it. As a result, I've kinda been aware of the preparations for the remembrance ceremony at the WTC site only on the most basic level: Info gleaned while being collapsed on a sofa in the brief moments before I threw myself into bed of an evening.

So I was a little surprised to be awakened this morning at 6:10 a.m. by a troupe of bagpipers marching up Flatbush Avenue (and consequently, right underneath my open window) on its way to Ground Zero for the ceremony. I found out later that a troupe had started out in each of the four outer boroughs in the wee hours and were all planning to converge at the same time on the site of the former World Trade Center.

I know what you're thinking: My first reaction was the think, "What the fuck are these idiots doing waking me up only five hours after I went to bed?!?" But that wasn't my reaction at all, surprisingly.

I may be unaware of the events in the world around me, but I'm not completely stupid, you know. Almost before I was finished bolting upright in my bed and looking out the window, I understood what day it was and what the significance of the whole thing was.

Usually, I'm not a big fan of the bagpipe. I find it a shrill instrument and often think there's very little variety in the music it plays.

But there was something odd about this group; though they were playing something a little more fast-paced, a little more suited to marching their asses off to get into the city in time for the ceremony, there was a softness about the sound that was being produced by this group; a mournful quality that was incredibly appropriate to the occasion. It struck me - almost as though I could feel it in my chest, and when the full import of what they were doing and where they were marching to settled in on me, I found myself crying. This mournful wail stayed with me all through my morning routine, all the way to work, right to when I settled in at work - where they'd set up a TV in the lunch room for people to watch the morning's ceremonies.

It seemed to me that much of the city was wearing the same sort of subdued melancholy, and made me think about how in many ways the city had reverted to form; people don't make eye contact as much as they did in the days right after the WTC attacks, but it seems to me they're every bit as willing to make connections. Tonight I stood on the corner of 9th Avenue and 56th Street, waiting for Doug Rees to arrive for our dinner date, and I ended up spending about ten minutes chatting with this guy who was obviously tipsy and had the disheveled air of a homeless guy who's trying to keep himself cleaned up so that he doesn't repulse the people he's panhandling. He explained to me why a two block radius around Columbus Circle was being cordoned off (I'd assumed it had something to do with all the high muckety-mucks who're in the city for the UN's new session and the 9/11 ceremonies - but as it turned out, the high winds had blown loose scaffolding from a high-rise condo being built on the Circle, and the scaffolding had fallen into the street and killed someone).

But the whole time we were talking, I was waiting for the schpeil to begin about how I should be giving him some sort of money - hell, having just finished The Mole People, a book about the homeless who live in the many layers of tunnels under Manhattan, I almost plain-out offered it to him at a couple of moments. But he never asked. After we talked for a while and admonished each other to be careful and to live each day as if it were our last, he said, "Have a good night, sir," and ambled away.

And I felt terribly guilty, not for not giving him anything - if there's one thing I've learned it's that homeless people are the most resourceful around. No, I actually felt guilty for assuming that he was going to try to scam me for money, when in fact he was just being neighborly... as neighborly as one can be on an island of 8 million strangers.

There's just no end of lessons to be learned from other people.