West of the Moon

memorial.

At the entrance, we asked if there’d be somewhere inside where we could throw out our coffee cups.  It was nine o’clock on a Saturday morning–we all had coffee cups.  There was a Dunkin Box o’ Joe sitting in the baby’s stroller, that’s how much coffee we had.

The guy at the entrance just shook his head.  ”There aren’t any trash cans inside,” he said.  ”Security.  No public bathrooms, either, just so you know.  Nowhere that people could hide things.”  We could take our coffee in with us, there just wouldn’t be anywhere to drop the cups when we were done.

The entrance is just some streetcorner downtown, a block and a half from Zuccotti Park.  It’s not a building, or even a tent, just a podium and a couple of signs.  We looked around for somewhere to toss the coffee cups before going in, but the guy shook his head again.  ”No trash cans out here, either.  Too close.”  He gestured at the curb next to his podium.  ”If you just leave them there, on the ground, I’ll make sure they get taken care of.”

They checked our tickets every hundred feet or so, it seemed like.  To get in, you’re basically walking through a construction site; it’s all alleyways and tarped-over chain-link fences, with one indoor waypoint, the security room.  It’s just like airplane security–coats and bags in pins, empty your pockets, take off your belts.  Follow the arrows on the floor, go through a scanner, don’t stand too long in one place.  Don’t ask too many questions.  The walls are covered with giant photo enlargements–one wall is all artist projections of what the memorial and the towers will look like when finished, the other wall is pictures of vigils and demonstrations of support from around the world.

The memorial itself is actually quite beautiful.  There were so many bad ideas being thrown around, in the early planning stages.  What they ended up with is beautiful.  It’s mostly a small park, and you can see already how peaceful it’s going to feel when the trees have grown up a little more.  The footprints of the two towers have been made into reflecting pools, recessed waterfalls ringed by the names of the people who died that day.

We spent a lot of time walking around and reading names.  This was a family trip, part of a family weekend that my in-laws do every year, and they had a list of names they were looking for.  You can look it up ahead of time, online, see where at the memorial the names are listed.  They were looking for neighbors, for the sons and brothers and nephews of friends.  I didn’t have anyone I’d looked up, I was just reading names.  Someone said that the families were contacted, asked for advice on grouping the names, so that in the end people aren’t listed alphabetically or at random, but they’re listed with their friends, the people they knew.

I hadn’t been down there before, and I don’t know that I really need to go back, but as memorials go, it’s very graceful, which gives it a lot of emotional power.

Posted Sunday, January 8th, 2012 at 11:56 am. Filed under: personal.

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