and a little child will lead them …

New York, in those crazy weeks afterwards, became a patchwork of remembrance – it was like the city itself had become an enormous collage, or a roughly done papier mache sculpture – taped togther – the fence outside St. Paul’s jammed with flowers and patches and letters and drawings, the missing persons posters EVERYWHERE – some professionally done, others much more hand-made, the posters overlapping – everywhere you looked, the drawings and letters from people all over the world plastered up and down the walls in Penn Station, the side wall of Ray’s Pizza – I walk by there now and I know it’s years later, so I should be used to those posters being gone – but I can’t help it. That red wall (almost off-screen over to the left) just aches with emptiness now and all I can see when I look at it, like a mirage, ghosts, are all the posters, all the faces, the words Have you seen me, have you seen me, last seen on, last seen … Ray’s Pizza became a kind of pilgrimage – once you could get below 14th Street. I remember standing there the day I volunteered at the Salvation Army – this was on the 14th – with my surgical mask on, my eyes burning from the chemicals and smoke still in the air, standing by that red wall, scanning all the faces, the faces, people lighting candles, but pretty much what we all were doing – was just standing there. Looking. You had to look. You had to look at every face. Even if you had already seen the same poster 100 times already in the last 2 hours. It was an obligation. You must look.

All of that came up for me when I read the following:

… Don’t miss this post.

Thank you, Joe.