Andrea Masciari

I whispered to my friend that I wished we had some kind of recording device to capture this moment on Sept. 11, 2003. For a fleeting fraction of time, I wished I could always embrace a photograph to remember the steeple and the trees and the quiet life all around us. I wanted so much to be able to seize this snapshot and hold it forever — one unshakable second entrenched in sorrow for 3,000 people who died 730 days ago.

As we turned the bend of the lagoon in our beautiful Public Garden, sitting in the front seat of the Swan Boats never felt as important as it did today. Even as a child, always rushing toward the front of the boat held so much less significance than this ride will hold for me for a very long time. The wooden swan drifted 10 passengers ever so slowly toward the Arlington Street Church, the somber church bells painfully, deliberately peeling out the sweetest renditions of “Amazing Grace” and “America, the Beautiful,” calling for people to stop and listen, to feel the heartache of our bleeding country. As we approached the melodious splendor of the steeple, I captured in my memory that humbling, real-life vision of two giant weeping willow trees, their branches gracefully, tearfully, so gently sweeping into the shallow water of the Public Garden Lagoon.

We wait for human monsters to commit their atrocities against us and against others who carry our burden in their hearts. Terrorists laugh aloud and dance in the streets for the injustice they have ravaged upon America and the world. They threaten us with menacing warnings of death and mayhem, and then they retreat to their dark caves like the cockroaches they have proven themselves to be, where they relish the empty promise of 40 virgins at their beck and call. Then they wrap themselves in explosives and crash airplanes into skyscrapers.

I once felt compassion for their plight, I believed people like them should get a fair chance in this life. When our powerful and sometimes ruthless governments were to blame, it was our moral obligation to fix the cesspool swallowing up their dignity and any grain of hope for a better future for their children. When I didn’t believe that prayer could provide answers to our own immorality, I prayed for their children who died of hunger, disease and relentless violence. I naively longed for the healing of the miserable existence of millions of people whose choices were so few and whose prospects for happiness were limited to the meager crumbs their brutal dictators scattered upon the parched earth for them to devour like starving, wild animals.

I once felt compassion for their plight, but then I saw men and women jumping from the pinnacle of one of the tallest buildings in the world, in desperate attempts to escape fireballs of jet fuel forcing upon those poor souls a choice that no one should ever have to make. I watched them jump to their horrible deaths, and there was no one there to catch them. I saw the memorial around the grave that was the World Trade Center, where so many strangers respectfully touched the sad pictures and recited the scrolls of poetry lined up along a mile of warping plywood, and I felt compassion only for the victims of this atrocity. And while the perpetrators of these crimes find evil solace in the promised reward of young virgins swarming to greet them in heroic death, I wonder what will become of the fragile humanity that has caused so much suffering and seems unable to cure itself of the poison flowing through us all as we systematically axe this world into thousands of corrupted cities.

I hope that when I am old and slowly sauntering toward the front seat of the wooden swan, I will hear again the steeple’s joyful songs. When I rest my aging eyes upon the gigantic weeping willow trees, I believe I will remember these songs of peace and grace and home with a gladdened heart; and I’ll whisper to my friend that I am still holding in my soul the perfect picture we took on this September afternoon.