The Places We Remember
A few years ago, I was officiating the funeral of a friend’s sister who had suddenly passed away. I’d never met her, but the family had always been special to me, and I was more than willing to help walk them through the grief they were now experiencing.
They held the interment at a small cemetery just seven short miles from our church, and after it ended, I spent a little time walking around. A jagged rock, sticking out of the ground, caught my eye. I bent down to look at the bronze placard in front of the rock, which simply said: “Minoru Yamasaki, December 1, 1912 – February 6, 1986.” And below that: “Teruko Yamasaki, April 21, 1919- November 10, 1997.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. One of the greatest architects of all time was buried right here in Lakeville Cemetery.
One of my little hobbies is studying architecture. I really like the Industrial Age-Victorian type buildings, but even more, I gravitate to the mid-century modern. So growing up near Detroit, I found a cornucopia of all kinds of architecture. And Yamasaki was my favorite. When so many other architects of his era were following the path of Frank Lloyd Wright, Yamasaki was an independent modernist who forged his own distinct path. From the McGregor Memorial Conference Center at Wayne State (where I once sang with my high school choir) to the beautiful Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, which he designed to resemble a tent, inspired by the temporary tabernacles used by the ancient Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt. He designed schools, houses and skyscrapers, not only in Michigan but all across the U.S. And if you go to downtown Detroit, you will see one of his most well-known buildings, One Woodward, which was the prototype for his most famous buildings: The World Trade Center.
I remember the day well. It was a beautiful, warm, and sunny Tuesday morning, and it was my fifth day of being a middle school teacher in Albany, NY. I was in between my first and second period; my wife Andrea, who was also teaching at the same school (across the hall, in fact) caught me in the hallway and told me that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. “It’s a strange accident,” she said. “It’s such a clear day.” I remember exactly what I was feeling, and that was not much. A small plane sounded only like an accident.
Within the hour, most of our school’s classrooms had been cleared out, and the teachers and the students of our little school were sitting in front of televisions watching the North Tower burning and the replays of the second plane flying into the South Tower. Then, at 9:37, the news flashed to pictures of the Pentagon burning, and I still remember the voice of Dan Rather saying, “We are under attack. The United States is under attack.” Shortly after that, we watched live as the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. Parents started calling the school; they were coming to pick up their children. By the time the North Tower collapsed, the teachers were all gathered in one room, crying around a single television.
On Monday, August 27, 2001, just two weeks and one day before, a friend of mine came to visit me in Albany before school started. He’d never been to NYC before, so we made the 3-hour drive down there to give him a tour. We actually stood in the plaza of the Trade Center and did what millions of other tourists have done: lay down on the ground between the towers to take a picture straight up into the sky. When you looked up, the towers were so tall, they looked like they curved toward each other. My friend had one of the first digital cameras ever, and snapped a picture. The next time I saw that plaza, it was a big hole in the bottom of New York City, with construction vehicles driving around in its center.
When I was in college, I spent three months living in New York City, working in ministry and taking every opportunity I could to explore this immense city. I rode the subway, walked neighborhoods, visited churches, wandered through different places I had only ever seen in movies, and slowly began to feel like the city was becoming familiar to me.
New York has a way of doing that. It is enormous and overwhelming, but after you’ve spent enough time there, certain places start to feel like they’re yours. You know the streets you walk, and where to get the best garlic knots. You know where you like to eat and sit where Jerry Seinfeld might have sat (though the restaurant looks nothing like it on the inside). You recognize the sounds, hearing the echoes of the Harlem Renaissance poets. You have memories attached to places that, to everyone else, are just another corner of the city.
And the World Trade Center was one of those places for me. It wasn’t just a picture on television anymore. I had stood beneath those towers. I had looked straight up at them. I had walked through the plaza. I had taken pictures there. So when I watched them disappear on September 11, I wasn’t watching something that was completely unfamiliar to me. I was watching a place I knew become something I would never be able to visit again.
Years later, I took my young family down to the memorial. We walked around the Twin Reflecting Pools; on bronze panels surrounding the pools, we read the inscribed names of people we never knew, and stared into the sky at One World Trade Center, which stands at a symbolic 1,776 feet. I snapped a picture of my then four-year-old daughter, placing her little hands across some of the victims’ names. She couldn’t understand what those names meant, or why we were even there. She only knew that I had stopped to take a picture.
That’s one of the hardest things about remembering September 11. We can explain what happened by telling the history. We can name the perpetrators and their victims. We can describe the planes, the buildings, the fires, and the collapse. But we still can’t fully explain why.
Why does evil happen? Why do innocent people die? Why do some people get to go home that night while others don’t?
I don’t think remembering September 11 means that we have to understand everything that happened that day. Some things are beyond our understanding. But I do think remembering matters. We remember because every name belonged to someone. Someone’s mother. Someone’s father. Someone’s husband or wife. Someone’s son or daughter. Someone’s friend.
And every one of them had places that felt like home.
Yamasaki built buildings where thousands of people went to work, visited, traveled, ate, met friends, looked out windows, took pictures. He built a place, and then people filled it with their lives. Then, in a single morning, that place disappeared.
But the people did not become less real because the buildings were gone.
We remember who we were with when it happened. We remember where we were standing when we first heard. We remember the places. And sometimes those places no longer exist. But the people do. Their names and their stories do. And as long as we remember them, they are more than names etched into bronze.
They held the interment at a small cemetery just seven short miles from our church, and after it ended, I spent a little time walking around. A jagged rock, sticking out of the ground, caught my eye. I bent down to look at the bronze placard in front of the rock, which simply said: “Minoru Yamasaki, December 1, 1912 – February 6, 1986.” And below that: “Teruko Yamasaki, April 21, 1919- November 10, 1997.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. One of the greatest architects of all time was buried right here in Lakeville Cemetery.
One of my little hobbies is studying architecture. I really like the Industrial Age-Victorian type buildings, but even more, I gravitate to the mid-century modern. So growing up near Detroit, I found a cornucopia of all kinds of architecture. And Yamasaki was my favorite. When so many other architects of his era were following the path of Frank Lloyd Wright, Yamasaki was an independent modernist who forged his own distinct path. From the McGregor Memorial Conference Center at Wayne State (where I once sang with my high school choir) to the beautiful Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, which he designed to resemble a tent, inspired by the temporary tabernacles used by the ancient Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt. He designed schools, houses and skyscrapers, not only in Michigan but all across the U.S. And if you go to downtown Detroit, you will see one of his most well-known buildings, One Woodward, which was the prototype for his most famous buildings: The World Trade Center.
I remember the day well. It was a beautiful, warm, and sunny Tuesday morning, and it was my fifth day of being a middle school teacher in Albany, NY. I was in between my first and second period; my wife Andrea, who was also teaching at the same school (across the hall, in fact) caught me in the hallway and told me that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. “It’s a strange accident,” she said. “It’s such a clear day.” I remember exactly what I was feeling, and that was not much. A small plane sounded only like an accident.
Within the hour, most of our school’s classrooms had been cleared out, and the teachers and the students of our little school were sitting in front of televisions watching the North Tower burning and the replays of the second plane flying into the South Tower. Then, at 9:37, the news flashed to pictures of the Pentagon burning, and I still remember the voice of Dan Rather saying, “We are under attack. The United States is under attack.” Shortly after that, we watched live as the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. Parents started calling the school; they were coming to pick up their children. By the time the North Tower collapsed, the teachers were all gathered in one room, crying around a single television.
On Monday, August 27, 2001, just two weeks and one day before, a friend of mine came to visit me in Albany before school started. He’d never been to NYC before, so we made the 3-hour drive down there to give him a tour. We actually stood in the plaza of the Trade Center and did what millions of other tourists have done: lay down on the ground between the towers to take a picture straight up into the sky. When you looked up, the towers were so tall, they looked like they curved toward each other. My friend had one of the first digital cameras ever, and snapped a picture. The next time I saw that plaza, it was a big hole in the bottom of New York City, with construction vehicles driving around in its center.
When I was in college, I spent three months living in New York City, working in ministry and taking every opportunity I could to explore this immense city. I rode the subway, walked neighborhoods, visited churches, wandered through different places I had only ever seen in movies, and slowly began to feel like the city was becoming familiar to me.
New York has a way of doing that. It is enormous and overwhelming, but after you’ve spent enough time there, certain places start to feel like they’re yours. You know the streets you walk, and where to get the best garlic knots. You know where you like to eat and sit where Jerry Seinfeld might have sat (though the restaurant looks nothing like it on the inside). You recognize the sounds, hearing the echoes of the Harlem Renaissance poets. You have memories attached to places that, to everyone else, are just another corner of the city.
And the World Trade Center was one of those places for me. It wasn’t just a picture on television anymore. I had stood beneath those towers. I had looked straight up at them. I had walked through the plaza. I had taken pictures there. So when I watched them disappear on September 11, I wasn’t watching something that was completely unfamiliar to me. I was watching a place I knew become something I would never be able to visit again.
Years later, I took my young family down to the memorial. We walked around the Twin Reflecting Pools; on bronze panels surrounding the pools, we read the inscribed names of people we never knew, and stared into the sky at One World Trade Center, which stands at a symbolic 1,776 feet. I snapped a picture of my then four-year-old daughter, placing her little hands across some of the victims’ names. She couldn’t understand what those names meant, or why we were even there. She only knew that I had stopped to take a picture.
That’s one of the hardest things about remembering September 11. We can explain what happened by telling the history. We can name the perpetrators and their victims. We can describe the planes, the buildings, the fires, and the collapse. But we still can’t fully explain why.
Why does evil happen? Why do innocent people die? Why do some people get to go home that night while others don’t?
I don’t think remembering September 11 means that we have to understand everything that happened that day. Some things are beyond our understanding. But I do think remembering matters. We remember because every name belonged to someone. Someone’s mother. Someone’s father. Someone’s husband or wife. Someone’s son or daughter. Someone’s friend.
And every one of them had places that felt like home.
Yamasaki built buildings where thousands of people went to work, visited, traveled, ate, met friends, looked out windows, took pictures. He built a place, and then people filled it with their lives. Then, in a single morning, that place disappeared.
But the people did not become less real because the buildings were gone.
We remember who we were with when it happened. We remember where we were standing when we first heard. We remember the places. And sometimes those places no longer exist. But the people do. Their names and their stories do. And as long as we remember them, they are more than names etched into bronze.
Recent
Archive
Categories
no categories