Song for my city, with indelible memories

I have lived in Maine for six years, but I am a New Yorker. Today, I have never been so proud to be from away. I am profoundly grateful to Maine, to its strength and decency, to its beauty; and, most importantly, to its generous, no-nonsense people who have allowed me a safe haven in which to raise my son. His life is being formed here, among good people.

Mine was formed somewhere else.

For most of my adult life I lived on the island of Manhattan – specifically, in the few blocks north of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Later, as a lawyer, I would walk each day to my office at One Liberty Plaza. I watched these huge buildings go up and become icons of the landscape. Like you, I have now watched them come down. With them came a lifetime of memories.

All those years I had the honor of living alongside the women and men who work in the city, run its businesses, teach its children, produce its art, lay its cable, put out is fires and respond to more emergency calls than it is humanly possible to handle – and whose thick-accented, brusque love the world now recognizes, correctly, as the grace of heroes.

Friends from outside New York sometimes thought the neighborhood I lived in was ugly. To me, it was gorgeous. It was a place of egg merchants and industrial trucks pulling up to turn-of-century warehouses. Of retailers, firefighters, dissident artists, traders, lawyers, moms pushing kids in strollers. Of every ethnicity on the planet. Of steel and breathtaking views. Of small parks nestled among skyscrapers. Of working families, community colleges and four-star restaurants. Of people and corporations battling each other, learning to live with each other. Of disagreement with everything I have just said. Of loneliness. Of utter support and love. Of garbage. Of joy.

And now, in a spray of fire, twisted girders and carnage hurtling toward the windows of my child’s former bedroom, it is maimed. Some

of it is simply gone. You’d think I would have been prepared for the heartache of it. I wasn’t.

A few days ago, I went to the noon memorial service at a church in Orono. I had never been to this place before but knew that I needed join the national mourning, so I went. In the fragrant simplicity of this New England church, I picked up the hymnal and opened my throat to sing. I could not.

I, who had once been a professional singer in my beloved New York City, could not find a way to sing in this New England church. All I could produce was tears. I had to let my need ride on the clear, strong voice of the friend in the next pew.

The tears became a pathway. The spirit of my late husband, my mother, my friends – and, as I think, the still hovering spirits of those unknown to me who died in my neighborhood Tuesday – seemed to take my hand and lift me through the ceiling of the Orono church, saying, come with us and remember.

As from aerial view, I saw the tall, sunny 19th-century windows of the loft in which I had come of age as an artist, wife, attorney, mother and, finally, widow. I was suddenly inside again as though I had just moved in, looking west unobstructed to the Hudson and south to the construction of the twin towers. Then, years later, walking those eight blocks to work, through World Trade for a cup of coffee or to pick up something at the children’s store for my baby. Now up again in brilliant sunshine and over the river, to the boats and fish markets, to Lady Liberty and back to the schools

and their playgrounds in the shadow of the twin towers. Where are the vibrant diversity, hardness and grace

of that neighborhood? Where are the schoolyard children? Where are their parents?

The strong, ephemeral arms of the dead guided me gently back to that Orono church. Weeping for my mangled home, I was given a lesson in sorrow for millennia of lives and neighborhoods obliterated without fanfare or notice. I was given a small, bitter taste of loss of place, identity, personal history. I was given a glimpse of the void and then pulled back, reminded that I am lucky indeed.

There is no condoning what happened on Sept. 11. Excruciating questions remain alongside a need for clarity and action. How to balance the strength required to defend our children and homes with the humility we will need to understand how we must change? How to begin? What price for not beginning?

The dead left me in church with a whispered answer but with no details. Those, I’ll have to figure out for myself.

As I know a good Mainer would. In my case, I’ll have to do it as who I am – I am a New Yorker.

Stephanie Cotsirilos lives in Orono.