Fred told me how much he valued his relationship with you. He described how you had begun a search for the ideal place to live the next stage of your life. And he spoke of your sense of adventure with great love and admiration. It was clear to me that Fred was able to embrace life so vigorously because it flowed from you, and from his mother.
When we landed in Las Vegas, Fred said good-bye and I went looking for something to eat during the layover. But before I ate, I stopped at a phone and called my wife to tell her about this extraordinary young man who seemed to have his feet on the ground even as he let his heart soar.
After wandering the airport a bit, I boarded the plane to New York to discover that Fred was again in the cabin. He grinned, explained that his appointments had been canceled, and asked the person in the seat next to his to trade with me so we could resume our conversation.
On the flight to New York, Fred told me about his dream to convert his experience on Wall Street into a life of his own design. He talked about moving to a smaller town or city, opening a business—perhaps something in aviation—and devoting himself to both his own passions and his relationships with loved ones. What was most remarkable was Fred’s commitment to real values—friendship, love, service to others—and his rejection of stark materialism and self-involvement. He said the most important thing he had learned on Wall Street was that money is a means, not an end, and that a single-minded obsession with work was almost suicidal.
I hope you will tell Fred’s mother that he spoke at length to me about her as well. He talked about her teaching—he was genuinely awed by her ability to reach students—and about her unwavering love. At one point he reached for his computer, made a few clicks, and brought up a manuscript, complete with drawings, of a children’s book she had written and illustrated. (It had something to do with nutrition and health.) He made it clear to me that like you, she had been a major source of the values that guided him. She had taught him to love, and he was deeply grateful for that.
When we landed, Fred and I exchanged business cards and e-mail addresses. (A first for me with a fellow traveler.) We agreed to meet for lunch, and to play golf with you on Long Island, where I live. A few days later an e-mail arrived. I answered, and we had begun to schedule our lunch. Though I am much older than Fred, I believed that I had met someone extraordinary, someone who would become a good friend. I knew that he was one of those rare people whose eyes were truly filled with light, whose heart was open, and whose mind was alert and ever at play.
I suspect that Fred affected everyone he met in the way that he affected me. Though he would likely have been the last one to say it, he was clearly a cut above the ordinary, a young man who gave freely of himself to others and approached life with a generosity and spirit that is exceedingly rare. You should know that he felt fully loved and supported by you and his mother. In turn, it was clear that he loved both of you very much. Indeed, I have never met a young man who seemed so certain about the gifts he had received, so happy with what he had, and so determined to share them with others.
Please accept my gratitude for your son and the time he shared with me. I am saddened by his loss, by the terrible fact that I won’t have a long relationship with him. But I was blessed just to know he was in the world, and I hope you are warmed by knowing that he touched me very deeply.
Please share my thoughts with Fred’s mom. And you can both feel free to contact me.
Sincerely,
Michael D’Antonio
Michael D’Antonio
Submitted by Tara Hitchcock and John Langbein
Dear Mike:
Thanks for your wonderful letter. As you know I have already faxed it to Annelise, his girlfriend, who has emailed you.
Your letter was one of the best communications that I have received since 9/11. I am sensitive to the time it took you to write your letter and I will treasure it for the rest of my life. For a complete stranger to take his valuable time and say the things you did has more meaning to me than you possibly can understand.
I look forward to meeting you.
Fred O. Cox
Fred O. Cox
Beep if You Love America
The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.
Isaiah 11:6 NIV
We become a large town during the summers when our tourist population swells. But after Labor Day, we have a population of about five thousand in Bradley Beach, New Jersey. On this day, September 13, 2002, we stood in front of a World War I monument, in honor of those who perished and those who survived September 11, 2001. Members of the clergy spoke to the crowd and so did the mayor. We lit candles and cried together and shared stories about the day and how it affected us. Many had stories about friends, about family, who did not come home. Over and over, we heard the same refrain, “They just never came home that Tuesday.” There were children of all ages, holding candles and flags. They were listening.
Later, when the memorial service was over, the children left the park to stand on the corner, and we stood around aching to do something more. We hugged. We talked. We told each other it would get better. But there were no smiles and there was no laughter.
Suddenly, we noticed horns honking up and down Main Street, as if a parade was passing through town. As if there was a celebration.
We couldn’t imagine who would celebrate on a day like today.
And then we heard the children’s chants. “Beep if you love America!” they shouted. Again and again. “Beep if you love America.” They stood at a four-way intersection, on the curb, jumping up and down, waving their hands to get attention, holding the American flags in front of their chests, pleading, “Beep if you love America.” And everyone did. The night air was filled with horns honking and people waving as the children jumped in the air, holding flags in front of them and shouting, louder and louder, “Beep if you love America.”
Their energy galvanized the people standing there and those passing in the cars. Perhaps the drivers were coming from work or going shopping. Undoubtedly they had on their radios and were listening to the accounts coming in, lives saved, lives lost. And yet, there were youth on the corner and energy on the corner, shouting and waving over and over, “Beep if you love America.”
It went on for a long time. The town resonated with honking horns.
People smiled from their car windows. We heard ourselves laughing with the children. We began to wave also to the passing cars. We let the children lead us that evening. Even though they had read the papers, looked at the television, watched the adults around them cry and vent their anger, even though they knew something really terrible had happened to their country, a new feeling had taken hold of them—one they couldn’t even explain to themselves. It had something to do with the flags they were holding. It had something to do with their country, America. It had something to do with their love for freedom.
That night, for a while, we let the children lead us and heal us.
“Beep if you love America,” we roared.
And we knew America would hear us.
Harriet May Savitz
The Face of America
In the faces of men and women I see God.
Walt Whitman
Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, U.S.A.
September 11 dealt a stunning blow to the American psyche. For many of us, dazed and shocked, the urgent question we asked ourselves as we watched the carnage pouring out of our television sets was What can I do to help?
Local and national news commentators urged us to respond to the Red Cross’s call for blood donations by participating in a blood drive. I have donated blood in the past, but nothing has approached the urgency I felt to donate this time. Tuesday night I told my husband, “We’ve got to go tomorrow.”
We equipped ourselves with books to read and snacks to munch while we waited, figuring the line might be, oh, maybe an hour or two. When we
reached our local Charleston, South Carolina, Red Cross, we couldn’t believe it. At 11:00 A.M. the line stretched around the block.
It might be eight hours before we reached the head of the line—still, we walked to the end. And while we waited, I looked at the faces around me—and I saw the face of America.
I saw young and old, women with children, Generation-Xers in T-shirts and tattoos, veterans, people leaning on canes and in wheelchairs, waiting to give what they had to our country. No one was impatient, no one argued or pushed ahead of anyone. We had a purpose and a goal—so we waited.
As we stood, local television and radio stations came out. They hooked up speakers for us to listen to music and the news from New York and Washington. They brought us American flags donated by locals to wave and stickers to wear that read AMERICA WILL PASS THIS TEST.
Red Cross volunteers brought out food donated by local merchants: pizzas, McDonald’s cheeseburgers, sub sandwiches, delicious fried chicken, snack foods, fresh fruit, bottles of cold water and sodas. They fed us, answered our questions and told us what to expect when we finally reached the head of the line. They thanked us for coming out and for our “sacrifice.”
One volunteer told us that television pictures of us waiting in line and giving blood were being transmitted to giant screens in the middle of the World Trade Center. He told us, “You don’t know how much good it does for these guys to see you here. They come out of the rubble, exhausted. Then they see you on the screen and they go back in.”
We were just Americans, doing what we do, finding another way to have fun, even in the midst of tragedy. We sang to the music from the speakers and we laughed, because Americans are people who love to laugh. We made friends and discovered common ground.
On a hot fall afternoon in Charleston, South Carolina, I saw the face of America. Our hearts are broken, but our spirit is roaring back. We have a common purpose and a common goal. We are once again the UNITED States.
Susan Halm
Edited by Joyce Schowalter
Reprinted with permission of HeroicStories.com ©2001.
FOXTROT. ©Bill Amend. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.
How the Children Help
When I woke up on the morning of September 11, it was to the sound of my mother crying, “My God, we’re being attacked!”
By the time I reached the kitchen, most of my family was in tears, sitting around my sister’s radio as the news interrupted her usual morning music. In the living room, the children who attended our in-home daycare sat huddled around the TV where they usually get to watch educational morning programs. That day, it was different. The cartoons had been interrupted by emergency broadcast news reports and dark images of smoke, rubble and pain. For the first time in my history of working with children, not one of them complained or cried for us to change the channel (news is “boring,” you know). No, this time they all sat, staring intently at the screen. They obviously could feel the seriousness of that particular news broadcast.
When the image of the towers crumbling to the ground glowed from that gruesome screen, all the children turned to check the reaction on my face before looking back at the television. Not one of them made a sound the entire time, and I tried my best to hide any expressions of being upset. For their sakes, I smiled.
After skipping channels for an eternity, all I found were dark images of the many distraught people, smoke and rubble. I turned on a movie instead; I think it was Bambi. As I sat down on the couch, I immediately found myself buried by all seven children, from one to three years old.
That night, after all the children had been picked up, I went down to my local Red Cross to donate blood. I was amazed by the scene. The line was out the door, and the employees and volunteers were turning people away. Unable to donate blood, I returned nightly with a plate of homemade brownies, cookies or cupcakes to hand out to the donors.
The children loved baking “goodies” for the “people helping to save all the people that got hurt from the airplane crashes.” It was not our job to explain what terrorists were, and the children wouldn’t understand anyway, but they did know that planes had crashed and people were hurt, and they wanted to help more than anything. We baked every day, and each night I brought what we made to the people waiting to donate blood.
The children also made thank-you cards for the donors, and I handed them out with brownies one night. One elderly gentleman waiting in the line cried when I gave him his brownie and card. He had lost his daughter and granddaughter on one of the flights. I didn’t know what to do other than to hug him and cry with him. Everyone else in the line began to cry, too. After a few minutes, we all wiped away our tears and started talking, sharing stories and finding common ground. They shared their cards with each other, smiled at the children’s pictures and misspelled thank-yous and condolences. By the time I left, many were gathered around the elderly gentleman, arms around him, pointing out details on his thank-you cards.
On Thursday we received word of an assembly being organized for Friday afternoon. We were invited to gather in a local park to show our patriotism and support for the rescuers back East. We asked permission from the parents to attend. On Friday morning the children were dropped off wearing flag shirts and red, white and blue dresses. They had patriotic ribbons tied in their hair and around their wrists. One parent had even painted a T-shirt for her three-year- old to wear. It had a giant American flag on the front and in huge red, white and blue letters on the back it said, “THESE COLORS DON’T RUN.” The little boy seemed very excited to be wearing it. He was determined to walk backward the whole time in case a camera was there; he wanted the world to read his shirt.
We baked cookies, packed a big picnic lunch, then went outside to decorate the three strollers most of the children would be riding in to the event. We used streamers and flags, cardboard cutouts and ribbon. We even had some beach towels with American flags on them that we used as blankets for the children’s laps. With these strollers, holding two children each, we looked like a regular parade! As we passed houses on the way to the park, people came out to ask where we were headed in such glory, and each person we told grabbed the flag from the front of their house and joined us. It was a regular marathon of people and strollers, all carrying flags. We filled that park and overwhelmed the organizers.
I can’t describe that entire afternoon, other than that we sang “God Bless America” four times, and the kids were more intent on waving their flags than eating their lunches. To top it all off, the elderly man from the Red Cross was there! He came and shared our picnic with us. I had been so worried that seeing the children might upset him, and I nearly clenched my teeth when they all ran up to shake his hand. They took a liking to him immediately, and they were all very excited to have him sit with us. In fact, they all offered their cookies to him.
He spoke to the children about the plane crashes, and told them that his daughter and granddaughter were on one of them. The children listened, and one little girl even asked, “Oh, you’re a grandpa?” Instead of crying, as I thought he might, he smiled and the children hugged him. The three-year-old boy showed him his T-shirt, a little girl told him that it’s happier in heaven than it is here, and a two-year-old offered the man her juice cup. Just as he was leaving, the little girl who spoke so highly of heaven shook his hand and said, “You know, even if they’re both in heaven, you’ll still always be a grandpa and a daddy.” He smiled as he walked away.
Even though children feel the losses, they somehow know what is needed to go on. How lucky I am to work with such healers!
Ann Marguerite Swank
Edited by Joyce Schowalter
See contributors’ bios for more information about the free online newsletter HeroicStories.com.
“Finally, a line I don’t mind waiting in.”
Reprinted with permission of The Journal News. ©2001 The Journal News.
Answering His Country’s Call
&nbs
p; . . .Gold is good in its place, but living, brave patriotic men are better than gold.
Abraham Lincoln
The Nebe family and friends are gathered in the kitchen, holding plates laden with Mexican food, their heads bowed in prayer.
They have come on this recent Saturday evening to celebrate Justin Nebe’s brief homecoming. Eleanor and Bill Nebe’s baby boy, Nicole’s kid brother, Beatrice Gomez’s feisty grandson, is a U.S. Marine, stopping at home in Texas for a week before reporting to a California base.
Being the first Marine in his family makes him proud. His parents say it makes them proud, too. But since September 11, Justin’s recent enlistment has stirred other emotions in his family. They want, of course, for him to serve his country. But now they are fearful, too.
When Justin decided to join the Marines nearly eleven months ago, America stood at peace. He and his parents knew that he might be called on to defend his country. For his parents, the possibility seemed remote. Besides, the military seemed the perfect choice for Justin. The Marines, in particular, appealed to him. He liked the discipline. The honor. The challenge.
Last December, he finished his high-school course work. In February, he attended boot camp. In May, he graduated from boot camp and attended his high-school graduation in his Marine uniform. Since then, he has been training at bases in Florida and North Carolina. And now Justin, who will celebrate his nineteenth birthday while home, is on his way to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, near San Diego, where he will work as a helicopter mechanic.