Apparently there are stages to the plumage of smoke coming from a fire.
When a fire is at its most destructive, the smoke is black, strong dark clouds of consumption filling the sky and thwarting any attempt at controlling it.
Later, as firefighters do their selfless job and try to contain the blaze, the smoke lightens to gray, indicating that some water has been added to it. Later still, the plumage turns white. By that point, the firefighters have made great strides towards extinguishing the fire and ending its destruction.
That's one thing I learned on Tuesday.
"I was bruised and battered, I didn't know what I felt
I was unrecognizable to myself."(The Streets of Philadelphia)
In all honesty, though, I'm not sure that it's true. It was just one idea - one theory thrown out by a newscaster as he watched the black cloud of smoke rising from what was once the symbol of financial activity, the World Trade Center. We were all throwing out ideas by that time, trying in that way humans do to explain the unexplainable, to put words to our terror and anger and grief.
Silly humans - like any words can explain what happened to us on Tuesday. Explanations seem impossible. The best we can do is recount what we learn, and hold onto what we have left.
So this is what I learned: our security, our freedom - our lives, really - are very very precious and equally as fragile. Since Tuesday we've been hearing the stories, the voices of people who fought for their lives and for our freedom. Some are stories of bravery, like the story of the firefighters who rushed to the World Trade Center to handle the disaster, only to lose their own lives when the massive building crumbled and fell.
"Lights out tonight
Trouble in the heartland."(Badlands)
Other stories are heartbreaking, like the pair of financial workers who held hands and leapt from the World Trade Center, falling to certain death while trying to escape the horror that enveloped that building.
Thanks to the media, we all have these images. What we don't have - not yet - is a method to deal with the horror. I watched the doomed rogue plane tear into the skyscraper, and all I could think of was the terror that those poor travelers felt as they realized what was happening. A plane full of people - sons and fathers, grandmothers and friends - crashes and explodes. Families are shattered, blown up along with the New York skyline.
