Word: firemen
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...herself by going to Mass, priests reversed bans on cell phones in church, just in case there was any good news. Mike's two young nephews, Christopher, 12, and Brandon, 7, attend St. Clare's School, a nearby Catholic day school connected to a church that has been burying firemen for months. The boys have heard the dirges of the pipe-and-drum corps from their desks; their classmates have served as altar boys. Mike's eldest brother, Robert, left Staten Island years ago, but the tragedy followed him: he works as a psychologist in the public schools of Middletown...
...first couple of days, Mike did not come home at all. Like firemen across the city and country, he worked 24-hour shifts, much of it on the pile, the putrid 16-acre wasteland where the laws of time and space simply do not abide. "We'd be working in one place for a bit, and they'd blow the horn and tell us to run because another building might collapse on us, and then they'd bring us back to the same place two hours later," he recalls. "You'd be doing your work, and then...
...housemates; one depicts a helmet, another the Ladder 11 company patch. A masseuse stands by to give free massages; there are free tickets to the Broadway show The Music Man and a lottery for trips to Hawaii and Barbados. To unwind one evening after inspecting a gas leak, the firemen watch outtakes from The Bravest, a TV show chronicling the lives of fire fighters with real footage from New York companies; they pause the tape every few minutes to honor the men they instinctively refer to as "missing...
...many ways, the horrific scale of Sept. 11 challenged our ability to put into words what happened. Language failed us that day, says Patrick Quinn, a professor at the University of Northampton: "When they talked to the firemen and witnesses, they had a vocabulary of 30 words. They would say it was 'terrible' and 'shocking' and then there would be these long pauses and then they would come back and say the same thing again...
Then, one crisp September morning, the Clintonian cult of self crashed down. Our new president asked us to believe in things bigger than ourselves, and we did. We believe in many big things now, like the kindness of children sending dollars to Afghanistan and the courage of firemen sprinting into the mouth of hell. But most especially we have remembered to believe in those two victims of the modern academy: America...