Presence – Hidden Language
MUSIC: “The Void Says Hi” by Doctor Turtle.
SCOTT: Two buskers are sitting on benches, facing each other, on either side of the mosaic circle that reads IMAGINE. They’re in Strawberry Fields, the Central Park memorial to John Lennon, and there are usually any number of visitors gathering. While there, tourists wait their turn to sit inside the black and white mosaic, taking pictures, singing along to the buskers playing songs by John or the Beatles or other songs of the time.
MUSIC fades.
SCOTT: But right now, there aren’t many people at all. One of the buskers turns to the other and says, “Where is everybody? People must be downtown. It’s 9/11, right?”
It is. It’s September 11, 2011, the day that the 9/11 Memorial opens at the footprints of the World Trade Center, now filled with two reflecting pools and embraced by the names of those who died on that day in 2001: those who died at the site of the Pentagon; and at Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and at the towers themselves, from both the bombing in 1993 and the attack in 2001.
But today in 2011, today is reserved for those families of the fallen, for the children who are mourning the loss of parents they had never met. And over the years, I’ve watched the televised reading of names, of those children reading the names of parents they never really knew — but they do now know in some way, in some way of memorializing them by speaking their names, giving them some presence right now, once more. Today honors them.
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Hidden Language 