Remembering 9/11 . . .

Below is reprinted Marash Girl's blog post on the day following 9/11. Marash Girl was at the Newtonville Post Office, shipping books from OldCornerBooks.com to her customers, when her postal worker friend walked out from the back room, face ashen. "Hey, Ann, what's up?" Marash Girl quipped, hoping to urge a smile onto her friend's face. "A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center," Ann's shaking voice answered. "My son -- he works in Tribeca, just a few blocks north of the World Trade Center in New York City. I have to get home and try to reach him," thought Marash Girl. Which of course, try as she might, she could not. All telephone lines were inoperative. In a panic, she kept trying to call, to no avail. Alone with only her books for company, Marash Girl silently prayed and in answer to those prayers, her son called to report that he had witnessed the crash of the second airplane, but was alive, and walking northward out of New York's Financial District with thousands of other New Yorkers. Marash Girl tried to call her father, but there was no answer. "Let me drive over there . . ." she thought, and she did. Hugging her dad, she told him of the Twin Towers. Once Peter, this Armenian-American man, born in Marash in 1912, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, understood exactly what had transpired that morning, he knew what he must do. They went together, Marash Girl and her father, to the house next door; they sat in silence, side by side with Mohammud and his family . . . they sat in solidarity throughout that day and the next, without speaking, "sitting shiva", as it were, with their Muslim neighbors in Newtonville, Massachusetts.