Johnny Cash :: In the Sweet By and By
For two or three months after the September 11th attacks we weren’t allowed to go to work. Our office was three blocks from the Trade Center, an area of heavy contamination and debris.
The rubble smoked until January, though we were back at work before then. About the time the New York City winter began in earnest—cold, gray, dreary—we were admitted below Canal Street with proof that we belonged there. An address, a pay stub. We’d show it to a guy holding an M-16.
Eventually the checkpoints disappeared. In the meantime, Giuliani’s administration changed the city’s wound back into a tourist destination. Smiling, well-intentioned tourists would stop us on the street to ask which way to the Trade Center. Just walk toward the big hole in the skyline, we’d say.
Those of us who worked in the midst of it just trudged through in a surreal kind of way. We grieved, of course. But somehow the effort of getting on with our days kept a lot of the emotion at bay. We’d shake our heads over lunch, take a walk uptown after work, drink until 5 the next morning. But sooner or later everybody had a breakdown—a desk drawer would slam and somebody was headed for the door. Sometimes you went after them, sometimes you didn’t.
One day in April I had to walk to the Battery Park Post Office—past Liberty Square, past the packed viewing platforms, past the little church whose gate was covered in hand-painted prayers from family members, past tourists posed beside them. It was a beautiful day, and somehow that was killing me. I made it to the post office, mailed whatever I was mailing. On my way back, a women’s choir of old-order Mennonites was singing at the church. As I walked by them, they started on In the Sweet By and By. That was it right there—my breakdown. I have no idea what it was about that song, but in the face of it I fell utterly apart. It was horrible, and cathartic, and really, really overdue.
In the Sweet By and By (3.3MB MP3)
Johnny Cash (homepage)
tina, this post (you, post) literally made me cry. a very touching story.