Days of Kindness: Days of Sorrow

It was a typical warm, sunny, September day in Sicily, when my wife Vicki and I stepped up to the moneychanger’s window in Cefalu, a coastal resort town east of Palermo. She told us a bomb had exploded at the World Trade Center, and she thought some planes had crashed. We quickly made our way to a restaurant with a TV, where we watched CNN in Italian trying to piece together the story.

The next day we kept to our itinerary of driving to an interior hill town to hike amongst some ruins. After losing our way for twenty minutes in the winding, interwoven streets of the little town, we found the small, family run hotel where we were scheduled to spend two days.

The owner of the hotel was a stocky, compact man with an open, friendly face. He was a man one instantly trusted. Several times he approached, trying to reach out, trying to convey his sympathy, his grief. He could speak little English and I less Italian. He would say, “Terrible, terrible.” The next day we decided to leave the hotel a day early in hopes of finding an English TV station in Taromina, the seaside town that was our next destination. Though I knew the family that ran the hotel was upset because they were losing a night’s revenue, no one said a word. On the contrary they helped us leave and continued to tell us how sorry they were about everything that had happened.

We found English programming in Taromina along with American newspapers. This town is a favorite vacation spot for British people, and many approached us, expressing their sorrow. Our hotel waiter said he cried for two days following the attack, and most of the local shops posted messages of sympathy in their windows. A time of silence for the victims of the attack was observed at a local concert we attended. Everywhere people reached out.

Our days were strange. The beauty of Taromina was in sharp contrast to the ugliness of the terrorists’ attack. Surrounded by warm, empathic people, we ate wonderful food while looking out at the multi colored sea. Such experiences served unwittingly as temporary buffers against overwhelming grief.

The last Italian person I talked with was our cab driver, who drove us to Leonardo D’Vinci airport in Rome for our flight to Chicago. I paid the bill, and I watched him collect himself and approach me in an anxious manner. He said we were the first American people he had met since the attacks, and he wanted to express his sorrow to us. He said the Italian people supported the Americans, and he grabbed my hands with both of his and said, “Solidarity.”
I thanked him, turned slowly, and walked into the airport, not sure what I would find there or at home in America.