There are the obvious ones we all know about and often celebrate: graduations, weddings, the blowing out of candles.
Then come all the tiny ones, ceremonies so subtle we don't even know they've occurred until we look back.
I remember the last walk I took through the house I'd grown up in. It was emptied of all the clutter and mayhem my mom used to fill it with. It was empty of my mom. It wasn't really a home anymore so much as a shell.
I walked through every room, running my hand along the walls. I climbed the stairs and let my fingers trace the banister. Mostly I sat on the windowsill in my old bedroom. This room seemed shockingly small. Well, it was, maybe only 100 square feet at the most. Yet this tiny haven had been my salvation. For the seven years I lived there, it was the only place I could go to simply be myself. ... Whoever that was. How often had I slid open the window so I could sneak a cigarette late at night while my father lay sleeping in the next room? How many times had I hid under the covers with a flashlight writing poetry about rebelling against everything I was told I had to be.
In the '70s, the room had been wallpapered with Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin posters; a black light illuminated the fluorescent rock stars. Then I'd switched to punk rock and Blondie and The Sex Pistols took their turns at decor. I'd regarded my home as a prison, my parents as the wardens and this tiny room as my one window to the world.
Then I ran away. ... A lot.
Sitting there in the windowsill of my childhood perch, I was holding my own private ceremony. It would be the last time I would see this home ... at least this way. Shortly after that, it was sold to a young family who quickly renovated it, expanded it and modernized all its features. I've driven by. It's barely recognizable now.
I understand now that my pilgrimage that day was more than a good-bye, it was a full circle kind of ceremony, comparing who I became to who I was and maybe taking a moment to just decide that there really was a lot of love back then, mixed in with all the fighting.
I've had some ceremonies of a different kind in the last week or so.
Since September of last year I've had a bright yellow hard hat,a Seaman's Church volunteer pass and other bits of ground zero paraphernalia hidden away. These things sat in the back corner of my hallway coat closet, wedged under the pile of 9/11 photographs yet to be put in an album (if I even decide that's what should be done with them. I really have no idea what's right).
Opening the closet to hang a jacket became an odd experience for me. At face level was an array of coats and jackets. At knee level was my entire September 2001 experience in photos, ventilation masks, flashlight and mostly, in that hard hat.
It was like my dirty little secret.
'That closet started to feel like some weird morph between Pandora's box and ... well ... coming out of the closet.
Last week I took my hard-hat out of the closet. I dusted off the volunteer pass I'd worn and draped it around the hat. Then I looked around my home. The walls were still empty since I'd yet to pick up the paintings that hung there from the gallery . I found a place near the window and hung the hat and pass, adjusted them, stepped back, re-adjusted them. It was as if I were hanging a master work of art.
My whole mood lifted. The dirty little secret wedged in the closet instantly became a source of light. There it was, this yellow beacon of brightness. I looked at the hat and in just the seconds it held my gaze, it seemed as though it had always hung there, as much as who I have become as a result of my experience in those days in September now feels as though it was always a part of me, a new thing that feels old.
It's taken me these nine months to come around to this point, but I now know the reason I had a strange smile in the photographs taken of me down there and in the video tape that I have just now, finally, cautiously viewed.
It's because there, in the midst of the worst horror, of mass murder on a scale that went beyond the imagination, I was doing something, anything to help and so was everyone else around me. We were scared, angry, sorrowful, lost, desperate and so many other terrible feelings, but we were also proud. We were proud as hell.
I have some extra videotapes that I bought from the church where I volunteered. St. Paul's created a documentary of sorts about their relief effort. I appear early in the tape, in my yellow hard hart and volunteer mask. I'm wired and chirpy and probably in shock, but I'm there.
I've started giving these tapes to the people in my life that I love, partly because I want them to see what it was really like down there, because no words can ever really capture it and partly because I want them to have this moment in my life, preserved on tape, when I was the proudest I've ever been.
The viewing of the tape, by the way, was another ceremony. I shared it with a friend who has just come into my life in a huge way and an old friend with whom I'd fallen out of touch in the last year or so. We sat there together on a comfy white couch and watched the second plane hit, the massive destruction of those first days after and the rescue efforts.
Then I appeared on the screen and talked about what I'd seen when I first got there. I described the 200-year-old tombstones covered in the day-to-day work papers of the World Trade Center.
The irony of viewing this tape for the first time, nestled between a friend from my past and a new friend who had blossomed in my life after 9/11 was not lost on me.
I expected to feel something terrible after seeing this film, but in fact I felt a sense of peace. It was the first time since those days, that I could simply point to the screen and say, "That's what it was like," instead of trying to find the words. Those words really don't exist, anyway. No piece of language can ever truly describe that level of devastation.
It was also a moment of closure for me and perhaps an acknowledgement that who I have become as a result of 9/11 and who I used to be are now meshed together into this new person, whoever she is.
I can't wait to get to know her better.
