Chicken Soup for the Soul of America Read Online Free PDF Page B

Migdalia Ramos found something, too. Maybe she found that the best qualities in her husband had rubbed off on her.
    Personally, I think they were there all along.
    Migdalia Ramos said that what happened at her mother’s apartment building made her understand her husband’s motives. She thought he was sending her a message.
    I heard a message from this woman on my TV screen. There’s something inside some of us—inside, I think, most of us. It’s something good and decent and brave and unselfish. It’s that best part of ourselves, that part that rises to the surface unquestioning, without thought, the simple act of caring for and about another human being. In a world where there are those who only exist to cause pain and terror, Mrs. Ramos’ message is timely. It is a message for all of us, of hope.
    Marsha Arons

FYI
    New York City Transit puts a lot of faith in paperwork. At times, it seems to have missed the whole computer revolution, or at least mistrusted it. In fact, in a dusty file room in downtown Brooklyn, there are boxes containing minute-by-minute records of the daily movements of your subway line, going back several years—all handwritten on paper.
    But in the weeks since September 11, 2001, weeks that have generated enough paperwork to wrap every subway car like a Christmas gift, there are three pieces of paper that have survived consignment to the oblivion of a cardboard file box.
    Instead, they have been copied and copied again and passed around like Soviet samizdat [a means of expressing oneself and communicating with one another in a sphere outside the censor’s supervision.] They were written by a fifty-five-year-old man named John B. McMahon, who works as a superintendent over several stations in Manhattan. The pages are dated and stamped, and start like any transit memo, heavy on military accuracy and acronyms, like “F.O.” for field office.
    â€œWhile at my office at Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue at approximately 0900 hours,” it begins, “the F.O. notified me . . .”
    But as the memo continues, recounting Mr. McMahon’s journey on September 11 from his office to the area around the World Trade Center, it quickly becomes apparent that it is something other than official correspondence.
    It is the soliloquy of a man trying to figure out what happened to him that day. In essence, it is a letter from Mr. McMahon to himself.
    That morning, he rushed downtown to get into the Cortlandt Street Station on the N and R line to make sure that no passengers or transit employees remained inside the station. When he found none, he went back up onto the street and, as debris began to rain down from the fires in the towers above him, he took refuge under a glass awning in front of the Millennium Hilton Hotel.
    At 9:58 A.M. , he looked up.
    He saw what appeared to be a ring of smoke form around the south tower. “Except,” he wrote, “that this ring was coming downward . . .”
    There was a truck parked next to him in front of a loading bay at Cortlandt and Church Streets, and he dove between the truck and a roll-down door, grabbing onto the bottom of a wall.
    He wrote: “There was an upward, vacuum-type of air movement, followed by a ‘swoosh’ of air and then . . . NOTHING. Not a sound, but pitch darkness with a powder-like substance covering every inch of the area. It also filled my eyes, ears, face and mouth.”
    He struggled to breathe. He scooped ash and dust from his mouth. But as soon as he did, his mouth would fill up again. He felt other people around him, and he remembers hearing himself and the others count off, signifying that they were still alive.
    â€œThen,” he wrote, “the strangest thing happened.” ”While I was facing this wall, I turned my head slightly to the left because I saw two lights that were too big to be flashlights and there were no automobiles around. Although I thought I was