"The Sentinels" By Msgr. Roger Fawcett

I don't think I can remember a more beautiful morning in New York. Everyone here has said so: weather wise it was perfect. The sun was bright and glistening; the air, all cleaned up in recent years, without the grit and grime that in previous decades made hordes of tourists call this town "dirty old New York." It was, for want of a better cliché, sparkling; and there was just a mild hint in the air of autumn on its way. I thought of the half-century's worth of autumns in New York that I've known and had to admit -- this was one of the best. But that was all out my bedroom window in Greenwich Village, from my cozy little apartment, my home of thirty years. I'd just been in a dead sleep fifteen minutes earlier. Something seemed to grip my unconscious, though, and I awoke without the usual beep-beep of my Tiffany's alarm (a gift, I assure you).

But then it happened. All that hell had to offer was here. Here. This was, you see, September 11, 2001, and my neighbor of many years, Adolfo Simonetti, was trying to rouse me by ringing the bell and then calling on the phone. "God, Roger, are you aware that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center?" " What? Are you kidding?" "Turn the TV on, for God's sake ... " "I'll get back to you ..." and with that I hit the switch and got a fuzzy CBS -- and that's all I got (because the relay antenna -- for all of New York -- was atop the World Trade Center... I didn't quite put that together yet) ... The phone rang again ... More friends, crying, some screaming. "Father! What will we do?" Ah, some folks still think the Roman collar brings with it all the answers! And there was Dan Rather, really looking worried, and then I got the gist of what was going on .. then, if hell hadn't been enough -- a deeper, more ferocious pit in the Inferno. Incredibly, unbelievably, the second tower -- and then the buildings beginning their fall to earth. And here I am in my little apartment, less than a mile from "ground zero" -- and wondering if I'd live to see tomorrow. Well, that feeling is somewhat still with every New Yorker -- it just won't go away. We leave our homes -- and we wonder ...

But that morning, I had to move fast. Directly across the street from my home, on Seventh Avenue South, in the very heart of the historical district in Greenwich Village, is the famous St. Vincent's Hospital -- the original, the one actually appointed by St. Elizabeth Bailey Seton's good Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul and staffed by them since 1848 ... It was Edna St. Vincent Millay who got her middle name because an uncle of hers, 'way back when, got himself into a pickle -- literally -- when he was himself pickled and trapped in some bales of cotton down there on the waterfront and it was those good Sisters in their widows' weeds and bonnets who nursed him back to health. Edna's mom and pop were apparently so grateful, they gave their newborn -- the poetess herself -- the "St." appellation and it lasted. There are folk tales, of course that have insisted that old Edna was born there, and that's how she was named after the august institution; but evidently they aren't true.

Out my kitchen window I could see the commotion, and the huge skeletal cranes with their antennae on top, indicating that the networks and their news hawks had arrived ... This was serious. This was -- and now I got a somewhat better picture on my Channel 2 reporting -- this was calamitous.

The horror unfolded, but I couldn't stay much longer with the television. A quick shower -- If I was going to meet Armageddon, I was going clean. And a pot of coffee in my Melita carafe ... I go nowhere and I begin nothing without a mug of java -- wow, there's a word that had nothing to do with computers when I first heard it ... (funny the thought processes you have when you're in utter confusion), but coffee it was and a shower -- a very quick one.

After all, I am a priest. A man of God. Ordained. My life, as they promise in times like these, flew before my eyes though, as I wondered if this were the end of the world -- little did I know it was the end of the world I knew and loved -- for I'd seen those Towers, those glorious gates-of-the world's greatest city, that said "welcome to New York" -- along with "Our Lady of the Harbor", to millions and millions. The Lady, a gift from the people of France to the people of America, for over a hundred years -- and the two glistening towers for a mere thirty-or-so ... And now it occurred to me -- what I'd never given a thought to before -- that I could remember, as they say, "as if it were yesterday" when those two gigantic glass "boxes" went up. New Yorkers have some very viable landmarks by which we mark the passages of our lives -- and many of those landmarks are Landmarks! So I remembered the young man I once was ... and I remembered my small waist (of all things) and my brown hair and the fact that -- when those towers were going up -- I was in a space that if you'd told me, "one day you'll be celebrating the Holy Sacrifice for a congregation in midtown Manhattan ..." I'd've told you that there were comfy asylums for guys like you!

I was the young, arrogant, "Mr. Broadway" then. It was heady and the greatest of fun; it was a life in the theatre. Broadway, Off-Broadway, road shows, commercials, soap operas, the glamour, Sardi's, "21", the Tony Awards dinners, opening nights, limos and big stars of Hollywood and New York, reviews after openings -- and we had seven dailies then ... I was, as a director friend used to say, singin' and dancin' a ragtime tune! And wherever those thirty years went, they were gone -- and so's the waistline and the dark brown hair ... but then I was back -- pulled back -- it was Dan's voice -- Dan Rather ... almost looking like he was going to lose it ... Hang on, Dan, don't fall apart. We need you. You're Uncle Walter's spiritual son, for God's sake! And I was, sadly, back in the present, in my apartment, drying off, calm, strangely calm, but less than a mile from Ground Zero. I took hold of myself.

You're a priest, Roger, remember? They need you. Look out the window again. St. Vincent's. So I quickly gulped down the mugs of steaming black coffee and dried off that tortured, plump body and found a clerical shirt. I started buttoning from the bottom as I always have, and realized I hadn't lined the damn things up right -- nerves, nerves. Never a recipient of the "Mr. Housekeeper of the Year" award, I started -- very unpriestly-like -- to curse like a drunken sailor ... Where was the pocket Collectio Rituum? Where the holy oils? a portable stole? Luckily (luckily?) I found them all, as I pushed my way into my clericals ... Now the nerves were starting to work on me. My God, dear God, -- holy, merciful God -- this could be it ... we might be leaving here -- and I mean LEAVING ... I remembered the reserved Sacred Hosts which I had in a locked little tabernacle in my bedroom. I fumbled with shaking hands, found the right key, and opened the little chamber. I must've made the fastest genuflexion on record; there were four Particles of the Body of my precious Christ. I could not leave them in the apartment. So I quickly -- and as reverently as possible for a man racing faster than a race horse now -- consumed them and made a very very quick prayer.

Now -- quickly -- down to the street, down to Waverly Place and to the corner of my block ... a corner where I have stood each day for thirty years ... what a wonderful, exciting place it's been -- and what a blessed life I've had -- I have -- for on the corner of Seventh avenue and 11th Street, every day for all those years, I've begun each day there -- I've looked north and, even from so far away, I could see the twinkling lights of Times Square and the tops of some of its better-known buildings. And when I looked to the south -- ah, there they were, always there for me -- the two Beacons, the two sentinels.

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