“Tomorrow the birds will sing.” ~ Charlie Chaplin in City Lights
At the moment, I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor in the JetBlue terminal at JFK Airport in New York. Curiously, I hear birds twittering high above me in the ceiling rafters.
For the first time in my memory, a voice over the loudspeaker asks everyone in the terminal to stop what we are doing. And, then invites us to observe a minute of silence in memory of the anniversary of 9/11.
Nearly everyone complies and the silence is eery and powerful.
The birds, however, keep singing. And, I think ‘how perfect.’
When I was a little girl and the chips were down, or things weren’t going well, or I was struggling with grief, my ever-positive Dad would remind me that “tomorrow the birds will sing.” Maybe that phrase has inspired you, too.
After the minute is observed and the loudspeaker voice thanks us for honoring 9/11, people seem to move through the airport in a more connected way.
We are talking to each other, smiling at each other, noticing each other.
Some of us are teary.
Yet, in surviving the day of that awful, awful tragedy, only a stone’s throw from this airport, a bond among us humans is forged.
And yes, the birds are singing.
