Everything is like itself only hollowed out.

All our rescue units are back from the Pentagon. The work there is now slow and deliberate, shoring up and stabilizing wreckage for "recovery" efforts. I signed up for a team my squad is making available to FEMA for efforts in New York, but there's no way of knowing when or if it will be activated. I'm told we would have "at least 4-6" hours to prepare before we would leave. That seemed melodramatic, but what isn't at the moment?

My rescue squad resumed its fall fundraising drive late in the week, meaning we were back to visiting the homes of everyone in our response area and giving them little booklets about who we are and what we do and why they should give us money. It's not something I enjoy but it's managed to build and maintain a free ambulance and rescue service in the community without tax dollars for over 60 years, so who am I to argue?

After the nightmarish week, I suspected the people I visited would be either very nice to a firefighter on the doorstep or unpleasant to a solicitor. In most cases, it was the latter. People are stressed out and sad, and having someone in a uniform knock on their door requesting they send in a donation doesn't help. I'd started to internalize some of the media's lauding of brave rescue personnel and half expected folks to be inquisitive and kind. Their responses, though entirely understandable, left me feeling momentarily let down.

On Sunday morning Susan and I went to Quaker meeting. I hadn't been to meeting in over a year, but I joined the legions of Americans who trooped to religious services seeking some kind of reassurance that we'd been unable to give ourselves. I was raised Quaker, or at least hauled to Quaker meetings for much of my childhood, where I squirmed and mostly failed to understand why there was no minister and no one was talking. Still, the underlying principles more or less took hold. It seems all around there's a common cry for more human blood to be spilled, for more suffering to be visited on the keening earth, and I wanted to hear something else, if only silence.

As we walked up to the meeting house, a man passed us on the sidewalk. "Kill all Quakers," he slurred drunkenly, and stumbled on.

The meeting house was packed. In the row ahead of me, a woman sat with a small steno book in her lap, occasionally scribbling notes. I looked over her shoulder. "Worn wooden benches," the top line said. A member of the media was among us, and from time to time as members of the meeting rose to speak, she wrote down the more compelling things they said. As many, many people have seen repeatedly over the last week, it's bizarre to see the circumstances of your life being taken in, processed, and retold to others.