What I photographed on the twelfth

I became an American citizen in the spring of 2002, in a courtroom in Concord, seven months after the morning that decided me. Every 11 September since, I have written something down for this country, usually in the tin and not for anyone. This one I am putting where you can read it.

On 11 September 2001 I was a photojournalist on a New Hampshire newspaper, and by noon every camera in New England was pointed at a television. I did not go to New York. I was fifty-six and the paper sent the young ones. What I photographed, on the twelfth, was a hardware store in our town where the owner had put a coffee urn and a stack of paper cups on the counter and a hand-lettered sign that said free, sit if you need to. Eleven people were sitting. None of them were talking. That was the picture that ran.

I have thought about that store every September for twenty-five years, and here is what I have decided it was about. When the largest thing you can imagine has happened, a person's instinct is to do the smallest true thing in reach. Make the coffee. Set out the cups. Write the sign in your own hand so that people know a person wrote it.

This site is about credit files, and my daughter would tell you I am wandering. I am not. A credit file is a record of a person made by strangers, and the work we do here, all six of us, is the work of making the record true, one small line at a time, in our own hand, with the envelope kept. It is patient work in an impatient country, and I have come to think it is one of the ways an ordinary person practices the thing the hardware store was practicing. You cannot fix the large thing. You can make the small true thing in reach, and sign it.

Jenavieve wrote on the 1st about going back to school for your file. Do that this month. Pull the three reports, in September, when the country is remembering what it can and cannot control, and look at what is true and what is not, and put the paper in something with a lid, as her father taught her and as I taught him.

I am seventy-one and I was not born here. I chose this place on the basis of a hardware store, and I have never regretted it.

To the families who lost someone that morning, and to the people who went toward the buildings when everyone else was going away: we remember. We are still setting out the cups.