One Degree of Separation
"Kevin Bacon saved my life." Those were the words of Ramone, the 60-year old Dominican who drove me to the airport for my trip home. Before meeting up with him, I had a little free time, so I wanted to visit Ground Zero. I wasn't sure what there was to see, but I knew I wanted to see it. So I got up early, grabbed the southbound W train, pumped Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" into my iPod and made my way to the site of one of our biggest tragedies. As I made it to the corner of Church and Vesey, where more than 3,000 lives ended and millions more were forever damaged, my personal soundtrack changed to a song called Empty Sky, from Bruce Springsteen's 9/11 tribute album, The Rising. The combination of what my ears were hearing, what my eyes were seeing and what my brain was thinking, I almost couldn't take it. There was nothing on the street or in the air that reminded me of what happened exactly there nearly nine years earlier, but you couldn...