“Dear Sean,” the notecard began. It was postmarked from Texas. The handwriting was very neat.

“I’m 12 years old… And I know your really buzzy… But my mom committed suicide and my dad doesn’t live with me because he does drugs and now I dont have any one but my foster mom… I’m super embarased about who I am and stuff. Maybe we can be pin pals. Love, Susan.”

DEAREST PEN PAL:

Hello. My name is Sean. I live in Birmingham, Alabama. I am red haired and very plain looking. I rarely clean up after myself. I talk too much. I like Werther’s Originals, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Chili Cheese Fritos, barbecue, and Elvis Presley.

A little about me. I was 11 years old when my dad shot himself. My father did the horrible deed in his brother’s garage. And my family completely fell apart.

After that, I grew up pretty poor. I wore clothes from goodwill. My mother worked in fast food. I thought I was a loser. And still do.

But do you know

the worst part about losing my dad, Susan? The worst part was the fear. I was always frightened. And it never left me. I am still afraid of the dark. Loud noises scare me. Fireworks especially.

Nobody tells you that grief feels a lot like fear.

Also, I was always embarrassed. I lived beneath the heavy fog of embarrassment. It was my go-to emotion. Again, I can’t explain this. So I won’t even try.

I’ll never forget when I was 13, when a popular girl named Amber invited me to her pool party. I had never been to a pool party before. I wasn’t sure why she invited me.

My father was freshly dead, and I had no friends. So my mother encouraged me to go.

I was a chubby boy. I was so embarrassed about being fat that I wore my T-shirt into the…

The sun was setting over Hartford, Connecticut. The sky was peach ice cream. The Mark Twain House was lit by a perfect dusk, and the crickets took an encore chorus.

I was touring Samuel Clemens’ home. Which has been a lifelong dream for me.

Tonight, I would be performing my one-man shipwreck in the museum, telling stories, singing songs. Which would be one of the greatest honors of my lifetime except for the time I was an extra in a Budweiser commercial.

Before the show, our tour group was upstairs, in the Billiard Room.

And that’s where I saw the cat.

The cat was sitting on the billiard table, staring at me. He was large, intensely black, with velvety fur, and a faint fringe of white across his chest. The kind of cat not easy to see in ordinary light.

“Whose cat is this?” I asked Mallory, our tour guide.

Mallory was mid-speech. She wore a confused look. “What cat?” she said.

“The cat on the pool table.”

Everyone in the tour group glared at me like my fly was unzipped.

“I don’t see any cat,” someone said.

“Mark Twain was a big cat lover,” said Mallory, dubiously. “But there are no cats here.”

On cue, the cat sprinted from the room like a small-caliber bullet.

“Look!” I said. “There he goes now. Can’t you see him?”

My wife felt my forehead.

So I excused myself. I left the group and showed myself out. I followed the cat through Mark Twain’s 150-year-old old home. Down the dark-wood staircase. Through the ornate entryway. Onto the ancient porch.

It was funny. You could tell this wasn’t an athletic cat. This wasn’t a cat who climbed trees or terrorized rodents. This was a big Bambino, with a waistline the size of a 40-year-old preacher. This was a cat who ate hot meals on bone china.

I jogged after the animal. And I was…

Our train came into Hartford at about one o’clock. The Vermonter eased into Union Station, and we deboarded after the ticket collector shouted, “Hartford, Connecticut!”

The station is built of brownstone and gracious glass windows. It’s a trip backward in time. Like visiting the 1880s.

No sooner had I deboarded than I met an old man, struggling with his heavy baggage. He was using a walker, limping. I helped him into the station. Soon we were seated on oaken pews in the old depot. He was breathing heavily from exertion. I was breathing heavier.

“Thanks for the help,” he said. “Sometimes I forget I’m an old fart.”

“No problem,” said I.

Hartford Union Station is just a giant room. Because that’s all train stations were, long ago. Big rooms. This particular room housed thousands who would embark and disembark for parts unknown.

There’s an adventurous feeling you get inside old train stations. A feeling you don’t get in, say, LaGuardia’s Fifth Circle of Hell.

Long ago, you could have come to Hartford Union Station to travel anywhere you

wanted to go. North to Montreal. West, to Santa Fe. Or south, to the Big Easy.

The old man looks around the station. He’s overcome with nostalgia. My granddaddy always said nostalgia was a crippling narcotic.

“We came to this station all the time when I was a kid.”

He grew up in Hartford. He visited this station with his mother. Each year, as a boy, he would take a solo trip to his aunt’s Pennsylvania. His mother would pin a strip of paper inside his little coat. The paper was labeled with his home address.

The note would read: “IF THIS CHILD IS LOST, PLEASE RETURN TO…” Then, his mother would tuck five dollars into his shoe.

“Everybody’s mom did that back then. People were very trusting.”

The old man points to the ticket booth and rifles through the last 100…

It was the dogs. The dogs are what got me.

When you tour the 9/11 Memorial Museum, you see a lot. You see twisted steel girders. Baby-faced portraits of the deceased. Mutilated emergency vehicles.

But it was the dogs that wrecked me.

The dog exhibit is pretty small. Located in the far corner of the museum, with photographs of search and rescue dogs.

You see dogs nosing through rubble, wearing safety harnesses. You see them in their prime. They’re all deceased now. But they were spectacular.

There was Riley. Golden retriever. He was trained to find living people. But, he didn’t find any. Instead, he recovered the remains of firefighters. Riley kept searching for a live survivor, but found none. Riley’s morale tanked.

“I tried my best to tell Riley he was doing his job,” said his handler. “He had no way to know that when firefighters and police officers came over to hug him, and for a split second you can see them crack a smile—that Riley was succeeding at doing an altogether

different job. He provided comfort. Or maybe he did know.”

There was Coby and Guiness. Black and yellow Labs. From California. Surfer dogs. They found dozens of human remains.

And Abigail. Golden Lab. Happy. Energetic. Committed. Big fan of bacon.

Sage. A border collie. Cheerful. Endless energy. Her first mission was searching the Pentagon wreckage after the attacks. She recovered the body of the terrorist who piloted American Airlines Flight 77.

Jenner. Black Lab. At age 9, he was one of the oldest dogs on the scene. Jenner’s handler, Ann Wichmann, remembers:

“It was 12 to 15 stories high of rubble and twisted steel. My first thought was, ‘I can't send Jenner into that…’ At one point, [Jenner] disappeared down a hole under the rubble and I was like, ‘Ugggggh!' Such a heart-stopping moment..."

Trakr. German Shepherd. Tireless worker. Worked until he couldn’t stand up anymore.…

The memorial sits on 180 Greenwich Street. Smack-dab in lower Manhattan. The memorial is busy today. But then…

“It’s busy every day,” says a cop standing nearby. “This is what everyone comes to see in New York. Everybody in the world remembers exactly where they were that day.”

It’s cold outside. Biblical throngs of tourists are bundled in jackets, sipping from obligatory Starbucks cups. Conversations come in all languages.

This isn’t like other New York tourist attractions. This isn’t “Hamilton,” or the Met. The mood is somber. People are reverent.

A family from Ohio peers into a gaping hole where the north tower used to stand. There are manmade waterfalls rushing into a cavern. A cavern where bodies were once found. Approximately 3,000 of their names are engraved around the memorial.

“I was on my way to work that day,” says the mother of the family. “I was getting dressed, after a shower. I saw the second plane hit, I was dripping wet, and I went numb.”

Almost as if on cue, a

commercial airliner flies overhead, past the One World Trade Center skyscraper above us. The plane flies well below the summit of the tower, an eerie reminder.

There is an old man escorted by a young woman. They are hooking arms. He is from Santee, California. He remembers where he was.

“I was in a coffee shop,” he says. “In San Diego. The shop closed down, that’s how serious it was.”

Tickets to visit the 9/11 Memorial Museum are cheap. One ticket will buy you admission into hell on earth. This is a hard place to visit.

The museum is impossibly crowded today. Standing room only. It’s worse than a major airport. And yet this is the quietest place in New York. There is no laughter. No idle conversation. You can hear your own heartbeat.

There are artifacts that survived the attacks. A blackened wallet. A mangled shoe.…

Hàoyú was playing violin on the F train. He was playing Paganini. His fingers danced across the fingerboard wildly, playing “Caprice No. 24.”

Nobody was paying attention to the virtuoso. Nobody even looked up from their phones. Except for one idiot tourist with red hair and a prominent overbite.

A few of us applauded him. He took a bow.

The violinist was Chinese. He was originally from Chongqing. He was easy to talk to. He was dressed in a fast-food employee uniform. He was quiet.

“I study violin since I was three,” he explained. “I was to be a concert violinist someday, but this plan did not work out.”

Namely, because the classical world is tough. Many classical musicians are about as much fun as a routine colonoscopy. Still, he tried. He studied with the right maestros. He played concerts. He kept his pinky up when he drank tea.

At age 20, his mother died in a car accident. Six months later, his father died of a broken heart. The young man has no

brothers and sisters. He was alone.

“So I quit school and I decide to try something crazy. I come to New York.”

He got a job working in a New York restaurant by day. He rode his bike to and from work.

“Everyone shows you their middle finger when you ride a bike in New York.”

Then, one day, while riding his bike, he was struck by a car. The tendons in his left forearm were damaged. He broke three ribs. He broke his leg. The paramedics said he was lucky he wasn’t playing the harp.

“I could not play the violin anymore, I thought life was over. I went through a very bad place.”

Because of his injuries, he lost his job; he couldn’t hold a teacup without using both hands. Funds ran thin, he was kicked out of his apartment.

Soon, he was living…

Young Catherine stood on the ship's bow as it sailed into Ellis Island. She was a teenager. Her hair was tied behind her head. She had a slender neck. Young face.

The passengers on the boat were excited. All 1,139 of them. They were speaking in strange tongues. Irish, Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Scandinavians, Norwegians, Swedish, Jewish, Polish, French.

The shoreline came into view. Catherine had never seen so many buildings. There weren’t buildings like this in Deutschland.

She leaned onto the stanchions. Her fiancé, Jakob, the carpenter, stood beside her and kissed her cheek.

“Ist es das?” said Catherine.

Jakob nodded. “Das ist Amerika.”

“Wow,” said the teenage girl.

Wow.

The journey had taken seven days. They had been canned oysters within the hull of the ship. After seven days, everyone smelled like body odor and puke.

Catherine’s parents had been upset at their decision to leave the old country. Leave Deutshcland? Why? Get married in a foreign nation? Huh? They were just teenagers. Had they lost their minds? Were they completely verrückt?

Nevertheless, youth is a potent

hallucinogenic. And this was a New World.

It was a trip of many firsts for her. For starters: Catherine had never been on a boat. Tickets on this ship cost five years’ carpenter’s wages.

Also, Catherine had never gone to the bathroom overboard before. Which was fun. Men went over the portside. Women went starboard.

The ship eased into Ellis Island, all misery instantly vanished. This was a fresh start. A new life. A new culture.

Everything happened so quickly. Catherine and her beaux went to the registration room, along with a few thousand other hopefuls. They waited for nine hours.

A doctor gave her a complete physical exam as she waited in line. They were all herded into cattle chutes. She and her fiancé were asked a series of quasi-trick questions by clerks.

In the lobby, she watched families reunite. She…

She was young, I’d guess mid-twenties. She had a sleeve of multi-colored tattoos on both arms. She was pretty. She was nice.

She stood behind the New York City deli counter, slicing salami, making sandwiches. She had a line 16 miles long, snaking outward into the frenetic streets of The City So Nice They Named it Twice.

Some of her patrons were very “particular” about their orders. Although where I come from, we would not call these people “particular.” We would call these people “fussy.” But hey. When in Rome.

The girl took it on the chin. She replied to each “particular” customer by smiling and batting her eyes.

I detected a slight drawl in her voice. I wouldn’t have noticed this in any other city. But in New York, you notice drawls.

It was my turn. I ordered the cheapest sandwich available, an item which cost about as much as an average Harvard doctoral semester.

She began making my sandwich. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“Birmingham.”

A look of wistfulness came over her face. “Birmingham,” she

said. “I’m from Birmingham. I was born there.”

“Small world.”

“And it just got smaller.”

The man behind me in line was not happy about this casual conversation between myself and our delicatessen professional. He began clearing his throat loudly.

New Yorkers, I have read, do not like idle chit-chat. I read this in an official guidebook. The guidebook stated: “New Yorkers do not like superficial conversation, eye contact, small animals, children, old people, or anyone who talks slow.”

The man in line behind me cleared his throat loudly again. He was sending a clear message.

“Can we speed this up?” the man actually said aloud. Then he made a “let’s get the ball rolling” getsure.

I was horrified. In Birmingham, this man would have already been in the backseat of a Jefferson County Crown Victoria.

The young woman merely smiled. She…

Ah, New York City. There is a slight chill. The city is full of Midwesterners, all wearing white Reeboks, all staring straight upward.

My wife and I have just stepped out of our cab, after leaving LaGuardia Third World International Airport. Our cab driver was a nice man who drove upwards of 75 mph with only one finger on the wheel, and that was just on the sidewalks.

Right now, my wife and I are walking to our hotel. Because that’s all you do in New York City, really. You walk. You walk for miles, until the blisters on your feet become the size of U.S. Congresspersons.

Right now, we are stuck walking in a massive clot of people moving like a herd of bison. We are trekking onward, hauling our luggage, dodging cabs.

Even so, my wife is thrilled to be in this town. It is her first time visiting. So she is taking cellphone pictures by the gazillions.

My wife finds important photographic moments wherever she glances. So far, she has taken pictures of our cab’s interior, my half-eaten airport bagel, the

plane’s lavatory, and a middle-aged woman walking down the street dressed like a giant marital aid.

I also have this feeling the locals can tell we’re out-of-towners. We have that look about us. I met a cashier in a coffee shop, for example, when I was trying to order a large iced tea.

My tea arrived. “There’s something wrong with my iced tea, ma’am,” I said.

“What‘s wrong?”

“It’s not sweet.”

“So add some sugar.”

“I can’t add granulated sugar to cold tea.”

“Why not?”

“Because I love the Lord.”

Then the cashier asked if I was from Alabama. I was so impressed this lady guessed where we were from.

“That’s amazing,” I said. “How on earth could you tell where we’re from?”

“Honestly?” she said, leaning in to whisper. “It’s your teeth.”

I’ve never been…