LETTERS FROM HOME: SILENT WITNESSES AND LULLABIES ALONG A FENCE IN OKLAHOMA

April 22, 1999

Dear Julie,

Driving south toward the Oklahoma City skyline at dusk Saturday night began a pilgrimage that took me first to a Church's Fried Chicken restaurant to ask for directions thinking everybody must know the place. The clerk just knew it was somewhere downtown.

"But there's nothing there," he said.

Crisscrossing the downtown streets, I finally happened upon a small sign with an arrow that reads "Alfred P. Murrah Building." It was a sign that had been erected for pilgrims.

Understandably given what happened, no parking is allowed nearby. When I stopped at the corner, a security guard sized me up then waved.

The wire fence running along Harvey Avenue has become a people's memorial to the victims of the bombing that shook Oklahoma City and far beyond almost exactly four years ago. An eerie, birdless stillness pervades, like at an archaeological dig of a tomb.

That night, families, couples and people alone walked along the fence silently reading the tributes to the dead, examining the ballcaps, pens, beads and crucifixes those who came before had left behind. Some wept.

I was in Oklahoma City attending a professional workshop. A reception was planned at the Cowboy Hall of Fame that night but I felt a duty to go to this hole in the ground where someone tried to bury our love for humanity. Like the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., this fence summons your soul to grieve.

The impulse is to leave something behind that says, I am a witness. People leave something of themselves because we all lost something of ourselves there.

A wreath for Don Leonard, a U.S. Secret Service agent, was decorated with five small stuffed rabbits. "You loved all God's living creatures, even the five wild baby rabbits you nursed," the handwritten inscription reads. "We miss you and we love you!"

Julie Marie Welch was 23 when she died. She had studied Spanish in Madrid and was an interpreter for the Social Security Administration. She had planned to marry an Air Force lieutenant.

A security guard posted his poem about walking past these families' grief every day. I had no words, just my workshop nametag to attach to the fence.

The photographs of the children who were in the day care were the hardest to look at. Beside one was an Easter basket. Farther along on the fence hung a tiny pair of hiking boots.

Someone left the lyrics to the Beatles' "Carry that Weight": "Sleep, pretty darlings; do not cry/And I will sing a lullaby."

The fence remembers these innocents whose lives were ended by blind hatred. Across the street, a Catholic parish house destroyed by the blast has been replaced by a sculpture titled "And Jesus Wept." Jesus's head is bowed and his back is turned away from the sacrilege that occurred in this place.

But the passage from John 11 gives solace because tears provoked Jesus to raise Lazarus from the dead. If tears it takes, this place extracts them.

Now there are high school students in Colorado to mourn. And lodged familiarly in our psyches already is the television footage of frightened students running from the school and the terrified girl with the eyebrow piercing disbelievingly describing the carnage she'd just witnessed.

Occasionally, CNN cuts away to pictures of the bombing in Yugoslavia, oblivious to the irony that we as a nation and as individuals still believe differences can be resolved through destruction.

Oklahoma City sadly bears witness that the truth is otherwise.

The national memorial with a reflecting pool and 168 chairs symbolizing the people killed is to open next year where the Murrah Building once stood. Trees will be planted, and someday birds may sing again on Harvey Avenue.

Love, Sam