Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 42

HeralddReview iiimr ii miiiiiimJ SUSAN BEER Sunday, January 6, 2002 'I wake up all hours of the night with Fai 1 fe .1 2 -I 1 amid ORRO A1 PI II Vt iil 1 i i was I 5 4 I i TE'. i -J I 4 A. it .4 i'4-riill i 'r- New place need not be lonely She called to wish me well in my new home up north and said she fantasizes about moving, too. "But I'm afraid," she said. "How do you meet people? I made all my friends through our kids, and our kids are grown, but they're still our friends.

"How would I make new ones, at my age, in a new town?" No worry is deeper: that in a new place we will be lonely. It's the fear that keeps people in dead marriages, in bad jobs and in towns where they make a living but never feel at home. When my husband and I moved to a small town on the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan in the fall, we worried, too. In our home down-state, we barely knew our neighbors and shared meals with them only a handful of times. Our closest friends lived miles away.

We needed to make dinner appointments days or weeks in advance, plans that often collapsed in the rush of life. UP NORTH, friendship seems easier. Less time is spent in traffic and more in conversation. Talk is the fuel that ignites affection. Every village has its gathering place, a bakery or diner or fire hall where each morning someone turns on the lights and the coffee machine.

The first time you step in, everybody pauses in their chitchat to look you over. Instead of bowing your head, you have to smile and say, "Howdy. We're new in town." Those are magic words. You will hear tales of the town's past and forecasts for its future. And when you're asked, "Where are you living?" you better know who owned your place before you.

"We're in Bea Bowen's house," we tell everyone. Then they tell us stories about Bea, he house or her chickens. These gathering spots open early. If you drop by every day, you will soon be greeted by name and asked what's new the first spark of friendship. FRIENDS MIGHT be harder to find the older you get, but not if you remember how you found them in your youth.

In college, I'd hang out in a dorm stairwell with strangers for hours, listening, snaring, asking questions. Everybody was interesting; anybody could become a friend. As I grew older, I shut off serendipity. I stopped investing in people with whom I shared little in common. I didn't have time for anything but surefire friendships.

Now, in midlife, in a new town, I'm open to anything. One night I asked the man who spent all day washing our windows to join me for bean soup. We talked for hours about his life doing windows, chopping firewood and growing mushrooms. A friend? Not yet. But could be.

WE'RE INVITING just about everyone we meet to "just drop by." And they do. That was hard for me at first. Sometimes there's fuzz on the floor or the kitchen's a mess, but they'll know me better than some friends for whom I've always cleaned up. The possibilities for friendship now seem boundless. We meet the men and women who own the gas station, the pizza parlor and the pharmacy because they work behind the counters every day.

We visit the bookstore and library and meet people who love books. We go to church and meet people who believe in justice and self -improvement. We hike the trails near town and meet people who are nourished by nature. "Hello," we say. "We're new to town." Anything can happen next.

Susan Ager writes for the Detroit Free Press, Box 828, Detroit, 4823L Send e-mail to ager freepress.com. Associated Press photos FALLOUT: Ash covers a street in downtown New York City after the collapse of the World Trade Center. In the photo at top, Smoke and debris erupt from the south tower of the World Trade Center as it explodes. Ground zero rescue worker recovers by talking about his experiences there By HUEY FREEMAN Staff Writer hen Bill Bresnahan, a former Philadelphia police man he had hated without cause a short time earlier. "When I humbled myself and he got my attention, he used me to save the Muslim," Bresnahan said.

Bresnahan almost lost his own life while searching for survivors in a damaged building. He fell through a floor and was knocked unconscious. After regaining consciousness in a Bronx hospital where he was diagnosed with a concussion and a dislocated right knee he signed himself i Ak- '-A out against medical advice to continue searching. During the early hours of the search, the scene was very dangerous, and some rescuers lost their lives. Bresnahan said his life was spared two other Bill Bresnahan officer, was searching for survivors in the wreckage of the World Trade Center, he was enraged by the carnage around him.

There were more body parts than bodies mixed in with tons of steel girders. "I dropped my faith that day," he recalled in a phone interview from Crawford, Texas, a stop on his book tour. "I wanted to kill every Muslim and every terrorist, and that is not the Christian way." But when he saw an angry mob beating a man with boards and bricks a few blocks from the disaster site, he acted quickly to save the man. Bresnahan noticed a nearby hot dog cart had a sticker on it identifying its owner as a Muslim. "Now I'm going to get beaten to death defending a Muslim," he recalled.

Bresnahan will talk about his experiences at ground zero at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Hope for America Conference at the Decatur Holiday Inn Select Conference Hotel. The free event is part of the Full Gospel Business Men's regional convention. Copies of a book on the experiences of Bresnahan and other rescuers, "911 Terror in America" by David Bresnahan (Bill's cousin), will be for sale at the conference. It contains 75 photos Bill Bresnahan took at the World Trade Center site.

When Bresnahan told the Muslim hot dog vendor's attackers that he had a gun and would shoot them, they walked away. The successful bluff he had no gun left him trembling. "I was crying," said Bresnahan, who retired from the Philadelphia Police Department in 1976 after he was injured in the line of duty. "I was scared for my life there." He believes God tested and humbled him by guiding him to help a ft" GROUND ZERO: A fireman screams in pain during his rescue shortly after both towers of New York's World Trade Center times under miraculous circumstances. A fire department chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, told him not to enter into what was remaining of one of the towers.

Judge himself later entered the building and was killed when it collapsed. A fire chief also ordered the retired police officer to stay out of another precarious building. About 15 minutes later, the fire chief's body was carried out by his men. "I should have been part of that team," said Bresnahan, who had prayed while driving from Philadelphia to New York that he would be able to help. "I'm overweight; I'm overage; I'm away from technology for 25 years; I didn't know how I would contribute," Bresnahan said.

"I just prayed that I wouldn't be a burden or a liability to my brothers who needed an extra hand, because they were so short of help." The veteran rescuer, who also helped at the scene of the bombed Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, did make many contributions. He helped set up a first aid station for rescuers, where he flushed FAITHG2 i Wk Uii I EYEWITNESS VIEW: David Bresna-han's book contains 75 photos Bill Bresnahan took at the World Trade Center site. rxr.