Last year at this time I was sitting outside of Tel Aviv, Israel watching an 8-foot TV monitor and yelling into my cell phone. Today at 12:00pm I am going to see a friend whose life was made specifically worse by this thing. I'm helping her put her bags into the taxi to the the airport, so she can move to San Francisco. I don't want her to leave. But I am grateful I'll be helpful, to have something to do in the middle of the flag-snapping.

I also want to pause and say I am grateful, a year late, to the people who didn't know me but who, seeing me here on this site, offered their homes and counsel and support, who called my answering machine, who couldn't have been kinder to a New Yorker away from his ash-covered apartment.

There was a man from the American Southwest who called and spoke for a while into my machine, and someone who offered to put me up in Europe for a week if I needed to get my life together, and dozens of others, not to mention my kind, protective Israeli coworkers, who gave me cigarettes and took me out and kept their eyes on me, even though we'd all just been laid off.

I have never seen kindness like those days, kindness that poured out everywhere. I am grateful for it, and remember it, just as I'm grateful to take off the weird black armband of general sadness that we've all worn for the year.