Girl’s 9/11 letter still touching hearts
Dave Triola waited near his
34-foot dump trailer, talking to other construction workers at the corner of Church and Vesey in Lower Manhattan in fall
2001. They pulled 12-hour shifts to haul debris from the World Trade Center to Staten Island, where special teams sifted through pulverized concrete and charred steel.
The Teamster from Local
445 had been on the job less than two weeks, removing rubble from building seven, when he took his rig on the assigned route: under two sets of scaffolding where a fire hose drenched his haul to tamp down the dust. The beams were still so hot they steamed.
He rumbled across the Verrazano Bridge and dumped the first load of the day. Their instructions were never to look. He didn’t see anybody — or parts of any body. But the lift itself sometimes collected debris, so he reached down with his gloved hand to wipe it clean. With the dust and sludge-soaked wreckage, gloves didn’t last long.
He grabbed a new pair at a respite center: heavy-duty, gray and green ones still stapled together with the price tag at- tached. When he stuck his hand in the left glove, he felt something: a small, white square. He unfolded it and read the short message in wobbly, hardpressed pencil on paper.
“My friend Mike said, ‘What is it?’ ” Dave recalled. “I couldn’t even tell him. I just handed it to him. He had the same reaction.”
That letter touched Dave’s heart in ways he could scarcely express: the innocence, the small act of kindness from a first-grader — a stranger — living 740 miles away.
For 16 years, Dave has held onto that letter. Folded back into its original square, stowed inside the pair of heavy-duty work gloves he never wore. Slipped into a plastic newspaper sleeve, tucked into his bottom dresser drawer.
He called a Courier-Journal reporter, hoping he might write about it, and if he did, that Emily would read how much her letter meant to him. But that reporter passed the idea to another reporter who found her.
On a sweltering morning in late July, Dave made it to Louisville and finally put a face to the crooked-lettered name.
He and Emily met for the first time at Bill Howard Memorial Park at Mercer Transportation, where a rusted piece of steel from the World Trade Center stands in memoriam. It was her 23rd birthday.
They sat at a picnic table under a gazebo and shared their life stories. Emily’s two children, Julia and Clara, her mom and Nana tagged along. Dave teared up when she handed him a school picture of her in first grade — the year she wrote the letter — to keep.
Dave hopes to donate Emily’s letter to the Smithsonian Museum or the 9/11 Memorial — a place that will display it so others can see it.
But he’ll always hold onto the kindness he felt from that 7year-old Kentucky girl.