Calabasas, CA: Too Young to Remember. Too Moved to Forget.

Dr. Bob Dworkoski spoke quietly, eyes taking everything in. ‘It’s hard to put into words. This is just a moving, powerful experience.’

The Headmaster of Viewpoint School went on to explain that he ‘didn’t know how having this sculpture come to campus would work out.’ Watching his students reaching into a box of paper and pens, writing down their thoughts and climbing a stepladder to slip their notes into the heart of the cross it was clear that the message – some message – had gotten through.

What does 9-11 mean to someone who was five years old at the time? To someone who was too young to have any memory of that day? To someone who didn’t even exist ten years ago, and only knows of a place called New York from TV?

Holding an almost impossibly heavy chunk of steel from the World Trade Center in their hands, the students seemed to grasp, to some degree, the horror of that day.

As time goes by these young men and women, these rough-and-tumble boys and giggling girls, will journey into adulthood. As they do, they will gain some kind of clearer understanding of just what happened on that terrible morning – and how the world they would eventually inherit had been changed forever.

Brentwood, LA: Official Unveiling at Leslie Sacks Art Gallery

This morning we found ourselves in the middle of a lights-flashing police cruiser and fire engine escort, winding down the canyon road and out onto the Pacific Coast Highway toward Brentwood and Leslie Sacks.

Reverend Georgiana Rodiger led a prayer and blessed the cross with holy water from the Jordan River. (Yes, that Jordan River.) Jon offered his thoughts, expressing his hope that everyone who looks upon this cross will reflect on their own lives and think of their place in a world that is much bigger than any of us.

I read the names of the firefighters stenciled in gray on the backs of their heavy yellow turnout gear. One of the men, white-haired and tanned, with weathered skin and deep eyes, was named Yamashiro.

Afterward we got to talking, and I found out that years ago his parents had emigrated from Japan and settled in Hawaii where they grew pineapples and sugar cane for a living. He knew a few people back in Japan, though he didn’t visit much. I wondered if he’d felt more affected by Japan’s disaster of a couple months prior than he had in the aftermath of 9-11. He was in the unusual position of being in the middle of the two disasters, both geographically and in terms of his past and present heritage.

I didn’t broach the subject. It didn’t really matter. I wanted to know more about the trip his parents had taken, leaving their country to start something new in a place far from home.

Official Press Release: St. Peter's 9-11 Cross

Jon took the hunk of Trade Center steel from my hands and put it back on his workbench. “We’ll leave in about three days,” he said. “After the unveiling.”

“Be weird to leave before the unveiling.”

“Wiseass. I mean right after. On Wednesday. Lee wrote up a press release for it. He’s putting it out first thing tomorrow morning so we pretty much have to get this thing done by then and hit the road."

“Press release, nice.”

“Yeah, I think it would be cool to get a little attention. Oh yeah, that reminds me. I hired a PR firm to help us get in touch with people in the cities we’re going to.”

“You mean like DC and New York?”

“Yeah, plus a few other places. We should sit down later and plan out a route. I’m thinking we go through Nashville.”

Three days. That would make it May 18^th. We’d be on the road for four or five days, a week at most. Even if we took a little longer my wife would be fine, staying with my mom, having some help with the boys. Still, her spoken sentiment of ‘Take your time! Have fun, and be careful!’ would only hold up for so long. A cross-country trip with an old buddy sounded great. But so did figuring out the rest of our life.

Artist Jon Krawczyk and 9/11 Memorial Cross

Begin Pilgrimage to St. Peter’s Catholic Church, N.Y.C.

Unveiling and Departure Wednesday, May 18, 8:00 AM

Los Angeles, CA – May 16, 2011 - Los Angeles sculptor Jon Krawczyk has completed fabrication of a fourteen foot tall stainless steel cross incorporating fragments of steel from the World Trade Center. These relics of 9/11 were provided by the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum, presently under construction at the site of the World Trade Center. The base of the cross will serve as a podium for a stainless steel book, still in fabrication, whose pages will be engraved with the names of those who perished as a result of the 9/11 attacks.

Krawczyk’s 9/11 memorial will take the place of the cruciform I-beam girders found standing in the ruins of the World Trade Center, then moved to St. Peter’s Catholic Church near Ground Zero. St. Peter’s, the oldest Catholic church in New York, was damaged in the attacks of 9-11.

Krawczyk’s 9/11 Memorial Cross will be unveiled at Leslie Sacks Fine Art, 11640 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles (Brentwood) California 90049 at 8:00 AM on Wednesday, May 18th and depart for the East Coast immediately thereafter.

Krawczyk, accompanied by long time friend and author Kevin Kato, will shepherd the artist’s 9/11 Memorial Cross by open truck to Shanksville, Pennsylvania (the crash site of United Flight 93), and the Pentagon in Washington DC, stopping along the way in Santa Fe, Indianapolis, Memphis and Nashville before placing the cross in storage until the original Ground Zero girders cross, now standing at St. Peter’s, is moved later this year to the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

Artist’s statement: “When installed, the cross will be polished to a mirror finish so each and every onlooker will see himself or herself reflected in it, hopefully thinking about those who sacrificed before them, and then considering what their own sacrifice will be. But before they think, I want people to see the beauty first – the beauty of existence, the beauty of the cross, then remember the destruction and find a better way.”

Costs of the 9/11 Memorial Cross are underwritten by a group of anonymous donors, the artist and Leslie Sacks Fine Art. Jon Krawczyk is represented by Leslie Sacks Fine Art.

Westlake Village, CA: The First of A Thousand Tears

On the morning of May 15th Jon Krawczyk presented his cross to the congregation at St. Maximilian Church in Malibu.

I wished I could have been there.

“It was pretty cool at first,” Jon said. “But when I started telling people what it was, talking about the original cross and St. Peter’s Church and all, people just started getting all teary-eyed.”

“At the end one woman came up to me, told me she just moved to Los Angeles from New York. She lost something like twenty-five friends on 9-11.”

Jon continued, explaining how this woman couldn’t even speak she was so choked up with sadness, heartache, gratitude, maybe all three; maybe more emotion than he could perceive or define, all brought to the surface by this thing he made.

“It was unbelievable, Kevin,” he said, a glaze of emotion rising up in his own eyes.

I’d seen over the years that Jon could get emotional. But those moments were few and far between, involving things that hit hard and deep; things that truly challenge one’s ability to understand, and to forgive. When you saw emotion in Jon, you knew it was real.

“This trip. I mean, if this is how people are going to react… I don’t know…”

I didn't know either. But any doubts about whether I should have left my family for this were now gone.