The continuous life is also what made the sustained engagement possible. He did not have to remember to be connected to the FDNY community, to manage a relationship with a community he had left behind; he simply inhabited the same city, which meant the community was always already present. When something happened — a firehouse threatened with closure, a neighborhood devastated by a storm, a documentary about firefighters being made — the response was not a decision to reconnect but an expression of a connection that had never been broken.
This is, in miniature, the story that the larger account is about: not the dramatic moment, but the continuous thread that makes the dramatic moment possible and that continues after the dramatic moment has passed. The bucket brigade on September 12, 2001 was a visible expression of a thread that runs from 1980 to the present — from the probie at Engine 55 to the Honorary Battalion Chief, from the young man who took a civil service exam at eighteen to the experienced filmmaker and actor who executive-produced a documentary about what the dust from the pile was doing to the lungs of the people who had worked there.
He is still in New York. Engine 55 is still on Broome Street. The five names are still on the wall. The World Trade Center Health Program is still enrolling members and certifying conditions and tracking what the dust continues to do. The Friends of Firefighters is still providing counseling in the restored firehouse in Red Hook. The work is not finished. It was never going to be finished by a single dramatic gesture, however sincere. It is finished, or rather it continues, only by the accumulation of consistent, sustained, unglamorous effort by people who care about the community and who keep showing up.