Bringing Home the Day That Was 9/11

Friday produced another beautiful spring afternoon in San Clemente. From the grounds of the Casa Romantica Cultural Center and Gardens, you could see the Pacific Ocean and, in the way that people do on especially sunny days in Southern California, perhaps be forgiven for feeling that all was right with the world.

It was a feeling not unlike the one that untold thousands probably had in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, 2001. A picture-perfect morning presenting another day of opportunity as the big wheel of life kept turning.

It’s a long way from New York City to the shores of the Pacific, but less so these days in San Clemente. Through July 10, Casa Romantica is displaying 65 photographs and more than 50 artifacts from the devastation left by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. They are from a traveling exhibit that ends its six-city tour in San Clemente before returning to permanent residence in New York.

On Friday, Tracy Weintraub had come down from San Juan Capistrano, partly to check out the exhibit before letting her daughter see it and partly because she’s from a Pennsylvania town of about 2,000 people that lost 14 in the attack.

“It still doesn’t seem real,” Weintraub says, referring to the immensity of the disaster. “Seeing it on TV, it seems like special effects.”

The exhibition, by design, reduces that scope. It brings 9/11 home in a way that is the exact opposite of special effects.

The photos won’t make you turn away, but they will take you back. They may make you cry. The exhibition doesn’t depict spectacular horror. There aren’t blatant displays of death and suffering. Rather, the display captures the small, otherwise incidental aspects of everyday life that were blasted into oblivion.

Instead of a dead firefighter, there’s a photo of his boot ripped in half. Instead of bodies of unsuspecting office workers, there’s a photo of dozens of keys recovered from the rubble. There’s a swipe card for the subway, a battered pay phone, the numerical buttons from elevator panels. A photo shows two guns fused together by the intense heat of the fire. In one display case is an unsold doll, still intact, from a gift shop.

It’s the smallness, if you will, that underscores the largeness of the catastrophe. Realizing that probably wasn’t an original thought, I mentioned it to center director Greg Smith, and he agreed.

“Like you said, it’s the small things that were identified as having actually been in someone’s hand or pocket. It puts a human face on the exhibition. We couldn’t always do that with sound bites and video footage of the actual event itself. It was too big to take in.”

Statistics of what workers recovered in the months after the attack bear that out: 1.8 million tons of debris, 1,358 destroyed vehicles, $76,318.47 in loose cash and coins, 54,000 personal effects, 4,257 pieces of human remains.

Smith says the exhibition, open at varying hours every day of the week except Monday, has attracted about 1,000 people a week since it opened April 23.

“We’ve had a few people who had to walk out,” he says. “They simply couldn’t deal with the emotions that it brought up.”

Casa Romantica volunteer Susan Spracklin tells me later that Weintraub, who had been composed as we talked, wiped away tears after she’d seen the entire exhibit. “She was crying when she left, and when I saw her crying, it made me cry,” Spracklin says.

I can understand that, because it’s a quiet, understated exhibition meant to come at you with a cumulative wallop.

Each of us, I imagine, carries a 9/11 narrative in our heads. The narrative that accompanies the exhibition refers to “our collective memories” of that day, and I think that is well said.

It’s a collective memory none of us wants. But the exhibition, in its still-life and unspectacular way, reminds us that it could have been just a regular day ... if only.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana .parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.