Net bouncing through St. Louisans and redheads took me to a site that linked to a WTC survivor story. I wasn't going to read it. I've read all of it before, and saw no reason to make myself cry again. Yet something (probably my macabre curiosity) had me click the link anyway. She is the last person pulled from the wreckage alive. She's had more than her 15 minutes of fame because of it. So I read and cried and read some more, then pondered how things tend to go a certain way. She had a long string of coincidences bringing her to the point where she was rescued.

She was heading down the stairway with her co-workers. Everyone was holding hands. On the 13th floor landing, she paused to take off her shoes. At that moment, the building collapsed. Stopping to remove her shoes gave her a chance to survive. No one else near her did. She fell through an open wall, in a rain of debris onto something soft. It was the body of a firefighter. The rescue workers dug into that particular part of the 7 story pile of debris because they could see reflective tape from the dead firefighter's coat. She says a man, calling himself Paul, took her hand at the end, and held it until she was rescued. There was no one there.

She had returned to her Catholic roots during her ordeal, so perhaps "Paul" was St. Paul the Apostle. Or perhaps he was the firefighter who's body cushioned hers, and who's coat somehow stayed reflective in all that dust. I'll never know and it doesn't matter, but it's one more bit of circumstantial evidence in favor of the supernatural.