Not everyone can afford to adopt a Central Park bench and personalize it with a plaque, but it costs nothing to sit on one. My favorite bench, near Conservatory Water, is inscribed with “Tell Me Something You Promised You Wouldn’t Tell” and dedicated to a woman named Helen, who lived for nearly a century. Helen must have been either very rich or very loved, perhaps both, because several benches bear her name or initials, along with snippets of poems, such as “Hushing my deepest grief of all / And filled with tears that cannot fall,” a bastardization of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous lines for his dead friend. I think of tears that cannot fall, how much it hurts to hold them back, to dam up all that grief. A few weeks after the towers fell, I dreamed that thousands of New Yorkers were kneeling beside the Hudson River, our fingers plugging up holes in a dike that was about to break.