Remembering Sept. 11, 2001

Seven years ago today, I woke as usual to NPR's "Morning Edition," and listened with half my brain while getting ready for work. But something was going on, and Bob Edwards' voice was telling me, telling us all, the terrible, horrifying events taking place in Manhattan, in Washington, and in Pennsylvania. I turned on the television and watched in confusion and disbelief as New York seemed to be coming apart before my eyes. And then, because I didn't know what else to do, I went to work.

None of us knew what to do, really, and in the seven years since then, I'm not sure we know any better now. For months after that day, I grieved for the people in the towers, in the Pentagon, and probably most vividly, for those who that day drew the death card and boarded one of those airplanes. How, I wondered, could the men who planned and carried out that nightmare, how could they stand in line with those innocent people, those children, hear the ordinary conversations of ordinary people, and not falter?

Seven years has made the rawness of that day and the following days less sharp, but the physicality of those events still vibrates quietly inside me. And, in one way or another, I imagine it does in every American who bore witness to the loss of our naivite, our collective hubris, our innocence.