09.11.03 - 12:55 p.m.

It's strange, how unthinkable, bewildering moments are suddenly history. September 11, more than anything else, taught me that. As cteresa said, it seems like forever and a day, for the world has certainly changed. And then something new comes out - like the transcripts of the port authority tapes - or the anniversary comes along and it seems as raw as a salted wound and as immediate as your morning coffee.

I was here: this desk, this chair, this computer, these windows, this office, this view of the valley spread out beneath me. It was a pretty day - bright blue sky, the last shimmering breath of summer, already tinged with the vague bittersweetness I associated with fall. Today is something like it, though on September 11, I think the sky was brighter, the day warmer, and the horizon here untainted by the white haze that blurred the mountains in the distance to a series of receding shadows this morning. The haze is receding now.

A co-worker stepped into my office and said something garbled about planes and the WTC. We listened to the radio, and gradually migrated to a conference room downstairs with the big screen television. Another coworker�s nephew worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, and the story filtered through the office, as such things do, that the family had been speaking to him on the phone, and he was fine, fine, and then we watched the towers crumble. One. Two. How can you begin to express your sorrow to the man or woman sitting next to your, who just watched his or her son/brother/father/sister/mother/daughter reduced so quickly to ash?

The rumors were the most fascinating part: the radio was full of them. There was an explosion at the state department, a car bomb at the Washington mall, or maybe Union Station. Scrambled F-16s shot down a 747 over Morgantown, some woman�s neighbor�s son saw it happen. Most of the rumors had the barest kiss of truth to them: the Pentagon, after all, was attacked. The fourth plane crash-landed in Shanksville, PA, not so far from Morgantown, after all.

There were other rumors, though, other theories, other reactions with more than a hint of the absurd. That evening, I sat down with a Corona and chatted with my next door neighbor, who was babysitting her grandson while her daughter was at work. Her daughter did not want her to keep the boy outside, because our town was "definitely on the top ten list" of potential terrorist targets. Since at least 50% of Americans seem largely unaware that we are, in fact, a separate state from one of our neighbors, I deemed this unlikely and gently informed my neighbor, even though similar rumors had filled me with a sort of thrilled dread when I was in elementary school, morbidly dreaming of a nuclear apocalypse two decades before.

And then, in the days after, the silent skies and the strange bits of vigilance: the bridges, a volunteer force to watch the bridges (My brother, we said, should watch the bridge leading to the subdivision where my parents live. It was, most likely, a top ten terrorist target.) in a state so small and insignificant, Manhattan alone beats us 3 or 4 times over in the population. I think about the volunteers, whoever they were, so well-meaning but perhaps a tad silly, watching the trees catch fall�s fire and the sleepy Tug Fork slip sluggishly beneath the Williamson bridge.

My friends were safe. My family, too. Only these tenuous connections, these faint brushes with grief � a coworker�s nephew, a professor�s son � but they are close enough, I think, for someone so far away from the whole thing, so unconnected to New York.

But there was something else, too: as horrifying as it is, sometimes we require such a tragedy to bring out the best in people, and the best was on display everywhere. In New York, and throughout the world: through all the strange, surreal grief for 4000 people I did not know, there were other stories: people in Manhattan helping one another, hordes of volunteers showing up from as far away as 0hio to do whatever they could, citizens finding room in their towns and their hearts for passengers diverted from US airports to Canada, and the indelible images of many people throughout the rest of the world, sharing Americans� grief.

There is so much to say, and there is never enough to say. I have read about the Greatest Generation, and how the generations that followed are little more than smug, self-satisifed and myopic imitations of the people who sacrificed over the course of many years to defeat Nazi Germany and Japan's imperial ambitions. 9/11, at least, proved to me that we, too, could make such sacrifices were we called to do so, were the need urgent and immediate as it was then.

And so: 9/11, two years later: grief for the dead, an abiding sadness that, somehow, we cannot seem to learn from our history, that we - humans, all the world over - repeat so many of our mistakes, and that weird little flame of idealism that never, ever seems to die.