A month earlier, Jeff hit a man on a bicycle with his pickup truck on the way to work.

The man was riding the wrong way, towards oncoming traffic, in the middle of the road, around a blind curve, a right-hand turn-off, between Leesville Road and another road in Ocean County.

Unless you know rural Jersey roads, it's difficult to envision these right-hand turn-offs. But, basically, we Jersey drivers cut as many corners as possible, so often, 4-way intersections offer turn-offs just prior to the traffic signal. Drivers turning right need only yield rather than make a full-stop.

Jeff called me to pick him up after the accident. He was upset. His truck was messed up. The biker was very messed up. I drove Jeff directly to work and for the next few days, drove him and picked him up. He has since abandoned his predilection for local roads and thinks the major highways safer. I'm not sure about that.

So, when the phone rang on the morning of September 11^th, 2001, I was afraid that Jeff had had another car accident. I answered his call with some trepidation and mild annoyance as Kenny and I were just about to leave the house for a 10 o'clock Bible study in Princeton. The Friday before, I had returned to work full-time after a 12-month Care of Newborn Child leave and was using vacation days to attend the Bible study.

Jeff was driving up the Turnpike to his office in Newark. He saw smoke coming from lower Manhattan and heard reports on the car radio about a plane hitting WTC. Several drivers had pulled off the roadway onto the shoulder, gotten out of their cars and stood staring. Over the phone, he asked me to turn on the TV and tell him what's going on.

Yes, it seemed like an accident at first. I didn't realize at the time that such an accident was quite impossible. Watching, I said to Jeff on the phone, "There are people on those upper floors. They have no way to get out." He agreed. Then they reported a second plane hitting and I said to Jeff, "This is on purpose." Again he agreed. I could not fathom how anyone could force an airline pilot to fly his plane into a skyscraper. I didn't have any concern about Jeff continuing towards his office in Newark and I went about my business, driving over to Princeton, a little distracted, listening to the radio and thinking that I needed some Bible study on a morning like this.

Only one other person was at the church. We spent some time talking about the events as we listened to our car radios. Back in the day when NJ 101.5 was tolerable. What the hell has happened to them since?!

As she and I stood together in the church parking lot, talking and listening, we heard about the Pentagon. We heard that the towers had fallen. It never entered my mind to think that the Twin Towers would fall. She and I decided that Bible study was cancelled because no one else arrived, so we parted, and I continued going about my business, to the grocery store. Concerned but not able to piece anything together. I didn't connect it with the 1993 incident, even though I had watched that on TV.

After the grocery store, I filled up the car's gas tank and withdrew several hundred dollars from the bank. I was thinking that I may need to evacuate the tri-state area before the day was over. I urged Jeff to leave Newark but he thought he was safer there for the time being. Probably true; leave the roads to emergency vehicles. We realized that we shouldn't jam up the phone system with our inconsequential calls, so after confirming that the other was safe, we agreed to "radio silence". He came home earlier than usual, in the middle of the afternoon.

To our surprise, we learned that Jeff's sister was up from D.C. on business and had to flee uptown from lower Manhattan on foot that morning. She reached her hotel in Yonkers safely, and after being stranded in NY for a few days, returned home with mild inconvenience and plenty of trauma.

Upon waking up the following morning, my first thought was that the towers were irrevocably gone. The new day did not erase yesterday's nightmare. I didn't think about the people, probably for good reason. I didn't know any. News commentators were yet hopeful that most were saved. The full impact of the grim attack was still being assessed. No one dared report how many might have died.

So, as far as I could tell, the most visible casualty was the towers. I mean, the iconic or symbolic casualty spoke to me the loudest, above the yet undetermined human toll.

As the stories of personal loss and tragic experience poured in and as the commentators began to speculate on the number of deaths, my sympathies shifted. The plan to rebuild the towers directed me to refocus fully on the human cost. Towers can be rebuilt. Lives cannot. Sounds simple to me now, but this was not an immediate realization. Today, I can't bear to imagine their constant sorrow while my grief over the towers has morphed into nostalgia.

Jeff had watched the buildings collapse from his office in Newark. He went several days without talking about it. He was very disturbed by it. I didn't press him for details, for his eyewitness account. I let him be. He knew someone on a plane, an engineer at BEA Systems¹, whom he mourns even now.

In the days afterward, friends and neighbors checked in with genuine concern, "Everyone ok by you?" "Yes, yes, and with you?"

The following Monday, the catechism curriculum called for me to teach the Tower of Babel. There wasn't any inkling that religious commentators would in time declare 9/11 God's judgment on America. Uncomfortably teaching the Bible story that evening to my nine-year-olds, I made no connection with divine retribution and I still don't. My sadness was over the loss of the towers, hardly themselves culpable of sin, so any suggestion of punishment was nonsense. But I confessed to my students that I had difficulty talking to them about "towers falling down."

A man in our Thursday evening Bible study lost his brother. Whenever he chooses to speak about it, as he has a few times over the years, we listen breathless, knowing that the rest of us haven't any grounds for replying. "Vicarious" doesn't cut it.

I did cry eventually and I have cried. But I cried more at the Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem two years earlier and I cried more over the Asian Tsunami two years ago. Maybe it's just the numbers.

People are still dying from 9/11. I think that the rest of the country has moved on. Even upstate, in my hometown, they try to empathize, but they cannot. We here in NJ have not moved on. We are incapable of moving on.

¹ Edward P. Felt - Wikipedia

Read more 9/11 remembrances at the Carnival of the Blogging Chicks.