I went to school in New York City during the late seventies. For the first three years I lived in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn a short walk from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Many evenings I walked along the Promenande and looked out over the water towards lower Manhattan where the impossibly tall Twin Towers glowed like mirages out of a fantasy novel. It was hard to believe the vision was real or that a suburban boy like myself was really living in the big city.

My last school year I spent in Weehawken, New Jersey. Every afternoon, after getting off work at the Hudson County Courthouse library, I took the subway from Jersey City into Manhattan to attend night classes. The PATH train station was far below the World Trade Center. I remember riding the long and crowded escaltors up out of the cavernous depths. Even when I had emerged from the towers I found them a bit hard to actually believe in. I had admit they were there, of course, but their scale was beyond anything I could actually grasp.

On September 11, 2001 Mary and I were living out in the woods in Pennsylvania. Our last television set still worked, barely, although we rarely turned it on. When Mary saw the headlines on the Internet we turned the set on in time to see the second plane hit. That was pretty hard to believe too. It is impossible, I think, to truly comprehend so many lost lives.

I haven't been back to New York since the attack. I have no business there. I suppose if I were to return to my old haunts I would be suprised by the absence of those skyscrapers. They are still as real to me as they ever were.