A kind of September...

Fifteen years ago, I was getting ready for work. Ten days before, I had finally made it to Manhattan.

My first trip to New York City, on Sept. 1, 2001, was magic. Perfect weather. Perfect day.

Well, almost perfect. The good news is I got to meet my hero Thomas Magnum, aka actor Tom Selleck, who was appearing that season in a revival of Herb Gardner's "A Thousand Clowns." The bad news is I was starstruck and speechless.

Anyway, Drew Weaver, Scott Frith, and I were there that Labor Day weekend. We took a train into Grand Central Station from Connecticut. Everything I'd wanted to do, dreams derived from the pages of The New Yorker, halfway pretending I was going to be a guest on "What's My Line," for that spectacular Saturday, I got to pretend.

Ten days later, everything changed.

Pieces remembered: My late grandfather knocking on the bathroom door to tell me a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers (this was at 8:46 a.m.). Getting downstairs just as the second plane hit. Turning on NPR on the way to work, listening to Bob Edwards try to explain the chaos. Getting a phone call from Doug from the Rotary Club. Watching the news at work on a portable black-and-white television set. Wishing I were with my family.

That night, I thought the thing to do was go watch television coverage with my mother.  Even though I was in my 20s, a college graduate, and gainfully employed, I knew I was no longer El Gallo's tender and callow fellow, to quote the song from "The Fantasticks." 

I eventually learned I knew a family who lost their brother that day. They planted a tree for Tony Karnes at Gibbs High School later that year.

Visiting Ground Zero with Drew the following February was sobering to say the least. We went downtown, and nobody, and I mean nobody, was saying a word.

We looked at the handmade memorials. One quoted Jack Kerouac. Another one needed no poetic prose: "Osama: Kiss my ass."

I thought everything would change. I thought the partisanship that had marred much of the 1990s and the 2000 presidential election was gone. The civilized parts of the world were united.

Well, you know how that turned out.

I have to tell myself that goodness can arise from the aftermath of atrocities, but post-9/11, it was difficult to see how.

Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo said it as well as anyone on a PBS documentary a few years after the attacks. 

 "9/11, how can you possibly use it for a good purpose? Look, what this reminds you of is the importance of your own life, and making the most of it, because you can lose it in a flash. And if that's all you learned from 9/11, if that's all you remembered, that, my god, that you could extinguish life so suddenly, so unexpectedly, and it could happen to me, and therefore I should think harder about the way I spend my life instead of wasting it...

"Now, it's not going to teach you what to do with your life, but it will teach you to do with your life, and to do it more and quicker and better."

Fifteen years, after all, went slip sliding away, and much of the nation, indeed much of the world, is starving for stability, and sanity, for people doing more, quicker and better.

Never forget the first responders. Never forget the fallen. Never forget the day. Never forget Cuomo's words.

Never forget.

But try too, if you can, to remember El Gallo's kind of September, when no one wept except the willow.

Where were you when the world stopped turning?

I was still in the shower.

My grandfather Wayne Wyatt, who passed away last September, poked his head into the bathroom and said, "A plane has hit the World Trade Center."

Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001.

"Terrible accident," I think.

By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs, the second plane hit the other tower.

This was no accident.

I went to work. Doug Shipman called to talk about a golf tournament. I asked if I could call him back.

I watched news coverage on a small black-and-white TV. My boss came in about 10 and told us to get to work.

"If you just sit there, the terrorists have won."

She was right. I went to work.

Then it hit me:

I was in Manhattan the week before. It was my first trip to New York. I took a train to Grand Central Station. I met Tom Selleck. I saw those magnificent twin towers.

Turns out a guy with whom I once attended church, Tony Karnes, perished in the attacks. So, too, did so many others.

Everything changed. Nothing changed.

Where were you when the world stopped turning?

Ten days before

The train came rumbling into the station, full of passengers making their way into the city for the holiday weekend.

It was as laid-back as New York City can ever possibly be, beautiful, not a cloud to be found. We alighted and walked in the general direction of the Empire State Building. I stopped at a newsstand long enough to get a morning edition of the Times.

We took our time at the Manhattan landmark, joking about finding Meg Ryan up on the roof. For a long while, we gazed southward into Lower Manhattan at those expansive World Trade Center towers. What a sight.

After awhile, we left, and made our way up to Times Square, where we found lunch and then headed for the small Broadway theater that was our ultimate destination. They weren't letting anyone inside yet, so we milled around on the sidewalk.

A few minutes later, up pulled an SUV with tinted windows. A man alighted from the car, familiar, friendly. He didn't have his famous mustache, but it was indeed Magnum, p.i. himself, Tom Selleck.

He shook hands, or signed autographs for, or took pictures with everyone who wanted something. I shook his hand, but couldn't think of one darn word to say.

We enjoyed his play, a revival of Herb Gardner's "A Thousand Clowns," very much. Phil Donahue was even in the audience.

After it ended, we made our way to Grand Central, hunting for the train that would take us back to Connecticut.

It was a day to remember, something you tell your kids about years later, a first visit to New York City.

The date was Sept. 1, 2001.

The February following the 9/11 attacks, I returned to New York. We walked down to Ground Zero. All of the normal cacophony of the city was hushed at that hallowed ground. Nobody said a word; it was very much like being at a funeral.

I read the graffiti ("Osama: Kiss My Ass") and was moved by the posters that hung here and there, people still searching for missing loved ones.

Bookends of two different trips, the events between which changed the world. Here's hoping we never forget what happened that hauntingly beautiful Tuesday morning -- especially the innocents who gave the last full measure of devotion in a war they didn't yet know they were fighting.