9/11. I was out of touch.

I must have been one of the few Americans who spent most of that day not knowing it had happened.

I was spending a few days in the emptied house in Crescent City of my recently passed away mother-in-law. No radio, no T.V., no internet. Neighbors were all all strangers and lived hundreds of yards away.

I spent the morning finishing reading Lord of the Rings --which was going to be a movie in the near future.

It wasn't until the middle of the afternoon that I called my wife.

Who told me the Twin Towers went down.

"Oh, you're exaggerating," I said. "You mean part of it fell off, don't you?"

"No...they are both gone."

I still didn't believe her. As I was driving home, I got the eerie sense that every car had it's radio on and we were all living in the same moment. Even on the road, there was a sense of oneness that I can't explain.

And when I finally saw the footage on T.V. it put lie to any idea I might have had that reality couldn't live up to imagination. In my wildest imagination, I didn't see what I was seeing on T.V.

I'd been listening to the radio, but I just didn't get it.

Anyway, yesterday MSNBC ran real-time coverage of the events, so ten years later I finally got a sense of what everyone else went through.