At the ballgame Saturday night, a plane crossed over the stadium on its way to the airport. It was dark by then, so the plane's belly, reflecting the light glaring from stadium, gleamed brilliant white as it passed over us. I had seen it approaching, and it awakened an alarm in me, so I had tracked its path toward us and over us and away from us, with mild foreboding. How easy it would be for an evil person to hijack a plane and fly it straight into that glowing, noisy stadium. Five years later and I can still mine that well of fear that was created when a bunch of maniacs turned planes into weapons of mass destruction.

Whenever I find a new blog or journal I like, I take the time to read back over the archives. Inevitably I will go searching for "the date" to see what someone wrote about that day. Maybe it's because I couldn't talk about it at the time. There are a lot of postings today about people's recollections from that day. Here's what I remember: I was standing at the copy machine at work when my cell phone rang. I was the only one in the newsroom. The receptionist was the only other person in the office. I hated Tuesdays because that was deadline day, and my stories weren't shaping up at all when I left on Monday. So I'd gotten in early to return phone calls. I guess I was looking through faxes at the time my phone rang. It was SkooterPie. He hadn't quite left for his class yet. He'd turned on the television and learned that a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. "What?" I asked. "And then, as I watching, another plane hit the other tower," he said. "That couldn't have been an accident," I said. I hung up the phone and ran to our conference room to turn on the TV. But it wasn't even hooked up to cable. We used it exclusively for videoconferences. I could just make out the burning towers through the static. I ran to my desk and tried to pull up cnn.com. But their servers were being inundated. Then I just sort of freaked, unable to control this frantic feeling that I needed to DO something. I ran downstairs to the receptionist, who was listening to her radio to ask her if she'd heard. She said she had, but she didn't seem sufficiently alarmed to me. So I went back to the newsroom and waited for someone else to get there. My managing editor finally arrived. He barely said a word to me and marched straight back to the conference room. I lamely tried to tell him that I had already tried to fiddle with the TV. He fiddled some more and managed a better, although still grainy, image. Gradually other people started filling the conference room. And we stayed there watching. News came about the Pentagon and about the order to land all the planes. The first tower fell. And then the second tower fell.

And then we numbly went to work. It was a busy day. We had to scratch everything we'd been working on and start over again. I don't remember how late I stayed. I just know that it was well after dark before I got home that night. I didn't call many friends. And I don't remember if I even talked to family that day. I do remember calling my friend Angie and asking her what the hell we were thinking when we decided to bring children into this world. I don't remember her answer. Once I got home I could finally see the images, clearly, on our TV. But I was so drained that I couldn't react emotionally. I hadn't cried at all that day. The next morning I realized how odd it was knowing that there were no planes, except military aircraft, in the sky. Not long after that I had a dream that someone was trying to drive a car through my house (actually my parents' house), and I was pushing against the door, trying to stop the car. The oddest memory I have is that for months afterwards I heard screaming in my mind. I mostly heard the screams while I was alone in my car driving. And for a long time, I couldn't listen to any music. My mind felt too scattered for something so abstract.

Jesse was 3 and a half on that day. A preschooler. A toddler. Now he's 8 and a half, and in many ways just as carefree. But he knows a little bit about this day. The story I told him when he was just starting to comprehend the images of 9/11 on TV was this: Some bad men flew airplanes into some buildings. And a lot of people died. And it was a really terrible day. Last night he watched with me a little bit of the documentary that the two French filmmakers made from that day. He's only just starting to understand what really happened on 9/11. Just this morning he picked up a book about 9/11 (SkooterPie bought the graphic adaptation about the 9/11 report recently) and asked to see pictures of the "bad guys" who flew the planes into the towers. So I opened it and showed him their pictures. 19 hijackers. Four planes. "But I thought there were two planes," he said. And I realized there are still so many holes in his knowledge about the attacks. So I explained that two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. One hit the Pentagon, a building in Washington. And I told him that the passengers on the last plane that crashed in a field, they were very brave and fought back against the hijackers, and they saved a lot of lives. I should tell him so much more. And I will when he asks.

When your kids are little, you lie to them a lot. Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy. There's no such thing as monsters. The sort of lies like the first three examples can be forgiven. They are lies tied to joy. They are traditions. And they're fun. But the last lie. It's the one that has always made me feel the most uncomfortable. You tell it so that your baby will go to sleep at night hopefully no longer afraid of the little noises a house makes or the weird shadows cast on a wall from a bedroom window. But even as I say the words, I know it's a lie. There are monsters. So I try to say that sentence now as a command. As a talisman. As a way to keep evil away from my family. As a way to keep us safe from harm. There are no such things as monsters. There are no such things as monsters.