(cross post from my personal blog a few days ago)

My most indelible memory of September 11th is of little boys playing Legos. But let me back up a little.

We move slowly in the mornings at our house. That morning we were just getting breakfast started. Our two three year olds were watching PBS, and the big kids were just starting to wake up.

The phone rang. It was my mother in law, sounding like she could hardly breathe. "Turn on the TV," she said. "A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center."

At that point I'm not even sure if I knew what the World Trade Center was, and I was thinking some pilot had made some terrible error. We turned on the TV and talked for a few minutes while watching the confused coverage, then hung up.

Minutes later we were watching still, as the plane hit the second tower. It was dizzying to realize this was something beyond pilot error. And then, unbelieveably, shockingly, one after another, the towers fell.

And fell.

And fell.

All day long, courtesy of instant replay, those towers fell, over and over again. And all day long, our TV stayed on, an event usually only reserved for the Olympics at our house.

And our little children sat, watching quietly and playing with their legos on the living room floor. And at one point, they said, "Look, mommy, look what we built!"

And when I could tear my eyes from the TV screen, I looked and saw that my sweet innocent 3 year olds, trying to make sense out of it all, had built two tall skinny towers of Legos, which teetered precariously. Now the boys were now beaming proudly at me.

"Can we get our airplanes out and knock them down?" they said.

My stomach lurched and I wanted to hold up those two skinny leaning towers made of bright plastic blocks.

And as I looked at their beaming little faces and struggled for an appropriate response, I saw the rubble of the towers just behind them in the TV, and I knew that moment that the world had changed.