Walking backwards is an excellent means of remembering how little you know. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in a caf in the West Village with my friends Lucy and Adrian when a woman ran in and said a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. A plane? we asked. Like a Cessna? She didnt know. She hadnt seen it happen. We went out to the street on that bright morning to see a fire high up in the distance. The waiter came out and told us to get back inside. We hadnt paid the check. I paid the check. Lucy said she didnt have time for this. She was teaching at Bennington in Vermont, and this was the first day of classes. She had to make her train. We said our goodbyes and Adrian and I walked downtown to see what had happened. We both wrote for the New York Times. Surely there would be a story for one of us. We had just passed Stuyvesant Park when the first tower fell. I would tell you we were idiots, but thats only true in retrospect. In fact we were so exactly in the middle of history that we had no way to understand what we were seeing.

These Precious Days by Ann Patchett