And of course, today is September 11.

I admit, I always feel torn about the day. On one hand, I think it is important to stop and commemorate - so many lives lost. It is one of those days, for me at least, like April 19, 1995, and April 20, 1999, that is a vivid (and not-entirely-wanted-by-me) reminder that people are capable of real evil. Not just spitefulness, not just thoughtlessness, not just giving in to a selfish impulse - but real evil. I tend a lot of the time to write off the stuff people do as selfishness. (and thank goodness, most of the bad stuff I encounter is stuff that can be written off as mere selfishness).

And it seems churlish not to stop and think of all the lives cut short on that day - all the parents who never got home to their children, all the sons who never called their moms on their next birthday, all the friends who were no longer there.

But on the other hand, I feel the desire to live this day more or less as I live any other. We have not seen further attacks. Where I am is comparatively safe. And I think of the new ways I learned to worry that fall - new restrictions on flying (except I haven't flown, not since 1999, actually). The anthrax in the letters (which turned out to probably be an American scientist - whose motivation I can't even fathom and about whom it makes me angry that someone in the same profession as I could do that). The thought that there might be an attack on Chicago, where my sister in law works (practically right downtown) and now where my brother works.

I am glad those worries really came to nothing. I remember the mail one particularly; how I would open my mail out on the porch just in case. And how I'd shake out the magazines, and how I stopped reading magazines in bed like I used to.

It is good that we still can go about our lives more or less as we did. It is good that for the vast majority of us, the changes that have been wrought are minor, and, tend more to be something to complain about.

I think I said last year that I prefer to think about and commemorate the personal-to-me anniversary two days later: the day I bought the house in which I now live. Because that is a much more hopeful day - and here I am, eight years later, still living in it.

But still, I think something needs to be said. I don't want to see this date politicized - oh, I know, it has been, practically since it happened - or trivialized (How must Martin Luther King, Jr.'s family feel over the fact that some stores are now commemorating his birthday with BIG SALES!!!).