I was sleeping on the couch with a terrible head cold. My wife woke me up and said that the news was reporting that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I didn’t think much of it because I had heard of planes hitting tall buildings before, like the Empire State Building, and while there had been some casualties, it wasn’t a catastrophe. I got up and called in sick to work, then I lay down on the bed.

Our clock radio is set to NPR, so I was sort of half-listening to the news as I tried to go back to sleep. They were broadcasting some personal interest story when all of a sudden the audio just stopped — very unusual. I’ll never forget the sound of Bob Edwards, who was the host of Morning Edition on NPR at that time, breaking in and reporting that another plane had hit the second World Trade Center tower.

Despite my cold, I was awake now. Something was desperately wrong. I got up and turned on the television and watched the tragedy continue to unfold right before my eyes. I remember distinctly the sense of honest-to-goodness fear I felt when they announced that another plane had hit the Pentagon and that the FAA was grounding all flights nation-wide. There was some time there that I just stood by the couch watching the TV and saying to my wife, “How many more are there? What are they going to hit next? How widespread is this attack on the U.S.? When will it stop?”

I also remember how thankful I was that my daughter, who was our only child at the time, was not old enough to know what was going on. I don’t know why I thought that, exactly — I guess I was just relieved that she wouldn’t be afraid because she was only a year old and oblivious to anything outside of her crib.

I know this has been said a million times before, but it’s true — watching the towers collapse was like watching a movie. It wasn’t until later that it really hit me that I had literally watched thousands of people die when those buildings came down. I can’t even imagine — I don’t want to imagine — how horrifying that must have been.

Amid all the tragedy, though, I remember one positive thing. In the days immediately following the attacks, I witnessed a unity and honest, non-jingoistic patriotism absolutely everywhere: at work, on the news, on the radio, on the streets, in Washington…. Everyone put their differences aside (race, religion, political party affiliation, etc.) and stood together, proud to be fellow Americans. I thought to myself, this must be what it was like in this country during World War II.

Alas, it was short-lived. But it was inspiring and reassuring while it lasted. It’s too bad that it takes a tragedy of that magnitude to make us realize how petty many of our differences really are, and how easy it can be to live with those differences when we put them into perspective.