I was driving to work on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, talking on my cell phone with my mother.  Suddenly, she interrupted our conversation to say that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center buildings.  My first thought was probably like the thoughts of many others who heard the news second-hand:  it must have been a small plane, a Cessna maybe, an inexperienced pilot or some mechanical error.  Surely an accident.  A few minutes later, my mother exclaimed, “Oh my God, another plane hit the other tower!” Then she hung up.

It wasn’t until I got to work and huddled around a TV with my colleagues that I fully understood what had happened. In a hushed room with several others, I watched in horror, my mouth agape, as the Towers crumbled, as people ran through the streets of Manhattan, thick smoke filling the streets behind them.  It looked like a scene you’d see from somewhere else, somewhere across the world.  But not here.

Those of us with young children at home struggled with what to tell them, what to let them see and hear. What do you say to a child who has hardly seen or experienced much of the world outside his home, his community, his state, that allows him to understand the magnitude of 9/11?  What do you say to let him know the larger world can be unpredictable and scary and dangerous, but so that you don’t scare him into never experiencing that larger world?