A year ago at about this time I received an e-mail from Aurelio Zen. She was freaking out because a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and they were getting ready to evacuate her downtown Manhattan office building. I was late for class and didn't have time to turn on the news, and it never even occurred to me that it was anything more than a tragic, freak accident. Or that it was anything bigger than a prop plane. I shot back an e-mail to say that I'd pray for her and asked her to write back when she got a chance to let me know she was okay, and then I went to class. It wasn't until I got there and my professor had suspended his regular lecture to talk us through what was happening that I figured out something big was going on, and it wasn't until I got back home and finally turned on the news, just in time to watch the second tower collapse, that the enormity of it all hit me. After sitting on my sofa in shock long enough to watch all of the replays a few more times, I went to bed, curled into a ball and cried my guts out. Then I got back up and, like the rest of America, spent the rest of the day glued to the news and freaking out about my friends in NYC whom I hadn't heard from again all day. It was evening before I finally heard from an exhausted AZ, who'd had to walk all the way home to Brooklyn. And boy, did she have stories to tell.