The phone rang and woke me Tuesday around 10 a.m., and when I picked it up my ex-wife said, "better get to work; they just blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon." She would be at work, in her little crafts shop, with NPR on the radio, and she probably called me just for the macabre pleasure of being the first to inform someone. She knows I work the night shift and generally sleep past noon.

So I sat down in my bathrobe at the computer, thinking that she'd gone off the deep end, and I logged on to news sites (Reuters, AP) and I was looking at pictures that took a long, long time to register in my head. The first tower had collapsed. There was that ugly mushroom cloud blooming into the same blue morning sky that was out my window in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The text was updating as fast as I could hit the "refresh screen" button, and within minutes of my logging on, both towers were reported down. And I kept looking at the pictures, and the words, and thinking, "That can't be right. That can't be right." I was there, just three weeks ago. As if that made it impossible. I had stopped watching TV years ago. Just then, I would have given anything to have one.

When I finally went in to start my newsroom shift, at 3 p.m., I kept one eye on the front of the room and the TV that is perpetually tuned to CNN or ABC News, and there I saw what everyone else had already been seeing for hours. I've spent years defending print media against people who live by video, but this was one story the moving pictures had to tell.

I was given two full inside pages to fill with wire news. Then two more. There were hundreds of stories, each one saying the same thing in slightly different words.

But there was the art. I had to figure out if the picture of the man falling headlong from the North Tower was going to fit my page layout better than the picture of the woman sobbing on the curb, covered in blood. I had to figure if "carnage" or "horror" fit better in a 54-point headline. I looked through stacks of victims' photos that came in, waiting to see a picture of someone I know -- another one. There was already one, a hockey scout from Boston I had gotten to know years ago.

In scrolling back through the stories I came across the first wire notice of the calamity, a bulletin datelined "New York" and slugged "Trade Center-Crash," bearing the time stamp 0856EDT. It was a single sentence: "Smoke poured out of a gaping hole in the upper floors of the World Trade Center on Tuesday and there were broadcast reports a plane had struck it."

I thought of some anonymous ink-stained AP wretch in the New York bureau, filling the quiet early shift on an election day till he saw the punctured tower from his window, flipping channels madly or listening to Howard Stern like everyone else in the city, wondering "what the hell was that?" And the second plane is screaming down the Hudson Valley at 500 mph, but he or she doesn't know that yet.

After the single sentence, as in all such AP bulletin stories that move in takes, is the single word "MORE."

For almost 20 years now I've been a print journalist. That day, for the first time, I didn't want to go to work. The ceiling seemed low, just above my head. Sound came muted. At some time the newsdesk phone rang and I picked up the receiver. A woman's voice: "Is this all they're going to show on TV today? It's so depressing!" I don't remember what I told her. She wanted to find a hole in the sand to bury her head and not look at the horror. Like a lot of Americans, her TV was the only place she knew to find one. But TV was where it happened.

I went home after deadline and tried to sleep. I lay down, dozed for an hour, but these images had been in my head all day and they wouldn't stop seething there. My handwriting changed today. I wrote a check, and the letters came out jerky and sharp. It didn't look like my hand at all.

Everyone saved the paper from the morning of Sept. 12, with the heart-attack headlines in 120-point Olympian. But I took home one dated Sept. 11, the issue we had put together the night before, with utterly trivial news all up and down page one, school board meetings and farm shows, and I stuck it in the bottom of a drawer to find 40 years from now.

It's petulant of me to "complain," because nobody should complain who didn't spend today breathing asbestos and digging corpses from tons of concrete. Or waiting by the phone for loved ones' calls that never came. I worked during the Gulf War, the Challenger explosion, and dozens of local calamities. You work hard in a tragedy, and that's good because it keeps you from feeling too helpless and angry. But this is JFK and Pearl Harbor and the "Titanic" rolled into one. There's not enough hard work in the world to drown out the emotions it brings up in you. You just try to say one step ahead of them.

My job is not an important job today. There's nothing we can tell people. I don't think we're putting out newspapers; I think we're putting out souvenirs for people's scrapbooks. Today we told people to give blood. Tomorrow we're telling them to stop giving blood. They gave too much.

Yesterday's Philadelphia "Inquirer" ran a poem by Chaim Potok on the op-ed page. The end of it went like this:

"Let us heal the sick and bury the dead.
Let us find the perpetrators.
Let us punish them without impinging on our own liberties.
Let us prepare for their next attempts.
For that is the way the world is.
And we had best be aware of its new nature."

Into which I would insert,

"Let us never again train mass murderers and turn them loose on our enemies, and think they won't be back to haunt us."

Which isn't very good poetry at all.

When this is all over I'm going to crawl out on the roof with a bottle of scotch.

As for our president and his behavior, I have strong opinions, but I'll keep them to myself for now.

You know who's been astonishing through this so far is Giuliani. He's the one I want to be the president. He's there. With his cops and smokeaters. He's calling the relatives of the dead he watched die. He's in charge of his municipality, but he's a man who knows he's not in charge of much else.

I also hope some hearts will be changed -- here and abroad -- by these endlessly recurring images of real people burning and falling and dying. The dead are not just Americans, of course; the WTC was home to multinational corporations and the people who worked there were citizens of dozens of countries. But you can't tell the Americans from the foreigners, can you? So maybe the part of the world that only knows us from our own idiotic entertainment products, and from the self-serving blather of their own leadership, will realize every place is a real place, and when you blow up planes and buildings you kill real people and real children, not images, symbols, and abstractions.