On the day that everyone was trying to get out of Manhattan, we were trying to get in.

We were sent to cover the story. In the car, on the way from Providence, my colleague, Jill was on her cell phone, trying to figure out which roads were closed. She asked me why I agreed to go. I have limited reporting experience. I've covered a cricket match, a couple of court hearings, and a ballroom dancing championship. I told I agreed to go so I could do the good work of which I hoped I was capable and I told her I needed to know that this tragedy was real.

From my desk at the NPR station in Providence talking to expert X about subject Y, or from my couch watching TV, or from my bed reading with my new glasses before I go to sleep, I'm struck by what seems to be the near impossibility of connecting with a sense of The Real. A sense of really getting it. Of really understanding that the people I read about or who's lives I hear about on the radio or see on TV are real people.

How do you understand from your home in America, or anywhere, that the Palestinian man on the news struck by a rubber bullet is real. How can I even begin to comprehend the horror-true horror-the true unspeakable horror of the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans, or have any contact with the material reality of a real machete cutting off the real hand of a real boy in Sierra Leone. Or the real grief of a real widower who's lost a wife in a tornado or a flood or on a rollercoaster. How can you know that from your couch watching the news, or from your car, listening to the radio in the taco bell drive through?

But there are times, for whatever reason, when you get it: when you're sufficiently staggered by the staggering and humbled by that which is beyond any life you've ever known. Maybe someone in your life has died. Or maybe someone has gotten married. And clarity cuts through the whirr and sputter of the every day.

I had spent the week before last tuesday falling in love. On Saturday night, I had fallen asleep in a bed with white sheets that shone blue in the moonlight in the Hollywood hills with a woman I couldn't believe I had to leave the next morning. And on Tuesday evening I was driving up through Queens watching the sunset on a plume of smoke, because the goddamn city of New York was on fire.

A lot of friends have said to me in the last few days that they feel they need to be in new york to make any sense of this. That from where they sit in Providence, or Chicago, or Brussels it just seems surreal. It's sad to tell that seeing it probably wouldn't change that..

On Tuesday night I was in Brooklyn-we couldn't get into manhattan. I was sitting in a bar with the best friend I have, a friend from high school that lives in the Greenpoint point neighborhood on the Brooklyn/queens line. We were a half mile away, if that. Step outside and you can smell the smoke. But it could've been London. It could've been Tokyo or Sydney, or Kuala Limpur: it felt no more real to be there. It made no sense to be sitting there-it's a twenty minute cab ride to the Trade Center on a normal day if the lights turn in your favor from where we were in the bar, and to know that there are firefighters breathing in asbestos just over the river, and that there is surely a survivor somewhere in there with his legs crushed under a wall of concrete but is still alive for the time being and that somewhere in Rye, New York or Metuchen New Jersey there's a kid who will never see their mother again because the steel beams that hold up the building she works melted-actually melted. It made no sense. And it makes no sense now.

I talked to my girlfriend that night. She had been watching her home town burn from three thousand miles away. I told her I was frightened by the prospect of having to make sense of this for people that listen to the radio. How could I begin to make rational the inherently irrational. How could I begin to make solid all that had so quickly melted into air? It was daunting. It's daunting right now. She reminded that people just want to know what it looks like and what it smells like and what it sounds like. And that that might be enough.

These are a few of the things I saw and heard.

At check points at major intersections the police would only let you pass if you presented a photo ID. On 1st avenue and Houston, my Rhode Island license got me through just fine. A Chinese woman trying to get to work showed a photo ID. The Cop told her she wouldn't be able to pass with out a proof of citizenship. I didn't know being a Rhode Islander prevents me from being a security threat.

On Canal Street in Chinatown, there was only one newsstand that had Chinese language papers. There were 5 or six hundred people lined up at 11:30 to buy it. 26 hours after the event there were people who lived 6 blocks away who still might not have even known what really happened.

In Union Square, a man came up to me with whiskey on his breath. He said his brother was a fireman and had died that morning. He was already sick of people talking about God's will. He got into a shouting match with a man claiming it was time to turn to Jesus.

From the other end of the park, you could hear drumming. I walked over, thinking it was frankly hippies, or krishnas. It wasn't. It was a African American family. A dad in his thirties playing the guitar. A daughter, maybe 8 years old in corn rows and a tooth paste commercial smile playing a drum, a 5 year old boy on the tamborine, and two kids even younger trying to sit still. They were playing pop songs.

In times like this, it seems that the simplest things take on grand implications. A cool breeze is somehow cooler. A loved one somehow more dear. And a pop song some how profound. Two days ago I had a day off. I was in Providence running errands.

I was in a drugstore. I was waiting in line to pay for an eyeglass repair kit, two lightbulbs, and a coke. There was a machine that develops your photos in one hour or less. As I stood in line, I watched pictures of someone's vacation passing through the machine. The people in the pictures were happy.