I had to work late the night before, as I always had on Mondays. And I had a meeting to cover Tuesday night.

So I wasn’t planning on waking up until late that morning. For some reason, I did. And for some reason, when I turned on the television at around 8:50 a.m., I didn’t head straight for the Weather Channel or ESPN, as I generally do. I flipped to the Today show instead.

I remember just standing in the middle of my living room, in my underwear, trying to process what I was seeing: An airplane had hit one of the World Trade Center Towers? Huh?

I plopped down on the couch and stared. Which meant I had a perfect view when the second plane hit the second tower just after 9. I just sat. And watched.

The Wife, who had been in her newsroom for about an hour, called me around 9:30. We talked briefly about W.’s announcement that this was apparently the work of terrorists, comments that came while we were on the phone.

She started telling me what her paper was doing to react — they’re an evening daily, and had to scramble to meet an 11 a.m. deadline. That — along with the crash at the Pentagon — woke me up.

Although I wasn’t scheduled to start my shift until 3 that afternoon, I called my city editor and said I’d be headed to work in about 30 minutes. While on the hour-long drive — on an incongruently beautiful day — I heard radio reports about the fourth plane, possibly flying near Cleveland, and then looping back over Pittsburgh.

I couldn’t help looking out my car window for any odd-looking airplanes. As if I would have noticed a difference.

I called my sister’s house — she lived in the University Heights areaof Cleveland at the time — because my mother was up there visiting that day. I checked in with my dad, who had stayed in Columbus. I called a friend in D.C. I tried to reach friends in New York, but it would be a couple of days before I got in touch them.

I heard another announcement on the radio that the fourth plane had crashed in Somerset County. I called my newsroom to volunteer to make the trip — I was a few hundred yards from an I-79 on-ramp and about 10 minutes from the turnpike — but they already had a reporter and photographer on the way.

I went instead to the two high schools I was covering at the time. Both would significantly alter their policies covering visitors to school property in the coming weeks, but on that day, I was able to walk into the classrooms, sit down and just start talking with students and staff about what was going on. I didn’t find a single teacher trying to follow a lesson plan that day.

I worked until about 9 that evening, a long, very busy day. We made plans for stories we would tackle over the next week or so, and then we headed home. I think an advantage that newspapers will always have over any other media is permanence. On that day, we put together a paper that most of our readers will keep forever, and one that we were all pretty proud of.

But once that was done, I had time to think. For the first time in about 12 hours, I didn’t have my job to focus on. I broke down about halfway home, crying hard enough that I had to pull over for a while.

Much of what’s happened since then is about power and politics. It shouldn’t be. Much of what I saw today — the president’s speech aside — thankfully was not. It was about remembering the most beautiful, horrible day of my life. That’s how it should be.