I was watching "Little House on the Prairie" that morning. I was not yet a month married, just days back from my honeymoon. I’d just started my final semester of college, and I was up early that morning, reading the assignment for my class on Constitutional Law and Politics.

Eric was already on his way to work, and our little apartment felt too quiet; I thought about turning on "The Today Show" for some background noise, but opted for the soothing banality of Michael Landon instead.

When Eric called from work and told me what had happened, I was shocked, but I did not cry. I changed the channel and watched replays of the planes flying into the towers. And then I showered and got dressed and went to school. On my drive, everything was just like normal, except that instead of music, all the radio stations played continual loops of the same news coverage, over and over.

That night I called my best friend and we talked in hushed tones. Would there be a war? Would our husbands be drafted? We agreed that if our men went off to fight, we’d find a house together and I’d help her take care of the baby that she was due to have any day.

The attacks were story fodder for me. In the months to come I wrote editorials in my college newspaper condemning the atrocity of the attacks and expressing concern over the civil rights curtailments of the USA Patriot Act. I wrote about the schools’ candlelight vigils, about the cancellation of a business class’s planned trip to New York. I interviewed a man who’d grown up in the Willamette Valley and then gone on to work in the Pentagon; what stuck with him was the charred smell of all the wood paneling and wood floors and wooden furniture burning after the attack.

I listened to National Public Radio for the first time after the attacks. The music stations I favored before switched back to upbeat pop songs a little too quickly for my taste—I wanted more information, and so I began listening to the news as I drove to school each day. Their incredible coverage, not just of the attacks but of every story, every day, hooked me. I never switched back; since then NPR is the only station I listen to on a regular basis.

That was really the only thing that changed about my life.

Much has been written about September 11 being my generation’s defining moment; it supposedly woke us up from our sheltered, pampered lives. We came of age in the aftermath. It was our version of Pearl Harbor, the crisis that tested us.

Not so for me.

I do not know anyone who died in the attacks. I was saddened and shocked, but as far as I can remember, I never shed a tear. I’ve never been to New York City or to Washington, D.C. The image of the city skyline, with or without the Twin Towers, meant nothing to me.

It did not make me feel especially patriotic. It infected me with no burning desire to fight for my homeland. It brought to light the realities of the world we live in, of the nature of the burning, irrational hatred that terrorists have for our country. I believe we must continue to fight people who live on hatred and oppose freedom, but I don’t know if the course we’ve taken in the past six years is the best way to go about it. I don’t know what is the right way to go about it.

I was not scared. I never truly believed that anyone would attack the insignificant part of Oregon where I’ve lived my entire life. Some people I know have since chosen to go into the military, but no one in my immediate family. It has not been necessary for me to sacrifice.

Like it or not, the attacks involved my country in a war, and I had to write about soldiers, and their families, and their deaths. I cried then, when I watched husbands and wives kiss each other for the last time before boarding a bus to training camp, not knowing whether that kiss might be their last one.

The young man in fatigues, hugging his pregnant wife in front of a rundown National Guard armory on a small-town dead-end street, with a portrait of George W. Bush smiling down at him from the wall—that image is more real to me than those falling bodies I saw on the clear blue sky inside my television six years ago.

But other than subject matter for my profession and a change in my radio choices, I can think of no way that September 11 truly affected me. Am I heartless? Am I indecent? I hope not. What I am is removed—in my physical location, in my state of life, in my inability to do anything that will likely ever affect events on a world or national level.

I knew, of course, that the events of that day six years ago were of historic significance, so I saved the special edition of my local newspaper from that day, and the special edition of Time Magazine that came out a few days later, and I put them in a box. And that’s where they stay.

Except for once a year, when I look outside and see a flag on my neighbors’ front porch, and briefly wonder why.

And then I remember.