This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

That’s an age-old question that many of us ask in relation to major events.  We also tend to know the answer.

We know where we were when:

• The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred (though, for this, I relied on my parents because I was not born yet).

• The day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

• The day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.

And, in the case that prompts this blog, the day the Twin Towers in New York came crashing down due to a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland.

I remember what I was doing on that fateful day – September 11, 2001, now only a couple days away from the 20-year mark.

I was over in Central Oregon to play in a political fundraiser golf tournament at Eagle Crest.  At one point before playing, I walked into the pro shop and wondered why so many people were crowded around a TV.   Soon I knew.

With others, I saw the calamitous site of the Twin Towers on fire and coming down, even as some in the towers were jumping to their deaths.

I had no idea what was happening.  No one else did either.  No idea about the Twin Towers attack, the attack on the Pentagon, or the crash of Flight 93 in a remote piece of Pennsylvania land.

At one point, some of us thought an airplane might have crashed into the Towers in an accident.  But soon it became evident that something else far worse was under way – a direct attack on the U.S. by terrorists bent on exacting a huge price.

I was in Central Oregon with a lobbyist friend whose wife was home in Salem functioning as a principal in a grade school.  My friend called his wife and she asked him to come home immediately to help her deal with the tragedy.

So, immediately, we got in a car and headed back West for a two-hour drive where we talked about what we had seen but did not yet understand.

All of this, 20 years after it happened, comes roaring back in my mind.  And it leaves an indelible impression – we were not safe then and are not safe now from terrorists who hate the United States enough to give up their own lives just has happened again recently in Afghanistan.

What should these memories conjure up for us?  Who knows?  But just this – remember and value the lives lost in the tragedy and recognize that none of us is immune from this kind of tragedy, whatever the specific cause.

Finally, here is a quote I read on-line:  “Remembering is not merely a state of mind.  As those who beseech us to never forget the Holocaust have long insisted, it is an act. And when loss and trauma are visited upon human beings,” it is important to remember the reality and mourn those who were lost.