I wasn't going to talk about it today. You know IT. September 11th. And not because I'm Canadian and therefore, not interested.

Because I'm not just Canadian. I'm American too.

I was born in Idaho. I lived almost half my life on the other side of the border, in various states. Idaho. Wisconsin. Texas. Colorado. Texas again. Most of my extended family lives in the U.S.

My younger brother, my one and only sibling, is an air traffic controller in North Dakota. September 11th, 2001 was his second day as a supervisor.

He described it as the longest, most disturbing and most boring day of his life. He was up in the tower doing paperwork when the first plane hit. He thought, like many people I suppose, that it was some freak accident although he couldn't fathom how it could happen as he knew (unlike most the rest of us) that the air space above NYC was strictly controlled. Then the second plane hit and he knew. Terrorism.

The first thing they did was go on high alert. That meant all air traffic controllers and airport management had to report in for work immediately. Then he had to lock down the airport. Most of the air traffic at his airport comes from the University of North Dakota's Flight School. Some comes from a nearby military base. Within two hours, they had twenty-four planes on the tarmac, planes from all over that they pulled from the sky. Military teams and bomb squad dogs were sent to inspect those planes. One dog alerted, but it turned out to be nothing.

He spent part of the afternoon in massive conference calls listening to FAA officials screaming at the O'Hare traffic controllers who had intially abandoned their tower. He listened to managers at LAX freaking out as they tried to lock down their air space. He listened as the words "hijack" and "terrorism" bounced around. He didn't say anything. There wasn't much for him to say.

He spent the rest of the day fending off the reporters amassing at the gates, looking for a local angle. He spent that night, and the next and then the next waiting for the all clear. Aside from birds and clouds, nothing in the sky moved.

On the other side of the border, I stood frozen in front of CNN, the wolf's leash in one hand, my cordless phone in the other, staring incredulously as I watched one tower dissolve into a column of smoke and ash and then the other.

I had just returned from walking the wolf at a different park than I walk her now. It was a perfect morning, bright, crisp. Blue skies, a cool breeze.

I was walking with the same group of women that I had walked with for the previous two months, every day. One of the woman was a Texan. Her husband works Monday to Friday in Chicago, flying back to Toronto on the weekends. The other woman was from Minnesota originally. Her husband is in banking and had just returned from NYC, where he had had several meetings at the World Trade Center.

We were laughing and talking and throwing balls for our dogs. We were oblivious as the first plane slammed mercilessly into the one tower, and oblivious when the second plane screamed into the second tower.

It wasn't until I got back into the car for the short jaunt home and heard these words over the radio : "....America is under terrorist attack at this hour... " that I had any idea that that Tuesday would stand out in my mind forever.

Until I heard those words, uttered by a shaken alt rock DJ who had probably never uttered anything on air even vaguely resembling those words before, it was just another bright Tuesday morning, just another walk in the park.

Just another day like today.

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