Spanish views from a small town

Today is the sad memory of the attacks in Washington and New York, and a field in Pennsylvania, that left well over two thousand dead. It was afternoon here in Spain, and we watched it live at the tail end of the midday news, which then didn't go off the air for hours. A neighbor, whose son lives in New York was anxiously watching with us for a while, before she went off to try to get through to him again by phone. And I watched my memories disappear.  Though I grew up and lived in Boston for twenty-two years, New York was as far away to me as Los Angeles. My parents didn't believe in travelling for the sake of travelling, and I never went much further than a couple of hours drive around Boston on a Sunday afternoon. But New York was a magnet of ebullience that had always intrigued me. The only time I saw part of it was on our trips to and from Spain, when we had to fly from JFK airport on Long Island. I wished we could spend a few hours in town on those occasions, but though...