A lifetime ago I left New York to guest lecture at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Now I’ve come home to a world that did not exist when I left.

I left home during what we naively called peacetime. We were told the cold war was over. Now I’ve come back to what our President describes as "a state of war." As if to agree, the seasons themselves are shifting. When I left I took the end of summer with me to a college campus already embracing fall.

Now I’m home under the gathering clouds of what promises to become the winter of our retribution.

My granddaughter is 15 months old and we spend the weekend enroute to Columbia with her and my daughter and son-in-law in St. Louis. She is so far removed from the madness we now find ourselves embroiled in that it pains my very soul without warning or explanation.

Back with them the morning after the terrible assault on our way of life, I watch her totter back and forth in front of incessant images of horror on the television and I cannot comprehend the vast canyon between her purity and the vile pictures sent to us from my home in New York.

We booked our trip to Columbia far in advance to take advantage of lower airline ticket prices. Friday morning, Newark airport into St. Louis, rent a car and drive to Columbia Sunday, stay with our friends Steve and Avis Kopcha, do the classes, Ad Club Monday night, a couple more Tuesday and back to New York Tuesday night.

But on Tuesday morning September 11 our world changed forever. Students in our Strategic Writing lab tell us an airplane has crashed into the World Trade Center, and while they’re watching it another one hits the second tower. I hear the words but I do not understand.

Then we’re galvanized in the student lounge, watching grotesquely large pictures on a big screen television that might as well be scenes from "Independence Day" or "Air Force One."

Except they’re real. Painfully, horrifically, graphically, incomprehensibly real.

I call my daughter. Of course she’s safe. She’s hundreds of miles from it all. But I call any way.

I call my son in New York, and even though he’s 25 miles north of the city I assume nothing. He’s driven across the Tappan Zee Bridge this morning and he can already see the smoke rising down the Hudson River from lower Manhattan. He’s fine, and will continue to be fine.

And I will continue to call him, often.

We keep our rental car. The company waves any drop off charges for taking it to New York, a humane and welcome gesture. Our nation is coming together.

And I start back home across middle America to the rest of my life.

After departing St. Louis – the hometown I left for New York 18 years ago – we stop for dinner in Louisville – where I was born at the end of World War II.

And now I see the journey my wife and I are on for what it is. In the midst of the insanity that now embroils us I am tracking my family roots back across America.

It is the only conceivable, appropriate response to this madness we’ve found ourselves in, and I’ve come to it by ways I cannot question. Or deny.

By embarking from St. Louis I am launched with the unassailable joy of my granddaughter and her mother and father stoking my wounded heart. Then the touchstone of my birthplace brings me up, and I telephone my only living cousin who lives 30 minutes down the road in Frankfort to say we’re coming, and we’re spending the night.

She honors our visit by giving me two pieces of china that were my grandmother’s and a song book that belonged to my great grandmother. I will pass them on to my daughter.

The next morning we’re on our way to Ashland, Kentucky to visit with my last remaining ancestor, my aunt Mary, my father’s sister, now 91 years old and a treasure of family history and lore. She remains the head of her house, now alone, the same house she’s lived in for 60 years.

This is worse than Pearl Harbor, she says. Much worse.

On the road again the images do not loosen their grip on me. The Towers fall, over and over. The airplanes strike again and again, from different angles, and each time with more clarity and more accuracy. They strike at the very heart of the way we have gathered our lives together up until now.

Over the radio the news is insistent, if not consistent. And soon enough the call-in shows are in motion and America is talking. Disbelief. Sorrow. Anger. And retribution; we’re demanding our measure of revenge.

I’m struck by the bipartisan, cross-cultural unity I hear and feel from the callers. From the small town local news accounts of Bingo game cancellations and nondenominational services taking place hundreds of miles and millions of dollars away from the epicenter. And in every community Americans are gathering with remarkable conviction to offer prayer and support, and their own blood, to fellow Americans in New York and Washington.

American flags are flying thick up and down Winchester Avenue in Ashland, Kentucky, for fellow Americans. The local theater marquee says, simply, emphatically, "God Bless America."

A guy in a gas station in Nitro, West Virginia, wearing a Caterpillar cap, hears we’re on our way home to New York and follows me out to the car just to tell us he hopes we’re all right and wish us a safe journey home.

The look on his face is a mirror that reflects nothing less than our national anguish.

The media is catching up quickly. They’re editing cell phone calls into sound bites; they’re replaying loving, heroic last words from doomed husbands to wives and wives to husbands, from sons and daughters to mothers and fathers and from hijacked passengers to the authorities.

Chilling, personal tragedies. Cruel, real-life theater. It is much, too much to contend with.

And the images coming to us are now much more personal, too. Now they’re of people, not just buildings. Firemen are emerging from the wreckage, slobbering, choking, aching for their less fortunate brethren. People are walking the streets of Manhattan carrying pictures of missing victims of the attack in hopes that some one, somehow, has seen them and will now, please God, call them to tell them everything is all right.

Utterly futile and without logic, but somehow creating a growing system of mutual support and comfort for these Americans consumed with grief, and hope without hope. This phenomenon will continue to rise from the ashes of lower Manhattan to remind the rest of us how fortunate we are.

I can see my granddaughter and her father in one of these photos, and cannot comprehend the randomness of it all.

Now we’re in the midst of some of the most beautiful country in America. The green and rolling hills of West Virginia surround us like strong and steadfast shoulders to lean on and embrace us with what feels like reassurance, protection. Every so often a trio of wooden crosses rises out of the surrounding trees, one painted gold, two silver, as if to carry us on our way home.

The closer we get to our nation’s capital the more prevalent the American flags are, trailing out car windows and on many and then more highway overpasses.

Four young women on their own way to New York climb out of a car in Hagerstown, Maryland, each one wearing identical American flag do-rags wrapped around their heads.

We make it to Washington, DC, the site of the second attack on America, and to my sister’s house. And once again we relive the rape of our country and the pillaging of our values, and once again we share tears, and fears, and are thankful for our family and our freedom, both blessedly intact for us, and both now remarkably fragile.

In perfect family symmetry, I also have a niece in Washington DC, newly enrolled at American University and a freshman student of Political Science for all of one month. My guess is she’s already learned a great deal about the country she lives in these past few days. Since first talking with her two days earlier we’re prepared to take her and her roommate home with us because she’s afraid to be there, in our nation’s capital.

Now she’s staying. When I get her on her cell phone she’s on her way down Connecticut Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial to join a powerful candle light vigil. She feels safe again, for now, and she’s showing her colors to the world in magnificent 18-year old fashion.

At my sister’s house my wife and I sleep in the antique four-poster bed that belonged to my parents.

Saying our goodbyes to her and my brother-in-law feels like we’ve never said it before. Our embraces are tighter, longer. I hear their wishes for a safe journey home in renewed sincerity.

On the road from Washington DC to New York the flags fly more abundantly, the banners more insistent. "Give ‘em hell," says one. "Pray for NYC," says another.

We stop at a gas station outside Ft. McHenry, where our national anthem was inspired and written, and I go inside to pay. Standing behind the counter is a man in his early fifties with an attractive, cropped beard surrounding his handsome, olive-skinned face. His eyes reveal great wisdom and a comforting serenity.

His head is wrapped in a turban.

It is immediately important to me that he understands that I harbor no assumptions, no biases. I ask him if he’s being treated with respect and he nods and says yes. Now his eyes portray appreciation, without saying so.

And then he looks at me and he says, "God bless America."

Closer to home the overhead highway traffic signs read "Limited access to

NYC. Expect delays." Another one says, "Holland Tunnel Closed."

Approaching Newark a Continental 767 lumbers overhead into the airport, one of the first flights in following the reluctant FAA clearance.

At the airport the long-term parking lot attendant voluntarily reduces our fees by a full two days, given the circumstances. We transfer our baggage and our hopes to our Jeep. We get ourselves out to the Jersey Turnpike that feeds us north along the entire length of west side Manhattan and across the George Washington Bridge into Harlem and Yonkers and up into Westchester County.

And then, there it is.

Not on television. Right there before us. Lower Manhattan, just beyond the Statue of Liberty, on what should be a beautiful college football Saturday afternoon. We pull over, and in a single view I can see a discarded and rusted tractor trailer in the middle of a Jersey junkyard with the words "God Bless America" scrawled across its side, and farther on, just beyond Ellis Island and across the waters of the lower Hudson River, the remaining skyscrapers of Manhattan and the smoke, still rising from the wreckage.

An enormous American flag greets us as we cross the George Washington Bridge into New York City. It hangs over us, half as big as a football field, and seems to be saying that we will emerge from this stronger.

I am moved to salute it.

We are on our way home. My son is there – where he’s lived with us for the past four years - waiting for us. Driving up the Henry Hudson Parkway alongside the Hudson River I am confronted by a beauty that seems to utterly ignore the events of four days earlier and just a few minutes south.

There is the barest suggestion in the foliage that the season is turning, and along with it, our lives. Within weeks we will be blessed again with spectacular reds and yellows and vibrant oranges that will look to us just like they did last year, and will again, next year.

The world we live in, however, will never look the same. The visible scars will endure in Manhattan, and Washington D.C. The rest of them will lie festering in our soul.

I tell my son how much I love him. Our four dogs crawl all over us, just like they always do.

Down in my basement I find the American flag that draped my father’s casket when he was buried some 35 years ago, as a veteran of World War II, and hang it up on my porch looking out over the Hudson River.

We’re home.

Tim Arnold.