Six days ago as I was leaving Ames, Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” came on the radio. It was a cloudless, hot day in early September, a type of day that no longer holds an idyllic image. Jackson asked where I was, and I knew. I was in class, and my first day of work at the Iowa State Daily was going to be unlike anyone else’s.

I wrote the following recollection that week:

It didn’t immediately catch my eye, but at an Internet forum I saw the title “Check Out the World Trade Center!” I shrugged; maybe someone had pictures of something. I did not expect to see “Did you see that? Another plane just crashed into the tower! Two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center! It’s on fire!”

Suddenly everything in the papers I had just picked up were old news. The World Trade Center was on fire. No, check that — there was no World Trade Center.

During the time I went to hear a lecture on Colonial America and returned from a lecture on two-dimensional motion, the Empire State Building had become the tallest building in New York City. The Pentagon had become a quadrangle.

The clips being shown now simply could not be possible. The most valuable real estate in the world looked like Richmond after the Army of the Potomac, mixed with Spokane after Mount St. Helens.

The clip I saw first and the most is the one from the “wrong” side, with the plane coming in from behind and then an explosion. I found myself begging for the other side, to see the impact. It had to be special effects.

Later, with Fox News on my computer screen and CNN on the TV, I saw the Internet as a major communications device. Webcams at houses around Manhattan saw a bandwidth spike. ABC borrowed servers from ESPN, Google sent people to the TV and everyone struck ads and graphics for all-important text. Other sites dedicated forum threads to keeping up and comparing notes as different people reported different TV stations and different perspectives.

A live shot of the 59th Street bridge into Queens “looked like the New York City marathon.” The Transamerica Pyramid closed; the Sears Tower and the Chicago Board of Trade had been emptied. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the nation’s heartbeat, had flatlined.

On CNN’s site, I listened to a clip from three hours previous of a reporter describing something that had hit the Pentagon; they had not quite known yet.

Then, “I need you to stop for a second. There has just been a huge explosion; we can see billowing smoke rising and I’ll tell you, I can’t see that second tower. But there was a cascade of sparks and fire, and now this — it looks almost like a mushroom cloud explosion, this huge billowing smoke in the second tower … I cannot see behind that smoke.”

It was during the noon hour Wednesday that I first saw one of the most powerful clips.

A jet. A commercial airliner, filled to capacity, flying impossibly low over New York, captured by a camera across the river. You could make out the jet engines, the plane set at an angle to the building. And then the plane just … disappeared. Nose, wings, tail, straight into the building. A beat later, the explosion.

Those video clips still feel like news. Why? Why are the sadness and rage I feel upon seeing the CNN special Sunday at the identical level I had then?

It is still news because it is still around us. Just this week the last service was held for a firefighter who died in the attacks. A new videotape has surfaced showing the impact of both planes. And on Monday, an ABCNews.com article reported the hunt for Osama bin Laden is in a 40-square-mile area — scarcely larger than Ames and its immediate vicinity.

In addition to those, it’s partially a guarded response to the knowledge that when it ceases to be news, there are those around the world willing to do it again no matter what this country does to change.

One day, Alan Jackson will ask where you were, and someone will say he doesn’t know. Then more will say the same. Just as it is hard for many college students to say they remember the Soviet Union, it will eventually became hard for students to say they remember the beginning of the war on terror.

And then we will need to watch the video anew, uncut. We will need to remember that it is still news, and the feelings it stirs within. Because once the emotions become fuzzy, the memories themselves will follow.