A four-year-old post from a site for funny Macintosh news, As the Apple Turns: Look! Good fortune is around you.

Someday, some Hollywood genius will make a big movie — like Titanic, perhaps — set against the terrorist attacks that took place four years ago today. And, to set a properly ominous mood, the filmmaker will fill the sky with dark storm clouds and rumbles of thunder. Audiences and critics will rave about how the filmmakers brought a half-forgotten historical tragedy to life.

But if I’m there, I will remember. The sky was blue. A brilliant, cloudless blue, the same here as it was in New York and Washington, D.C.

When the FAA ordered a “full ground stop,” the mandatory grounding of all civilian planes, I went outside with some of my co-workers and watched planes approaching the airport here for their unscheduled landing. There would be no planes in the sky for several days to come.

After the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, Hollywood frantically cut or altered shots of the New York skyline from movies approaching release. Even a fleeting sight of the towers, they reasoned, would stir emotions that would overwhelm the story in any film where they appeared.

Time dulls the ragged edge of grief, and distorts our memory. The twin towers become the Doomed Twin Towers. Like Pearl Harbor, Abe Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, and the Titanic itself, we wonder: was there really a time when no one knew what was going to happen? “September 11” has been turned into a political punchline. Was there really a time when it was just another date?

It’s good, I think, to feel some of the pain again. To remember what really happened. To know that it came out of the clear blue sky.