Weather Forecast   Donald Kaul: The legacy of 9/11   The 9/11
attacks comprise one of those events that you remember where you
heard of it and how, like the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor
was for old-timers and JFK's assassination was for middle-
timers.   I had recently retired (for the first time) and was
sitting at an outdoor café in Bethesda, Md. A stranger came up
and said: "A plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center
in New York."  I immediately thought of that time decades before
when a plane had plowed into an upper floor of the Empire State
Building in a fog. This had to be some version of that.  "What a
terrible thing," I said.  I have a gift for understatement. As
the morning wore on the bad news mounted. Another plane hit the
Trade Center. Thousands dead. The Pentagon itself hit. There
were reports of a fourth hijacked plane, possibly on its way to
Washington, that crashed in Pennsylvania.  At the end of the
day, although we didn't realize it at the time, we had become a
different nation