Try to remember the moment before a memorable moment.

If you’re 70 now, you were 55 on Sept. 11, 2001, when two planes struck the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and horror rippled across the nation.

If you’re 55 now, you were 40 then. If you’re 40 now, you were 25. If you’re 25 now, you were a kid then, and you might remember parents staring at the TV, as serious as you’d ever seen them.

If you lived in Tacoma or the South Sound, you might recall a surge of civility, impossible to quantify, but tangible: a little less swearing at traffic, a little more patience, a collective awareness, something that felt like unity or the notion of a nation.

Anniversaries — boxes on a calendar — make nothing happen. But they tend to focus the memory. Tacoma wasn’t attacked on Sept. 11, but the shattering events on the East Coast briefly overwhelmed local preoccupations, substantive and trivial, and added a filter of civic awareness that hadn’t existed before.

School had just started. During the previous spring, state lawmakers had struggled through a then-record 163-day legislative session, complicated by a 49-49 partisan split in the state House, ending without agreement on transportation funding and education reforms. Some things never change.

Two days before the terror attacks, the 3rd Brigade, Second Infantry Division at what was still called Fort Lewis completed a five-day diagnostic training event.

The computer simulation involved “lighter-but-lethal” tactics, including light-armored vehicles — the cyber version of what would become the Army’s new Stryker brigades, later deployed in the global war on terror.

Editions of The News Tribune published the weekend before the attacks reveal a standard mix of local news.

Sunday’s paper featured a review of country star Chris LeDoux’s foot-stomping appearance at the Puyallup Fair and the story of a female sex offender housed at McNeil Island’s Special Commitment Center.

Sept. 10, a Monday, brought a somber story to the front of the local section: an Auburn-area man target shooting near Greenwater fatally shot his 10-year-old son by accident. The boy had been rushing to place paper targets, and the father didn’t see him.

Other news was happier. In the days before the attacks, the Seattle Mariners, led by rookie phenom Ichiro Suzuki, notched victories 102 and 103 on the way to a record-setting season that would end in disappointment. By the time the Mariners faced the New York Yankees in the playoffs, rooting against the Yankees — for once — seemed almost unsportsmanlike.

Tacoma’s police department was in disarray, fighting with City Manager Ray Corpuz over stalled contract negotiations. The police chief, James Hairston, had announced his pending retirement, triggering an internal leadership scuffle that ended with selection of a local veteran as the incoming chief: David Brame, who would kill his wife and himself in a Gig Harbor parking lot 18 months later.

Social media didn’t exist. Smartphones were a distant dream. TV, radio and print media provided the dominant information sources, still baby-stepping their way to online delivery.

The most popular wireless phone was a Nokia model that dropped calls as often as it held them. The release of a music-playing gadget called the iPod was a month away, along with the debut of a white-knuckle TV drama called “24” and its reluctant protagonist, counter-terrorism specialist Jack Bauer.

In Lakewood, residents buzzed over a pilot project backed by then-Police Chief Larry Saunders: traffic cameras designed to catch speeders in school zones. Saunders countered worries of excessive surveillance with numbers: 4,450 speeders nailed since the spring. In years to come, the cameras would spread to Fife, Puyallup and Tacoma.

One week before the attacks, a minor drama, unreported until a year later, played out in family court. John Allen Muhammad, an ex-soldier and longtime Tacoma resident, lost an argument with a judge over custody of his three children, who were handed over to his estranged wife.

Grieving his loss and drowning in obsession, Muhammad would track his wife across the country, recruiting a teenage boy, Lee Malvo, as a tool for revenge. They left a trail of corpses in their wake, becoming known as the Beltway snipers.

In the fever of post-9/11 paranoia, authorities labeled Muhammad a terrorist rather than a domestic, homicidal stalker who co-opted jihadist rhetoric to justify random acts of murder.

News traveled more slowly in 2001, but it still traveled. On Sept. 13, Bob Mottram, then The News Tribune’s outdoors writer, was on a hunting trip in Alaska, unaware of the 9/11 attacks.

“Here on the tundra, the natural world is in its mode that passes for peaceful — absorbed in the ordinary struggles of life and death that consume it,” Mottram wrote.

He had noticed the absence of planes for the past two days. He heard one before he saw it, recognizing the mosquitolike buzz. Spotting the craft, he heard the pilot gun the engine in recognition. A small object, what looked like a tiny parachute, dropped from the plane before it flew out of sight. Mottram followed the object and picked it up.

“It turns out to be a small, white-plastic garbage bag, tied shut at the neck,” Mottram wrote. “Inside is a rock about the size of a woman’s fist. Along with the rock is a computer-generated note. It is dated Sept. 12:

“Dear Hunters:

“Terrorists hijacked 4 airliners yesterday morning and destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon. They crashed the airliners into these buildings, killing thousands.

“The FAA stopped all air travel, even our planes. Obviously, we are behind schedule due to this. We will begin getting out the parties which were due to depart first. The parties due out on the 11th will be picked up first.”

Mottram shared the news with his friends — a father and two grown sons, discussing terrible news in a vast wilderness.

“We have no newspaper here, no CNN to watch, not even a radio to tune in,” he wrote. “But as we talk among ourselves, we realize the staggering changes in people’s lives this act will bring about.

“Society never will be the same again. Lives have changed forever in so many ways. Yet, these thoughts seem so at odds with what surrounds us.”

This story was originally published September 11, 2016 at 6:00 AM with the headline "The day before: What was on our mind before terror struck?."