I don’t mean to bore you with another travelogue, seeing how we mused recently about the importance of remembering our sacred past. The focus the first time was a weekend in Dallas, where the Sixth Floor Museum commands us to revisit the JFK assassination no matter the anguish it resurrects. We look, pray, reflect, talk to each other. Ultimately we grow.

This past weekend, a mini-family reunion took us to New York City. When we weren’t reconnecting with loved ones, and reveling in pasta and pastrami, I slipped away to recall two other powerful, painful moments in history. These remembrances come in dramatically different ways, and yet each one cleanses the spirit.

As my son and I did a year or so after the planes hit the towers, Matt and I returned to the site of the World Trade Center. We recalled that horrific day, and stared quietly at the cranes slowly bringing forth progress from a hole in the ground. There will be a memorial with rushing water. But there will also be skyscrapers in which people will do business. It feels like sacred space, even as tourists snapped photos and hawkers peddled Ground Zero souvenirs in the summer heat. We also spent tender moments in a makeshift museum that recalls not just tragedy but heroism. There are photos of the victims, footage of the rescue attempts, and amazing artifacts: A victim’s breakfast receipt from that morning. A fireman’s helmet. A piece of glass from one of the Twin Towers.

Hundreds of us pack the museum – different ages, different nationalities, different politics. And yet we are brought together by the memories, and there is barely a whisper.

A 15-minute subway ride north and the remembering channels John, Paul, George and Ringo. We took the A train up to Central Park West to mess around the park and wound up outside John Lennon’s apartment building, where he was murdered in 1980. Across the street, as concrete turns to grass near an area renamed Strawberry Fields, an impromptu band draws a crowd with its covers of Beatles classics. Rather than wallow in the act of a madman, we choose to celebrate the beautiful music that first shaped our lives by singing. Matt and I are supposed to be heading back to Greenwich Village for a family dinner. But the band’s doing She’s a Woman, and it’s impossible to pull away from that song and the sweeter, simpler time it evokes. Not even a cop’s siren can pierce the mellowness.

Downtown, we recalled 9-11 in near silence.

Uptown, by Strawberry Fields, we sang along to the music.

On both sides of town, we remembered.