WASHINGTON A tattered notebook. A broken pager. A stopped clock.

Take away the soft lights and the dark curtains, clear the room of the weeping people, and try to send yourself back in time, just a little more than 10 years ago.

If you had seen this stuff back then, you'd have thought it was junk.

But Thursday, as relentless rain fell in Washington, the line inside the National Museum of American History was 100 deep. And in the little exhibit room, on four small tables, there were the small fragments of what was saved on a day we lost so much.

This is where we begin the journey into 9/11, a decade later. This is where we try to draw the meaning out.

That notebook belonged to Lorraine Bay, a flight attendant who died on United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

That pager belonged to a woman named Goumatie Thackurdeen, who was on the 97th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center.

That clock hung on the wall of the fire station at the Pentagon.

"I was at my house in Arlington, a few miles away," says a retired teacher named Donna Seymour, first in line Thursday morning. "I've traveled a lot - more than 60 countries - and I have friends all over the world. When they found out the Pentagon got hit... I've never had so many calls. But the hard part was later, when I had time to think about it.

"Sept. 11 did me in for quite a while. I'm still a little maniacal about it. I read everything, watch everything on TV. I'm still trying to process it all."

This is what we do as human beings. Something happens. We let it tumble around in our heads and hearts. We try to figure out what it all means. Sometimes we decide in an eyeblink. Sometimes we never get it settled.

On one level, what happened on 9/11 is clear. Terrorists attacked us. They killed thousands of our people. They took down two of our most famous buildings. They struck at the heart of our national defense.

But what it meant - what it means - is still muddled. We pulled together, for a time, but did it make us better people? Our leaders had our trust, for a moment, but did they learn anything? We got revenge, in a way, but did that even the score?

A wise friend said he's taking a pass on the "media orgy" around the anniversary. He has a point. It's hard to honor the emotions without flinging ourselves back to that day and wallowing in the flames.

But part of our hard wiring is the need to mark time.

NEVER FORGET - people repeated that so many times after 9/11. And of course there are parts we won't forget and can't forget. But already, 10 years later, the memory crumbles around the edges like an old sheet of parchment.

"You know, I was so glad to hear that three of the Flight 93 widows have remarried," Seymour says. "Todd Beamer's wife, and that other one... last name with a B... from California..."

Maybe this is how we remember. We don't just throw ourselves back in the flames. We hold onto the small things that survived.

A man named Gary Lounsberry peered at the artifacts on the tables. It turns out he's a North Carolina guy. He's a consultant for Laurel University, a nondenominational Christian school in High Point. He's also a pastor. He has spent a lot of time thinking about the meaning of terrible things.

"Why does God allow something like 9/11, right?" he says. "That's the big question. Well, you start with the knowledge that God is always gracious. This was not a judgment on us. But He is still allowing man his own devices, his own choices. We live in a fallen world."

There's a temptation to turn 9/11 into a holy day, to treat these artifacts as sacred objects. But the pastor has it right. These were the acts of man. Here are the things left behind.

The world fell on 9/11. In New York City. In Shanksville, where we're headed next. And here in Washington.

There's a memorial at the Pentagon, a beautiful outdoor plaza with markers for each of the 184 people who died there, either in the building or on the plane that crashed into it.

On 9/11 the plane hit the Pentagon at 9:38 a.m., but the stopped clock reads 9:32, as if it had tried to spiral backward into time.

We can't do that, not really.

But 10 years later we can look at a clock or a notebook or a battered pager, and we can try to take ourselves back to that day, and try to figure out what it all means now.