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Five years.

A car is paid off. A baby grows into a kindergartner. A sapling matures into a tree. A girlfriend becomes a wife.

There is a gulf of time that now separates us from the 9-11 of today and the 9-11 of five years ago -- an expanse just big enough to dilute the shock and clean the wounds inflicted on that day.

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It's enough time for a country once in a state of inertia to settle into a new status quo of perpetual conflict.

Looking back, five years later, we see a day of upheaval. One that changed the world -- but perhaps not as much as we thought it would.

Today, we dust off the book of "Where I Was When It Happened" and share our unique chapter.

For some, the chapter is longer and deeper. It's still being written, every day, until there are no more days. Every day that we live without something we lost and with something we gained from that sunny Tuesday morning.

Lost loved ones and lost innocence; gained faith and gained resolve.

For those directly involved, the gulf isn't as wide.

How could it ever be?

Lisa Watkins can still hear the music inside her head, but the words are beginning to fade -- much like memories of her brother that are steadily slipping through time's progression.

When Watkins was 6 years old, she implored her brother -- an avid piano player -- to put to music a few poems from her favorite book, Robert Louis Stevenson's 19th-century "A Child's Garden of Verses."

"He put every one of those poems to music," the Easley mother of two says. "It took over 20 years, but he did it. He did it all for me."

On the 9-11 of five years ago, her brother, Army Lt. Col. David Scales, died sitting at his desk in the Pentagon, his hands at his computer keyboard.

On the 9-11 of today, Watkins finds herself cheating from time to time, pulling out the children's book to remember the words as she struggles to call to mind what it felt like to actually embrace her brother.

"How did it feel when I hugged him?" she says. "You forget that. It's hard to believe it's been five years."

Watkins is the face of the personal loss of 9-11 -- yet an ebullient face, one endowed with the gift of perspective and faith and the absence of bitterness.

Scales was just shy of his 45th birthday and a promotion to colonel. Watkins had a chance to see him a month before 9-11, but her oldest daughter, Meredith, was only 18 months old and had trouble riding in cars.

David Scales was the star of the family, Watkins says, the "fulfillment of both my parents' dreams" because he surpassed his father's military career and learned a musical instrument his mother never quite could master.

David was the oldest, Lisa the youngest. They shared a bond reaching across two siblings in between: redheadedness. David, Lisa says, used to joke that until she was born, he wondered if he had been adopted.

A table in Watkins' den acts as a miniature memorial to her brother: a replica of a stained-glass memorial in the Pentagon chapel. A picture of Scales smiling widely, seated at the piano. A photo of the two redheads scrunching closely together in front of a church in Lynchburg, Va.

After the waiting and the worrying and the hope and, ultimately, the sobering realization, it took Watkins a while to move past her guilt of being alive. Of carrying on with daily life.

"David is never going to see this movie," she says. "David is never going to hear this song. David is never going to see this beautiful day. We're all just trying to find meaning in this."

That search for meaning weaves together a unique comfort that Watkins finds in her brother's death, made possible by a consciously adopted perspective.

David, she says, died in the service of his country. He didn't suffer a protracted death. Not only did his family and friends mourn him, but so did an entire country.

And five years later, she has a day especially to share what made him the person he was.

She's heartened by a Virginia Eagle Scout who made it his mission to erect a 9-11 memorial at Scales' father's VFW post that includes David's picture among the 189 who died in the building and aboard the plane that crashed into it.

Yet, she says, she sees a country that has largely moved on, leaving behind an observant search for meaning and reverting to its Sept. 10 tendencies.

"Everybody came together as a country, but that was so short-lived," she says. "There's so much division. The next day, they just went back to living."

Bill Haynes has gone back to living -- but never again in the same way. Not after what he saw.

Sept. 11 changed him. For the good. Forever.

Haynes had survived two wars and a dozen hurricanes, but nothing could have prepared him for his first look at the smoking hulk that had been the World Trade Center.

It was on Halloween -- six weeks after Sept. 11 -- when he arrived in lower Manhattan with a Southern Baptist relief group from Upstate South Carolina. Yet fires still flared and bodies were still being recovered from the scene where New York's heart had been ripped out.

Images of unspeakable tragedy remain seared into his psyche: The X marks painted on buildings where body parts had been found. Children's toys blasted into heaps of rubble. And the fires that would not go out.

"We got off the subway at the upper end of Battery Park," Haynes says. "We walked about two blocks and looked up West Street, and I totally, totally lost all composure that I ever thought I might have had when I saw that."

Even now, he chokes at the memory.

The week he spent cleaning out dust and debris from apartments in lower Manhattan became a life-transforming time for Haynes, a retired Air Force master sergeant who now is maintenance supervisor at Fairview Baptist Church in Greer.

He learned that New Yorkers weren't the rude, callous people he had believed them to be. And that the American capacity for compassion can rise to meet any challenge.

And he learned that life is never so secure that he can stay on the sidelines when the distress signal goes out.

Haynes had balked at the idea of going to New York at first, thinking that people who were rich enough to live in lower Manhattan could afford to clean up the mess in their homes themselves.

"One of the things that came out of that was that I made a promise to God and everybody else that could hear that I would never say no again," he says. "If somebody called and needed our help, we would go. However we could manage to get there, we would go."

He made good on that promise by helping feed people who had lost their homes in four hurricanes in 2005 and on four trips to the Gulf Coast during Katrina last year. Haynes says he saw firsthand the way bureaucracy can thwart charity during last year's debacle in New Orleans.

The lesson of 9-11, Haynes says, is that Americans can never again take security and safety for granted. It's not a question of if but of when another attack will occur on American soil, he says.

"I don't think it's avoidable," he says. "I don't think we as a people will allow our government to require us to live in such a way that it won't happen, because if we do that, then they've won here, because we're prisoners in our own homes."

If it does happen, he has faith -- in God and in the compassion of the American people -- that we will get through it OK.

"I don't worry about it," he says. "If it does, it does."

And he'll be there, ready to help, if the need arises.

"This is what Jesus told us to do, to go help our brothers in time of need."

Steve Matheny of Simpsonville also believes another attack will come eventually.

"It's inevitable," he says. "It's probably going to be carried out differently. It could be as bad or worse."

He speaks from the perspective of a survivor of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York. He was standing outside the north tower of the World Trade Center when the first plane came out of the blue and slammed into it.

He would have been inside had not one of his co-workers been late in arriving to set up for their presentation at the offices of the investment firm Morgan Stanley.

"I feel very lucky," he says. "I feel like God spared my life."

Matheny, a 1993 graduate of Hillcrest High who was working as a technical rep for IBM at the time, had spent the night at the Marriott World Trade Center -- between the two towers. He had walked to the north tower that morning, where he was to meet a colleague who was stuck in traffic.

They had planned to meet at 8:30 a.m. and carry in their computer equipment. He was still outside, leaning on the building, 15 minutes later when the first plane hit directly above him.

"I could tell that the plane was really, really low," he says, "and I heard it for about six seconds, and then it passed right over my head and it hit the building. It was really indescribable how loud it was."

He took shelter in a small subway terminal nearby as debris was falling around him. After a few minutes there, he ran back up the stairs and across the street and started walking north, as directed by emergency officials.

He was about four blocks away when the second plane hit the south tower -- and it became clear that this was the work of terrorists.

Even after the impact, he believed the buildings would survive and that New York would return to normal within a few weeks.

Then, as he was getting into a cab, the south tower fell.

Eventually, he made it to suburban Westchester County and, after three days of trying unsuccessfully to get a flight home, he rented a car and made the long drive to South Carolina.

Why he survived while thousands were killed, he doesn't know. What he does know is that the worst of circumstances can bring out the best in people.

"The leadership that was shown there was awesome," he says. "It just gave me more faith in the people that are good in this world. It gave me a greater appreciation for this country."

And, five years later, when he thinks about what might have happened to him, Matheny also has a much greater appreciation for two very special people in his life -- one who would never have known him and one who would never have been born.

Cole, 5, and Mallory, 2. His children.

"It definitely makes you realize that you can't take anything for granted," he says. "It made me further understand that there is good and evil. And I believe in the end that good wins."