By ROGER FRANKLIN in New York
The weather, thank God, has been merciful. For more than a week, New York has been wet and cold beneath a sky of dismal grey that drifted south from Canada and simply refused to go away.
This year, however, there have been few complaints about summer ending with a whimper rather than the bang-up barbecues and beach parties that Americans anticipate as much as the skyrockets of Independence Day.
Given the city's state of mind, the weather has been a blessing - one less reminder of that day almost a year ago when New Yorkers went to work under a sky of warm and peerless blue. Then the pair of hijacked jets arrived and everything we knew and took for granted began to tumble.
First, the office workers who preferred to jump rather than be roasted alive. Then the World Trade Centre's towers. And most of all, against a soundtrack of sirens that continued 24 hours a day for weeks on end, all the notions of invulnerability that this unthinkingly arrogant city had long regarded as its birthright.
The weather - it is one of the small and incidental details that everyone who witnessed the attacks and endured the anxious months that followed always seems to mention whenever the subject of September 11 comes up. And that isn't anywhere near so often as an outsider might imagine.
Yes, everyone recalls the key events - the twin impacts and the spectacle an hour or so later of the World Trade Centre's skyscrapers slamming down upon themselves, followed by that smoking, double-hummocked mountain of debris emerging amid the settling dust. And that is where recollections begin to diverge.
For some, at a distance of almost a year, it is the distant, canted column of dusty smoke that comes most readily to mind - a ladder for ascending ghosts that would remain in place until well into January, when the fires deep within the pyre finally could find nothing left to burn.
To the Chinese guy who runs the Mexican takeaway restaurant on Second Ave, it's the memory of two filthy firemen coming in to place a huge order for tacos and enchiladas. He was stunned. Normally, the city's smoke eaters take pride in doing their own cooking, but half the crew was dead and the firehouse's designated chef had turned out in his bunker gear at Ground Zero, so there was nobody left to man the kitchen. "Never before they eat my cooking," he marvelled. That's typical of the way New Yorkers have earmarked their memories - some for sharing, others to be kept dark and under wraps, each flash of recollection accessible or otherwise according to individual tolerance.
"It's funny, the things that stick in your mind," noted Bernadette Solum, the manager of a Manhattan dentists' office, who spent much of the week immediately after the massacre combing her files for the dental charts that officials hoped would help to identify the dead. "I cried every day, but so did a lot of people, and you get over that. What I remember is that the guy from the medical examiner's office wasn't wearing a tie and it didn't seem right, you know - someone dealing with the dead and not dressing respectfully. I was offended, although now I smile about it because I know I was too sensitive. That was an awful time for me, for all of us, but it must have been agonising for him."
Then Solum paused. "And the weather, too," she added, "remember how it started out as such a day, a beautiful, beautiful day?"
Hers was another small voice of gratitude for the past week's damp chill because, everywhere else, the mass of multimedia memories has been darkening like a cloud of black depression. The promos for the network's anniversary retrospectives are everywhere, - the talking heads debating where President Bush will strike next and why. Most unsettling of all: the chatter about whether America - New Yorkers take that as a synonym for their home turf - can expect Osama bin Laden or his heirs to mark the anniversary with another attack.
On the TV news, a Fire Department veteran mulls taking down the funereal bunting that has hung for a year in an inverted arch of black and purple above his brigade's headquarters. The photos of dead colleagues stare out from the community noticeboard by the double doors, and the camera makes a point of lingering for a moment on the images and tributes to the vanished faces.
The concert planners and conveners of prayer services, the buglers who will be playing as the national flag is lowered, they all seem to be taking their turns before the cameras to talk of how the commemoration of 3054 snuffed-out lives will proceed.
With its lack of self-conscious reserve, America does these things very well, manages the spectacles' emotion as few other nations can. Perhaps the rest of the country needs a reminder, perhaps it's all for the benefit of those unfortunates obliged to live in what New Yorkers dismissed as Flyover Country - at least that was what they called it until the rest of the nation rallied to the city's aid, sending everything from rescue dogs to sniff the rubble to replacement fire trucks and a billion dollars-plus in cash. But here, so close to Ground Zero, there is no need for reminders. Here least of all.
The fact is that Gotham has made enormous and unlikely strides in 12 months. If you were to fly in tomorrow, there would be almost nothing to give the recent past away. The Midtown streets are thronged, the locals once again muttering quiet curses at the rubberneckers who, in their out-of-towner innocence, don't realise it's just not done to dawdle four abreast and block the crowded footpaths' human tide. The restaurants are full and the traffic, which for weeks after the attack conducted itself with an unnatural restraint, has returned to the horn-blaring habits of old.
Even the economy is holding up, much to the experts' amazement. A stock market crash, corporate scandals, rising unemployment, fear and uncertainty - all the classic ingredients, in other words, of a major recession. Yet the economic contraction has been mild, the stores never busier and if you add a dash of wishful thinking to what the more upbeat experts are saying, then the worst of the downturn has passed. If the spectre of another attack could just be laid to rest, the money men say, America could get back to the business of business with a vengeance.
As for those spendthrift consumers, they have been working their credit cards as if there is no tomorrow. You could be gone in an instant, the psychology goes, so why do without that new air-conditioner? The shrinks say it is an affirmation of life. If you live here, September 11 taught you to live for today. Not recklessly nor with a profligate disregard for health and safety, but with a definite intention of enhancing the mundane pleasures of existence - an option we watched being stolen from so many.
Downtown at Ground Zero, there is now hardly anything worth seeing, which is why the locals have ceded the observation deck to the daily crowds of tourists. They come by the busload, some casting disapproving glances at the souvenir vendors and sellers of T-shirts.
Those visitors are the ones who expected a sacred shrine and found instead a horde of moneychangers. They need to review their preconceptions, for what is New York about if not money first and last? The towers themselves were a tribute to the making of it, so who now can blame the kerbside capitalists for getting theirs?
That's the first surprise. The second comes after waiting for a turn on the observation deck, from which there is nothing now left to see but a big, deep, square hole. If you didn't know so many vanished lives are mingled with the clay, it would just be another construction site waiting to be filled.
So they use the sort of imagination that the locals neither want nor prefer to exercise, picturing again the scenes they watched on TV sets in Iowa livingrooms and Kansas coffee shops. They're welcome to conjure visions, and the quiet prayers are appreciated, too.
But for a Gothamite taking in the empty panorama, it's different. Use that trick of selective memory and it's almost normal. "It's where our home is and where I go blading," said 14-year-old Lucas Gonzalez, who lives with his parents just 60 seconds' walk from the gaping hole that the city's fathers and developers are now feuding about how best to fill. "The neighbourhood is home again, it's just that it's sorta different, but I don't notice that unless I think about it."
Fact is, like the tens of thousands of other downtown loft dwellers, he's glad to be back on his home ground. For months after the attacks, the family camped out in hotels, waiting for the all-clear to return. When they did, it was to find disorder and damage. Simply cleaning the asbestos-laden dust from their loft cost US$5000 ($10,750). And then there were trucks that rumbled by with their loads of debris 24 hours a day.
The qualified normalcy is welcome, and the adjustments, while unsettling, don't trouble the teenager quite so much as they do his parents, who grew up in the chilliest days of the Cold War. For a while, when young Gonzalez was a baby, their hope was that he wouldn't know a world in which sudden death could arrive without warning. In their day, it was missiles. Last year, it was Mohammed Atta and his hijackers. Different weapons. Different motives. Same result.
"What have I learned?" said Gonzalez. "That I never want to see my mother wide-eyed with worry, like she was when she walked all the way to my school that day. Whatever it takes, I'm for it 100 per cent if we don't suffer like this again."
The logic can't be faulted: kill before you are killed. But still, to any parent who might have watched the Soviet Union fall and China open itself to the world, it's a sad thought that another generation will be forced to grow up in the shadow of the sword.
That hope for a better, saner world, is just one of the many things that have been taken away. You can see others at Ground Zero, too, by casting your gaze at the patch of sky the WTC once blocked.
Look beyond where once the towers stood and it's the three-dimensional bustle of the skies themselves that has vanished. Before September 11, the air over this city was a child's drawing, with the jetliners proceeding in procession every few minutes up the West Side on their way to La Guardia, the ubiquitous choppers darting and hovering everywhere. Like the towers, they are pretty much all gone now. Yes, the jumbos still barrel over Manhattan from time to time, but air-traffic controllers make a point to steer them clear whenever possible.
And just as well, too. Now, when one of those rare birds passes over, it's still difficult not to flick a nervous upward glance at the approaching rumble of jet engines. Despite the superficial sheen of daily life, all the certainties are gone but one: the memories still hurt.
And so, as if by common accord, New Yorkers have layered a foggy recollection over the events. It's not that people have forgotten - how could anyone do that? It's that awful images are filtered by necessity and the talk of them is almost always strained and halting.
"It amazes me how we've pulled everything together," said cameraman Jamie Beauchamp. "So quickly the appearance of normal life returned! But that's just the external stuff, the looking-out perspective.
"It's the city's psyche that gives away the changes, and you have to look inside yourself to really see how it's changed us. For me, it was a decision to make the most of whatever time I have left - a lot, I hope. I'd been putting off major dental work for ages, but then I had it done. I'm alive when thousands of people aren't, so I'm going to get the most out of not being dead."
Nor is Beauchamp alone. Dental manager Solum had the same response. Doctors had been at her for years to let them correct the worsening curvature of her spine with a pair of titanium rods. She put it off again and again until a couple of months after September 11.
"Life's too precious to be scared," she said from her bed, where she is spending three painful and sedated months while the surgeons' handiwork heals. "If the attacks taught me anything, it was that the unknown comes to you. When it does, if it does - and, please God, it won't - I don't want to be thinking that my life was about being scared."
How does Solum feel about the coming memorial services? She's dreading them. She allows that they might help grieving families to find that elusive closure the TV shrinks keep talking about, but a short and simple service would be preferable. "It's another day, one more day and every day should be important now," she said.
Still, it might not be too bad. The producers of those upcoming news specials know what they can get away with, know not to tap too large a torrent of tears or unleash the anger sealed inside their vaults of archived footage.
"This isn't the Hindenberg going down - it's not some historical curiosity," said ABC news producer Janet Boyle. "If you live here, then it happened to you, too. Nobody screws with their own sacred stories."
In her case, the key memory is of the telephone call from her husband, Jeff, who works just a short stroll from the disaster scene and was soon swallowed by the chaos that followed. When the call finally came, he told her that he had made it almost all the way to their family home in Brooklyn, just another of the millions of sooty refugees who poured out of Manhattan over the East River bridges.
"His first question was about the kids: were they all right? They were fine, but it's that call I remember most about September 11, the relief when all of us learned that we had made it safe and sound - that matters to me most these days," she said.
"Now, sometimes when we're getting on each other's nerves, I think about it and remember that it's family that I value most. And you know, Jeff made a joke, too, when he reached me. He said it was a lovely, sunny day for a long walk.
"Those animals thought they were destroying us by bringing down a pair of buildings. They didn't. They brought us closer together."
The kids are back now on the West Side ice rink that was pressed into service as a makeshift morgue, as they have been for months, the boys preparing for hockey season and the willowy girls turning pirouettes in their flirty skating skirts.
The chill that greets the visitor comes these days from the ice itself, not from the memories of what once was laid upon the same cold surface to which the living have so eagerly returned.
Memories, at least the ones we share, tend to be presented only in the softest focus. You have to wipe the hard-edged ones away. Not that it's easy, or perhaps ever will be, just that necessity has calibrated the unthinkable according to a comprehensible scale.
It was only three weeks ago that some plumbers working on a nearby apartment building's rooftop water tank found a human rib and a short link of vertebra, the flesh gone, the rest of the person to whom those bones belonged long since reduced to atoms and ash.
It was the same with so many others whose bodies were never to be recovered. They are with the other ghosts whose remains could never be matched with family snapshots, even in many cases with the bar-coded twists of DNA that were culled from the combs and toothbrushes of the dead. It's not much of a testament to a human life: some flakes of dandruff, a few frayed threads of dental floss fished from a trash can. But of so very many, that is all that remains, a buff envelope of relics in a drawer full of scores just like it. The drawers are shut now, as are the memories of their contents, the identification process all but over.
The discovery of those rooftop bones - they had been blasted four blocks from where the World Trade Centre once stood - rated a fleeting mention in the papers, punctuating the columns of briefs about the most recent murder in Bed-Stuy and the latest problem to have stalled another rush-hour commute.
Those urban mishaps are easy to slot into a nice, neat, pre-prepared pigeonhole of the Big Apple's imagination. Where else would a young black man with a sock full of crack vials be gunned down but in that particular part of Brooklyn? Who but an out-of-towner could be surprised by another mass-transit snafu?
But human bones on Tar Beach, the asphalt-covered roofs where the locals take the sun and pretend that doing without the sand and water is a worthwhile sacrifice for the pleasure of living in the capital of the world?
Well, that's another matter altogether. Old bones demolish the delusion of invulnerability the city has been trying so hard to reconstruct. So the gruesome discovery was glossed over. Just one more ghost to be exorcised.
For some, however, the day and its aftermath were too much to bury and ignore. Keen to get some first-person quotes from a volunteer at the site, I tried to reach a fellow journalist called Susan Forest, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for news reporting in 1982 and deserved it for her intensity alone. She is famous in New York press circles for once dropping a U-turn in the narrow Midtown tunnel (something only a lunatic or the most committed police reporter would attempt) when her office beeper summoned her to a breaking story.
Working freelance at the time of the attacks, she contributed some reporting from the scene to a number of papers and then went back as a volunteer, treating the exhausted searchers and excavators to coffee and a smile when they shuffled into the emergency kitchen at the site.
And then, when the big dig was over, she simply fell apart. Unlike her fellow New Yorkers, who have soothed their wounds with shopping and selective memory, Forest could neither blur the details nor bury the worst of what she saw at Ground Zero.
It came as a shock to learn that she was dead.
She drove to see her mother down South and made her farewells, an old beau said last week. Then she swallowed a handful of pills, lay down on the bed and ended it. Forest was a final victim.
Let's hope the sun was shining when they laid her to rest. She deserved it for the light she brought to Ground Zero. But for the rest of us, come September 11 and all the other reminders, we'd appreciate a little more bad weather to match the day.
Story archives:
Links: Terror in America - the Sept 11 attacks
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
New Yorkers making the most of each day
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