After the towers fell, old friends in Morgantown started

calling: Are you safe? Where were you when it happened? Did you — here, they

often paused, barely able to comprehend the thought — see it?

To that last one, yes. I live in Brooklyn, just across the

harbor from lower Manhattan, and after the second tower was struck, I walked a

few blocks to a small waterfront park near a hospital, where I and 50 or so of

my fellow New Yorkers watched as the first tower collapsed. At that point, it

became obvious to us that the second would, too, eventually; I actually began

to get sick to my stomach, and decided I didn't want to see it live. I walked

home. The prevailing winds that day were southeasterly, which is to say, right

at me, and by the time I got to my apartment — say, six minutes — my arms were

covered in ash.

All the clichés about national unity, about Americans

discarding their usual animosity toward New York and agreeing that we'd become

one people, were, at the time, true. My childhood friends, Stuey and Goose and

the others, were every bit as shaken as I was. In the larger world, Southern

conservative senators not previously known for their enthusiasm for sending

money to New York City ponied up; staffers for Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions

brought Hillary Clinton's people sandwiches and helped them answer phones. And

New Yorkers themselves, in their horror and anger, were united, which even from

the vantage point of Charleston you can guess is not something that happens

often.

Now? The cliché still gets plenty of air time — under

circumstances like these, the mass media want to establish a story line that is

watch the political process and maneuver around this city is different. When

President Bush blocks a $5.1 billion spending package, some of which was for

improved communications equipment for New York firefighters, it's hardly going

out on a limb to observe that the usual push-and-pull of domestic politics has

reasserted itself. And as far as New Yorkers are concerned, well, obviously,

those who lost a loved one or who experienced the terror first-hand still must

After the towers fell, old friends in Morgantown started

calling: Are you safe? Where were you when it happened? Did you — here, they

often paused, barely able to comprehend the thought — see it?

To that last one, yes. I live in Brooklyn, just across the

harbor from lower Manhattan, and after the second tower was struck, I walked a

few blocks to a small waterfront park near a hospital, where I and 50 or so of

my fellow New Yorkers watched as the first tower collapsed. At that point, it

became obvious to us that the second would, too, eventually; I actually began

to get sick to my stomach, and decided I didn't want to see it live. I walked

home. The prevailing winds that day were southeasterly, which is to say, right

at me, and by the time I got to my apartment — say, six minutes — my arms were

covered in ash.

All the clichés about national unity, about Americans

discarding their usual animosity toward New York and agreeing that we'd become

one people, were, at the time, true. My childhood friends, Stuey and Goose and

the others, were every bit as shaken as I was. In the larger world, Southern

conservative senators not previously known for their enthusiasm for sending

money to New York City ponied up; staffers for Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions

brought Hillary Clinton's people sandwiches and helped them answer phones. And

New Yorkers themselves, in their horror and anger, were united, which even from

the vantage point of Charleston you can guess is not something that happens

often.

Now? The cliché still gets plenty of air time — under

circumstances like these, the mass media want to establish a story line that is

watch the political process and maneuver around this city is different. When

President Bush blocks a $5.1 billion spending package, some of which was for

improved communications equipment for New York firefighters, it's hardly going

out on a limb to observe that the usual push-and-pull of domestic politics has

reasserted itself. And as far as New Yorkers are concerned, well, obviously,

those who lost a loved one or who experienced the terror first-hand still must

feel tremendous pain. But as for the rest of us, the attacks are no longer the

Given the constant media drumbeat — there are several 9/11

least impolite, to suggest that things might be more or less back to normal.

But I argue the opposite: Normalcy is good, and needed. The press of life makes

demands of us, a vital one of which is that we survive and carry on. It also

permits us our peculiarities, and among those, surely, is the truth that all of

us heal in our own ways. One man remarries three months after his wife dies;

another mourns for five years. The latter is no nobler than the former. It's

just that they came out of the womb with different emotional equipment, which

they put to use as best they can.

So it has been in New York this past year. At first, the

attacks represented a single, shared tragedy; a great civic cataclysm. But as

time has passed, it has come to feel as though New Yorkers have reacted to the

event more personally; now, there is not so much one overarching narrative as

there are 8 million individual ones. Which means two things. First, that we

have, on some level, gotten back to normal, and second, that there is no

consensus yet about how the attacks affected us (evidence for this can be found

in the robust arguments over what to build — or not — on the World Trade Center

are all too familiar, which is itself a sign of normalcy).

I still think, occasionally, of that ash on my arms, or my old

friends' phone calls that day. And when I see an airplane over the skyline, I

tend to watch it for five or six seconds, just to make sure it seems to be

doing what airplanes are supposed to do. But otherwise, I enjoy this

remarkable, strange, stressful, beautiful place, and I believe that enjoying it

is the best thing all of us, New Yorkers and visitors, can do for it.

Morgantown native Michael Tomasky is a columnist for New York

magazine.