I went to New York nine years ago to report on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and found a city that was not only moving forward, but one that had never stopped.
New York City is an extraordinary place. Generations of Americans and millions of foreign immigrants have been thrilled by its kinetic energy, its opportunities for exploration and reinvention.
But, being one of the city's upstate cousins, we don't always appreciate its greatness. Sometimes, we even resent the place. But 10 years ago, you could not feel anything but grief for the casualties and admiration for the resilience of the survivors.
The terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers did not bring New York to its knees. Even as the towers burned, and fell, hundreds of New Yorkers were rushing toward Ground Zero, to help in any way they could.
That very day, New York began to recover and rebuild. By a year later, what was most remarkable about
the city was the way everyone was going about their business, hustling and honking, showing up and showing off.
New York, with its gaping wound, was still New York.
I walked and rode all over downtown Manhattan that day, from the subways to the Staten Island ferry to the top of the Empire State Building.
Everywhere, people were moving with a purpose, getting to work, whether on Wall Street or simply on the street, where they sold paintings or souvenirs or hot dogs.
No one was frozen in fear. No one cringed when planes went over. But no one was forgetting, either.
A man getting on the ferry from Staten Island to Manhattan turned pale and walked away after telling me he had been on the ferry that morning a year before and had seen the first plane go screaming overhead.
A New York firefighter and his wife and son stood at the rail of the ferry as we glided into Manhattan, talking about the gap in the skyline where the towers had stood.
Tourists atop the Empire State Building, once again the city's tallest skyscraper, gazed through coin-operated binoculars and peered down the scores of floors to the street, from which sounds rose up, the moan of a siren, the clamor of a jackhammer.
A man talked about his son, who had worked in one of the towers and had escaped but who had changed, growing distant, separating from his wife, staying holed up in his house outside the city.
The scars were there, but, except for the hole at Ground Zero, where the cleanup was proceeding, they were hard to spot. Few people were injured in the attacks. They either died or they survived uninjured and the dead had been buried months before.
New Yorkers were, and are, left to deal in their own time with difficult memories and painful loss.
Meanwhile, thousands of new arrivals flood into the city each year, adding to the energy that pulses in the streets and cannot be cut off, not even by an event as traumatic as Sept. 11.
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