Everyone's writing their personal 9/11 stories today, Phil Anderson, Robert Harding, and I'm sure there are many more such examples. It seems incumbent on us New Yorkers to take the day and make it somehow especially meaningful, to take a step out of the ordinary and then think about what happened, and what it may all mean.

The truth of the matter is that today was for me a superficially perfectly normal day, maybe a little more hectic, since I'd been invited to that Service Forum we mentioned earlier, and had to finish today's agenda with some hours fewer than are normally available. And of course, I'm always behind; my apologies to today's crop of poison-pen email authors, I haven't gotten to your various grievances yet, and probably won't.

The year after it happened - you didn't even use to have define what you meant by it, so heavily laden was the collective memory - I took the camera down to the site, and shot some of what I believe are the best pictures I've ever taken, with my new camera, the one that I bought to capture and preserve the suddenly endangered landscape of the City, my home.

A year after that, I again took the camera down to the Trade Center site - which I think all of us would appreciate finally being not a site, but an actual tower again, thank you very much - and took some more photos; nothing really spectacular. In 2004, I spent the day campaigning against George Bush, in my mind the best memorial to the tragic mass murders possible to make. In 2005, if memory serves, I spent the day launching a web site about the heroes of the day and their stories. The year after that, 9/11 fell on the eve of the bitter NY-11 primary; the Chris Owens campaign did a memorial event, something tasteful and subdued that also provided a forum for Lynn Woolsey and the incomparable Maxine Waters.

In 2007, I'm not even sure what I did.

And today, I finished two tactical memos, worked on a larger strategic plan, thought out budgets, sent an invoice, published a couple of blog posts, had a conference call, some other business calls, and proceeded to dash from Williamsburg to SoHo to Columbia. Very mundane, the present milestone of a journey that has moved from the deeply emotionally wrenching into today's pedestrian non-observance.

Is there meaning to all that, to what in retrospect looks like a journey into normalcy, whatever that is? Probably not. But apparently, even the sharpest grief in time subsides into the fabric of daily existence. That's not the same thing as forgetfulness, far from it; speaking just for myself, I'm not capable of forgetting that day. It still strikes too near. But this year, I'm content to revisit my grief in private, at the end of the day, by myself.