One year after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade

Center and the Pentagon killed 3,025 people, plunging the

United States into war and a suddenly fearsome future, the

country today marks the anniversary of 9/11 in countless

public ceremonies and private moments, expressions of

patriotism and what for some is a deep desire to turn the

page.

Even as new intelligence information and threats of

terrorism reminiscent of ones detected a year earlier

prompted the Bush administration yesterday to put the

country on high alert, Americans are going ahead with plans

for memorial services, bagpipe processions, peace vigils,

prayer services, tree plantings and commemorations of every

imaginable sort.

way skyward. There will be cannon volleys and 21-gun

salutes and choirs singing Mozart's Requiem from one time

zone to the next in a "rolling requiem" circling the globe.

In New York City, the daylong observance includes a

citywide moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., when the first

plane hit the trade center, and church bells will toll at

10:29 a.m., when the second tower collapsed. Relatives of

many of the 2,801 trade center victims will carry roses

onto the site. President Bush will address the country from

Ellis Island at 9 p.m. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is urging

everyone to light a candle at 7:12 p.m., sundown.

At the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., more than 13,000 people

are expected to turn out for a memorial ceremony at the

Phoenix Project construction site, where workers are still

repairing the section of building that was damaged. There,

too, there will be a moment of silence, as well as the

national anthem, a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance

and an Air Force flyover.

While some offices and workplaces are expected to close,

many people wanted to work. Some said they would mark the

anniversary quietly, in personal ways on the job. Kristin

Liggett, a 25-year-old trail boss for Fort Worth Herd, a

tourist attraction made up of longhorn cattle in Fort

Worth, said she would use the day, silently, to remind

herself not to take things for granted.

J. Mark Scearce, a resident composer at the University of

Southern Maine School of Music in Gorham, who is to perform

a commissioned piece for horn and piano that is one of

three pieces he wrote in response to 9/11, said he did not

expect to stay afterward to hear a performance of Requiem

because he was assuming that he would want to be alone.

"I just anticipate feelings that inspired these works of

mine, which is complete and utter devastation," said Mr.

Scearce, 41. "I'm going to be by myself. I'll probably sit

under a tree and cry."

The Bush administration's elevated terrorism alert

yesterday prompted Mayor Bloomberg to hold a hastily

arranged news conference to assure New Yorkers that the

state was not the subject of any particular threat, that

the city had been on high alert since last September and

that its commemoration events would go as planned.

"I think the most important thing is that we not allow the

terrorists' primary weapon, which is fear, to take away our

confidence, to take away our freedom, to take away the

strength and courage we have shown over the past year," Mr.

Bloomberg said.

He added, "No state is better prepared or more organized to

prevent and respond to any attack than the state of New

York."

In an earlier interview, he suggested that the Sept. 11

anniversary should be seen as an opportunity not only to

reflect on what had been lost but also to set aside

grieving and move forward. While he said he understood that

the sorrow would not end for some people, he suggested that

the city would benefit if the rest could put the experience

behind them.

In New Orleans, the Gumbo Krewe, a group of Louisianans who

made a pilgrimage to New York last year to pass out free

Louisiana cuisine to police officers, firefighters and

other workers at ground zero, will distribute free gumbo at

a renovated warehouse where the Contemporary Arts Center is

exhibiting 175 homemade missing-persons fliers from New

York after Sept. 11.

Richard Weir, a 49-year-old captain in the Fort Worth Fire

Department who is a second-generation firefighter and spent

seven days at ground zero in mid-September, said he had

plans to spend part of today with other firefighters and

some American Airlines pilots framing a house for Habitat

for Humanity, "in honor of the firefighters and the people

that were killed."

At the Washington National Cathedral, Desmond Tutu,

archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, will preach at a service

attended by, among others, ambassadors from the more than

30 countries that lost citizens in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Tutu will be interrupted by the tolling of the

cathedral's bell four times, at each of the moments when

the four highjacked planes crashed.

There will be prayers offered by Hindus, Buddhists,

Muslims, Jews, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Sikhs,

Catholics, Methodists and Greek Orthodox worshipers.

Students at the National Cathedral School for Girls and the

St. Albans School for Boys will carry the flags of the

affected countries in a procession led by a bagpiper.

Some anniversary events center on trade center artifacts

and debris.

For example, two steel beams from ground zero, donated to

the city of Albuquerque, N.M., to be incorporated into a

new bell tower for the Sacred Heart Church in that city,

are to be carried to the city's Civic Plaza, then returned

to the church to be on view during a 6 p.m. Mass and a

concert by the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra.

Elsewhere, New York firefighters are the centerpiece.

Nine members of Engine Company 73 and Ladder Company 42 in

the Bronx are to be flown by chartered plane to Fairfield,

Me., to be honored in a memorial ceremony at the Lawrence

High School football stadium, where 3,000 people are

expected, including a Maine contestant on the television

show "Survivor," who wrote a poem for the event.

Victims' names are to be read aloud in New York City,

Washington, Birmingham, Ala., and other places. Doves are

to be released in San Bernardino, Calif. In Alabama,

political advertising is to be suspended. In Fountain

Valley, Calif., Cheriday Heckman will be the host of a

cul-de-sac dinner as a way of bringing together 45 of her

neighbors in remembrance.

Yesterday in New York, tourists and journalists milled

around ground zero. A preacher hectoring the crowd carried

a sign making the claim, "The winds of the end of time are

blowing." The Brooklyn Bridge was briefly closed to traffic

in one direction after the police stopped a green van and

took two men in for questioning, but the authorities said

they did not believe that there was a link to terrorism.

Far from Lower Manhattan or the Pentagon or the field in

Shanksville, Pa., where one of the four hijacked planes

crashed, at least a few people admitted in recent days to

wondering exactly what they ought to be feeling as Sept. 11

approached.

"A lot of people are wondering how much they should make

out of it, and don't know exactly what to do," said Criss

Roberts, lifestyle editor at The Hawk Eye, a regional

newspaper in Burlington, Iowa.

She said some had asked "whether we need to be trotting out

our firefighters and all that." One year after 9/11, she

said, it seemed as if "we are borrowing someone else's

grief."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/11/nyregion/11YEAR.html