Dan Rather NEW YORK CITY:
IN TIMES Square, final preparations are under way for the annual New Year's Eve celebration - tons of confetti, gallons of champagne on ice and one very large Waterford Crystal ball set to make its way earthward in the last minute of 2003.
While hundreds of thousands of tourists and other revellers gather at the Cross-roads of the World to welcome the new year, native New Yorkers will be greeting 2004 from their own spiritual cross-roads.
More than two years have passed since this city endured the worst day in its more than 350 years of history. And there was a brief stretch - sometime between the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the second, more subdued marking of that infamous day - when the harshest of those horrible memories had begun to fade for many, if not most, New Yorkers. No one, mark well, had forgotten. But the visceral sense of danger and anxiety, that sickness in the gut and in the heart of this city, had finally begun to heal.
In recent weeks and months, though, so many things that the tides of time had swept away have started once again to wash up on the shores of New Yorkers' consciousness, bearing powerful and painful memories.
Last week ended with a vision of redemption, as New York Gov. George Pataki unveiled a model for Freedom Tower, the planned centrepiece of a new World Trade Centre already well under construction at Lower Manhattan's Ground Zero. The 1,776-foot tower will restore a sense of balance absent from that famous skyline since the towers fell.
But the week began on a sadder note, as the city mourned the first New York City fire-fighter to die by fire since Sept. 11, 2001. That more than two years should pass without such a death only served to underscore, once again, the staggering toll of one day.
And so the nation's largest city has found itself caught between future and past. The commuter rail station within the Trade Centre reopened recently, to rave reviews. Nevertheless, many passengers were seen weeping openly at the naked sight of Ground Zero's dirt and dust just outside the station's windows. Last month, the final round of design proposals for the Ground Zero memorial was criticised by some for leaning too heavily on metaphor while insufficiently acknowledging the dreadful truths of 9/11. Then, last week, one of those dreadful truths was on display for all to see on the front page of The New York Times: a crushed New York Fire Department (NYFD) ladder truck, rusting along with other large artefacts of the attack in a hangar at Kennedy Airport.
New Yorkers are learning how to come to terms with their shared civic memories. What has become clear through the heavy, voluntary public involvement in the World Trade Centre rebuilding - at times welcomed, at times not, always impossible to ignore - is just how much these memories continue to mean to a city that lost so much. There is a heavy emotional investment here in getting those memories down right. It is an effort that, though borne willingly, inevitably brings its own share of weariness.
As New Yorkers look to 2004, they know the reminders will keep coming, with a May deadline for the final report of the official 9/11 inquiry, and with plans for Gov. Pataki to lay the cornerstone for the new Freedom Tower on the third anniversary of the attacks. The past will continue to bleed into the present, even as this city casts its eyes to the future.
Dan Rather is a television news anchor.Copyright 2003 DJR Inc. Distributed by King Features Syndicate
