The wind began to blow at exactly 8:46 a.m., when the city was hushed for a frozen minute of silence. The wind was fierce and sudden, driving from the west across harbor and river, pushing violently through the spaces between buildings.

The wind streamed into the 16 acres where the World Trade Center once stood. It turned an American flag attached to a construction crane into a flat, colored rectangle. It made flags lashed to buildings flap and billow and strain against their cords. Hats flew off. Old people held onto the young. The wind blew without remorse, indifferent to the speaking of the names of the dead.


"Gordon M. Aamoth Jr.," former Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in a low-key voice. "Edelmiro Abad. Maria Rosa Abad ..."

The wind lifted the names out of the hearing of strangers. On the 10th floor of 2 World Financial Center, the wind attacked the improvised tents above the heads of the media and tried to turn them into sails. Crews struggled frantically to pull down the tents, afraid that cameras would be knocked off their ledge onto people below on West St. The wind paused as they labored, then returned with greater ferocity. Someone said it was blowing at 40 knots.

Down in the foundation of the destroyed World Trade Center, relatives of those who died a year ago were coming forward to drop roses in a ring called the Circle of Honor. The wind created swirling dust devils in the earth beneath their feet.

The names went on. Many were in multiples, two, three, four with the same last names. Brennans and Browns. Two named Burns, five named Campbell, two each of Collins and Colon. A visitor moved two blocks through somber crowds and the voices were naming two Farrells and three called Fernandez, and then a long time passed and they were naming three Rosenbaums, two Rosenbergs, two Rosenblums, two Rosenthals. All joined in the whirl of dust and roses.

Litany of lives

The names had a growing accumulative power, each name forcing a human identity on the coldness of statistics. Each name evoked, even in strangers, the density of each life. A name was spoken into the wind, and you could imagine lives made of joy or anguish or intense complexity, of sumptuous dinners and laughter, of biology homework and worries about mortgages and wrecked dreams of journeys to Italy. For most of us, the names listed strangers, while also telling us they were more than mere strangers, they were us.

And then the wind seemed to become an essential part of this day of remembrance. It was as if it were lifting all that anguish out of the pit, out of the earth, out of the hearts of all mourners and dispersing it into the sparkling air.

A cleansing wind. A liberating wind. Once more at this site, this open New York wound, we saw a cloud of dust, this time coming from nature and not from the murderous hearts of addled men. The wind blew and the dust rose above us all, now moving north, toward Tribeca and SoHo and the Village, toward Chelsea and Times Square, toward all those places on our granite island where wolves howled in forests when men and women first came to live in Cortlandt St.

Some of the mourners grabbed a handful of dust. It was as if they believed it held some forgotten molecules of the people they had lost, and they would take that handful of dust with them for the trip through all the years to come.

On the TV monitors you could see some people weeping. Old men wept for their lost children. Men and women wept for the women and men they'd loved, and then had lost forever. Children squirmed, and stretched, and looked somber, as if still baffled by what had happened to them. It seemed invasive to be watching any of them. Grief is to be felt, not performed.

And so it felt time to go, to wander north with the wind at my back. I saw a black couple wandering through the stone and grass of the Irish Famine Memorial, and groups wearing T-shirts that bore the names of victims. A lone woman in her 40s stood in the lee of a building and wept.

The morning had been free of rhetoric, free of politicians wanting to impose meaning on the event. That was a good thing. And so was weeping. So was letting it all just flow into the New York morning.

The meaning of a year

I stopped at City Hall restaurant on Duane St. and talked for a while with my friend Henry Mier about the components of the great Jewish traditions of mourning: sitting shivah, where you surrender to the invincibility of death for seven days; sheloshim, for another 30 days, remembering the dead as they were in life, and then a mourning period of 11 months until the one-year anniversary called Yahrzeit. The prayer of mourning is called Kaddish.

Mier was saying that the understanding of Yahrzeit is that "now we must get on with our lives." And still we must pray. He went to the basement of his restaurant and came back with a Hebrew prayer book and showed me a prayer for Yizkor, a memorial service. The words of the old Jewish poet were apt for a New York that has reached Yahrzeit and is getting on with life. The words, of course, acknowledge the mercies of the Lord:

He knows how we are fashioned, remembers that we are dust.
Our days are as grass: we flourish as a flower in the field.
The wind passes over it, and it is gone.
And no one can recognize where it grew ...

Even for those who do not believe, that's a prayer fit for a day of wind and dust, of memory and forgetting. Outside on Church St., you saw women pushing babies in strollers and men eating ice cream cones and schoolgirls flirting with boys in Allen Iverson jerseys. Taxis honked for passage. A homeless man sipped wine against the pole of a telephone booth. Yahrzeit. Our days are as grass.