My cocoacolored shirt was flecked with white ash, like birdshit, when I turned in to my daughter's school Parents crowded the lobby, many picking up their children to take them home. To my way of thinking, school seemed as safe a place for Lily as our house; I saw no reason to take her out prematurely. Cheryl was standing by the door of the multipurpose room, waiting for Lily's class to leave at the end of dance period. When she came out, Lily seemed happily surprised to see me, in midday; I hugged her. She trooped off to her next activity. Cheryl milled around with the other mothers and some of the fathers, who had returned from the financial district: they were all comparing personal accounts, and engaging in that compulsively repetitious dialogue by which an enormity is made real. A few days later my wife reproached me for having shown up with ash laden clothing, my shirttails left untucked. She said I could have frightened the children. I replied that I didn't think anyone had even noticed me. But, on some level, her reproach was justified: I was indulging the fantasy of being invisible, I was not being a team player. Some sort of communal bonding had started taking place, foreign to me, beautiful in many respects, scary in others. My wife and I both felt anguished that day and all week, but it was an anguish we could not share. The fault was mine: selfishly, I wanted to nurse my grief at what had been done to my city. I mistrusted any attempt to coopt me into groupthink, even conjugal think. That New York was the primary target I had no doubt. I felt so identified with my native city that it took a mental wrenching to understand all of America considered itself assaulted. I knew, of course, that the Pentagon had been hit and another plane had gone down in a Pennsylvania field, but I chose to see it as an attack on the values of urban ism, vertical density, secular humanism, skepticism, women's rights, and mass transit. The American flags that started appearing everywhere may ave been fitting ways to honor the heroic local firemen and police who died in the line of duty, but the only banner I wanted to fly from my 46 THE WEST SIDE brownstone window was the orange, green, and white flag of New York City, with its clunky Dutchman and beaver. People claim that the city will be changed forever by this attack. It is easy to say, less easy to understand exactly how. New York's history has not exactly been a stranger to tragedy. A few days after September n, I notice subway riders being unusually polite to each other, whether out of communal solidarity and respect for human life, or from wariness of the Other's potential rage, I cannot say. That nuance has faded. No New Yorker expected America's warm feelings toward the city to last very long; it was like getting licked by a large, forgetful St. Bernard dog. Meanwhile, the towers that anchored Lower Manhattan are gone, pfft. I ask myself how I have been changed personally.