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.

Six years ago, terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 New Yorkers in the process, and ripping a hole in our skyline that has yet to be healed. That day, the global normalcy that London, Jerusalem, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo and Berlin are familiar with visited these shores, and is now here to stay.

The question before us today is this: what's the meaning of this event, and how do we best memorialize and commemorate it? Is it like this?

What is appropriate? Is it appropriate for Rudy Giuliani to pimp the dead of 9/11 in a bid for the White House? Is it, for that matter, appropriate for the young republicans to scream terrorism when they're accosted at a bar, more or less (no, it's not)?

What is appropriate, frankly, is to point out one stark fact: the man who ordered, by his own admission, the attack on New York is still free. Osama bin Laden remains beyond the reach of American justice.