For the first time in six years, Sept. 11 fell on a Tuesday, the same day the planes flew into the buildings and changed everything.<\/p>\n
Yet much was different at the increasingly familiar ceremony in Lower Manhattan, where families of the dead, public officials and visitors gathered to mourn and remember.<\/p>\n
Unlike the awful, brilliant day of the attacks, this year\u2019s skies were moody and dark, alternately threatening and delivering rain. The ceremony took place not at ground zero, where construction cranes now rise like tentative fingers of hope, but near its southeastern corner, in Zuccotti Park.<\/p>\n
The families began trickling in at 7 a.m., some clutching bouquets of flowers, others holding heart-shaped balloons, eventually filling the park by the hundreds and taking refuge from sporadic drizzle under a sea of dark umbrellas.<\/p>\n
And then, as it has for five years before, the remembrance ceremony assumed its recognizable form. At 8:40 a.m., the Brooklyn Youth Chorus took the stage, and sang \u201cThe Star-Spangled Banner,\u201d\u009d their voices sounding like angels as mourners held aloft photos of people who, to them, are angels now, too. Afterward, the drummer for the New York Police Department marching band sounded a mournful heartbeat, and then the bagpipers began.<\/p>\n
At 8:46 a.m., the moment the first plane struck the North Tower, a bell was sounded, as it has for six years now, and the gathered masses bowed their heads.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn that day, we felt isolated, but not for long, and not from each other,\u201d\u009d Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said. \u201cNew Yorkers rushed to the site, not knowing which place was safe or if there was more danger ahead. They weren\u2019t sure of anything except that they had to be here. Six years have passed, and our place is still by your side.\u201d\u009d In Washington, unlike previous anniversaries of the attack, President Bush spent the day in the city after attending a service at St. John\u2019s Episcopal Church and holding a moment of silence on the South Lawn of the White House.<\/p>\n