"Gordon M. Aamoth Jr.," reads Rudolph Giuliani, starting the roll call just before 9 a.m. One by one, the families lay the flowers until they form a giant O, precisely at ground zero. Someone digs a hole in the dust and plants a small flag in the middle of the O. There are elegant women wearing black; burly guys in shirts with giant flags and cut-off sleeves; tiny, weeping mothers with babies in their strollers. Many have brought pictures of their loved ones. It feels as if a cross-section of America is here. The rescue crews are here too, the firemen, the iron workers and a dog named Lacey that can sense a building's instability.

At 10:29 a.m., the roll call stops, and the harbour boats sound their horns in a long, low, eerie elegy. The roll call resumes, and some time after 11 it finishes with Igor Zukelman, No. 2,801.

From time to time, the people in the crowd look up to the sky -- blue and clear, but not as blue as on this day last year. Some of them are probably remembering the way the sky looked then.

Perhaps they're remembering the two people who joined their hands that day and fell to earth from the fiery sky.

"Bright, beautiful fall days bother me," says Laurel Nickson, who is watching the ceremony from her office window, five floors above ground zero. "It angers me that they've spoiled those days for us."

There will be a permanent memorial at this site some day, if anyone can agree what it should be. Meantime, there are the ones the people themselves made. The iron workers found some girders in the wreckage welded like a giant cross. So they made a concrete base for it, and now it guards ground zero. They also found a battered sculpture that once stood in the plaza between the towers. Now it's in a nearby park, another found memorial. It is a fractured, dented globe.

Across the street, the graceful wrought-iron fence around St. Paul's Church has been transformed into a giant folk art installation. The fence is overlaid with homemade banners and posters, T-shirts from other fire departments, teddy bears, hats, flowers, strings of origami cranes, poems and prayers. It's a little kitschy and immeasurably moving. Almost all the sentiments expressed are peaceful ones. "Amplify love, dissipate hate." "Do not blame too quickly or others will suffer as we have." If America is in a vengeful mood, there's no sign of it here.

St. Paul's was where the rescue workers on 12-hour shifts came to eat and sleep from September until June. It dates from 1766. It was inexplicably untouched by the falling debris, and for nine months it was the rescue crews' sanctuary. Today they have come back to embrace old friends and laugh and reminisce. Some of them pray. It has the feel of a reunion, a thankful, almost joyful one.

"We'd come sleep on these cots and catch two hours of sleep," says Tony Mastrelli, a burly New York firefighter in full-dress uniform who volunteered to work last winter at ground zero. "It was the only place you could forget about things."

"They'd have a little service here at noon, and you could reflect on the whole surreal thing," says Tim Jones, who worked the shifts with him.

"It made it a little bit easier," says Tony.

"You're looking for closure . . ." says Tim.

"But there isn't any closure," says Tony, finishing his former partner's sentence for him. "We still got funerals going on."

That's New York for you these days -- a city where burly firemen throw around words such as closure without blinking. But it would be a mistake to think the city is transfixed by mourning. Life goes on. Yesterday was a normal working day for most. The stock exchange showed respect by staying closed until 11. The street hawkers were peddling their usual array of astonishingly tacky World Trade Center souvenirs, and guitarist buskers did good business playing for pocket change. Just outside ground zero, people snap pictures of a man dressed in a flag suit from head to toe. The street theatre never stops. Two blocks from ground zero, someone from the New York Soaring Towers Coalition waves a petition. He wants to build more giant buildings where the WTC once stood. What for? The symbolism?

"Not really," he says. "It's because of the economy. People used to spend a lot of money there." By noon, most people had had enough of death and mourning and remembrance and were back to work.

If the United States is on heightened terrorist alert, you'd never know it here. On the subway, I met a woman who had brought her two-year-old from Queens to see ground zero. Her daughter wore a tiny T-shirt that said: "America, Land That I Love."

"We've been on terrorist alert since last September," she shrugged. "Nothing stops New York."