A few weeks ago one of the regular readers of this column e-mailed me and commented that my tone was always on the somber side.

I mentioned this to Tripp, who cocked his left eyebrow and looked at me askance. Was I not, after all, one of the somber Tombers? He has often noted that my sense of humor is, at best, truncated. I am capable of wit but not rollicking humor, not easily able to discern between a tease and direct declaration of dislike.

For God's sake! I am of German/Swedish descent, born in the American Midwest, nurtured in a Catholic school environment, in Minnesota, not a background that nourished a sense of humor.

Humor is not my element. An occasional flash of wit, yes.

But in an effort to be sensitive to readers and to outside criticism [something that speaks to the German/Swedish/Catholic/American Midwest thing] I have attempted to focus the last few columns on the brighter side of things. There was the roast of Larry Divney, a raucous, lovely event that spoke, at the end of the day, of innocence times and innocent hearts. I have written of the CINE Awards, a celebration of artistic passion expressed in film and video.

However, I live; we live, in somber times.

We live in the days that are post 9/11, post the collapse of symbolic towers in a city that has always been symbolic.

We live in a day when every hiccup in the Mideast means an exegesis in the newspapers here of whether this city is more or less of a target for suicide bomber attacks as a result of this or that policy decision of Mr. Sharon, especially if it involves the execution of a Palestinian leader.

These are the things with which I must live. These are the things with which we must all live, if we live here in New York.

It was also said to me that perhaps I was more somber because I lived in New York, which, because of what has happened here, is, now, of a different spirit than other parts of America.

Tonight, walking down South End Avenue to my apartment building, I looked at the people sitting outside in one of the first warm nights we have had, sipping their drinks and smoking as night fell on New York, thinking: we wait. We wait for today, or next week, or next month or next year or next decade but we wait, pensive, thinking that at some moment we will hear a loud explosion…

At dinner parties and cocktail parties, after a couple of drinks, we talk about the fact we fear we are waiting…

We have an often unarticulated but real and visceral fear that we live on the edge of something we are not in control of and which is larger than us - and which is far from what most people experience in this country.

In turn, I am far away from the day-to-day realities of the producer with whom I am working, who is in Iraq and who sent me an e-mail today outlining his life there, which includes incoming mortars at irregular intervals, the sound of which are like nothing else he has heard. Once one hears a mortar it is too late to do anything but pray it will not land too close. In the short three weeks Brent has been there, ten of the company he is following have died which has left the survivors shattered, understandably.

There are degrees of things. Here in New York I live in one degree of life and waiting. Brent in Baghdad lives and waits in another. Out there, beyond the Hudson, outside the Beltway, beyond the neatly repaired Pentagon, there is another level of living and waiting.

A cab driver I had this morning was waiting, waiting, he said, "for things to come back to normal." But I no longer think we will ever know that normal again. We will learn to live in the world in which we now exist, a time of discord, waiting for what will come next, whatever it may be.