On 9/11/2001, my day began with Tripp phoning me and asking me: do you know what's going on? Fresh from my shower, in preparation for a conference call with Brazil, I had no idea what was going on until I did as Tripp suggested and turned on the television.

The first plane had struck the first building. Still dripping from the shower, I pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and went out onto the street, to be met with the first of the thousand images of that day that will remain with me until I die.

There is, forever, the face of the man walking down Spring Street, hand over his mouth, his eyes cast down. When I saw him, I knew that whatever I saw when I rounded the corner would be worse than I thought it would be. And it was.

The first tower was burning and up West Broadway was streaming the first of the day's refugees. They were stunned, or crying, or both.

There are stories and images that haunt me - or, actually, simply live with me as testaments of the reality of being human. There is the frightening picture of the bodies falling from the Towers, individuals who threw themselves into the air and to their death as that was a death preferable to being incinerated alive by the flames of the day.

There is another story that has remained with me since my reading about it in the New York Times. It is the story of a man who worked on one of the upper floors of the buildings. He was confined to a wheel chair and when the elevators failed and everyone around him evacuated; one man remained with him, a friend, a colleague. They remained together, waiting: either to be rescued or to die together. But neither was alone.

I don't know their names. I only know their story and it has remained with me from the time I read it. I put down the Times and wept.

When I think of it now I feel a deep pain that will remain with me. If I were the man in the wheelchair I think I would have done as he did: urge everyone to flee. But one man would not leave his friend, his colleague, his fellow human being to face catastrophe alone. Together they waited, for saviors or for death.

It was death that found them. But it is the story that most encapsulates for me the courage that was shown that day. It is the courage of the firefighters that went up as the buildings went down. It is the courage of the people who helped one another.

It is the story and the image that lives with me and is the quintessential, to me, story of 9/11. The courage shown by the man who remained and the man who urged him to go was the streak of courage that permeated that day and was evidenced all across the city.

It was the caring that was demonstrated by the women on the bus I rode that day that stopped a driver when they saw a very elderly man, confused and dazed. The women stopped the driver, the bus and carried the man on board and he became that bus's cause. He was gotten home, handed from caring stranger to caring stranger.

9/11 was a day of caring strangers. It is a spirit that remains in the city.

I was away on the 10th on a business trip and I scurried to be back in the city. It was, it seemed to me, only right and proper that I be here. I will probably feel that pull for a long time, probably for the rest of my life.

Who I am today is partly because of my experience of that day, that time.

Like most of the city, I paused but did not stop yesterday. I listened to the recitation of the dead on the radio and watched some of the ceremonies on television and found my mind wandering at moments as I went about my business.

Returning home last evening, the Towers of Light, burned into the night, evoking what was gone and what will not return. But as they burned, they evoke not only loss but also hope.

Hope is one the driving forces of humans and New York is a city fueled by hope.