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Someone back East must have forgotten the time difference. They were calling too early on Sept. 11, 2001, to congratulate Jeannie and me on our anniversary. It was my father, crying, crumbling over the phone from Boston. Jeannie, he sobbed, had just been killed.

My wife is an American Airlines flight attendant. She had been flying in and out of Boston's Logan Airport that month, and she and my dad sometimes went jogging together. But that week, we had taken time off to celebrate nine years married, Sept. 11. She wasn't flying. We had met in a blues bar on Manhattan's Upper East Side. We married, had a kid, named her Clara, and in 2000 moved to San Francisco, where you can't get a good bagel. We hung photos of Clara playing in Central Park on our California walls.

Golden brown grew on me. My daughter can surf and orders ``pho'' correctly from Vietnamese menus. My wife does iyengar yoga. She still flies to New York -- is there as I write this. Our rule is she must call me from there. Sometimes I close my eyes and listen less to her voice than the music of taxi horns on Columbus Avenue in the background. We flirt with the idea of going back.

Five years later, writing about Sept. 11 hurts. Many people's opinions and feelings catch my ear like country music: simple, patriotic. But my feelings -- when I'm in the rare mood to think or talk about them -- bang around inside me like Thelonius Monk playing piano drunk on the smoky stage of the Village Vanguard.

I'm Jewish on my mother's side. I'm Arab American on my father's side. My great-grandparents had their name changed from the exotic ``Wehbi'' to ``Webby'' when they arrived from Lebanon on Ellis Island. Perhaps they gawked at the Empire State Building as they came into the harbor, just as Jeannie and I used to gawk at the night skyline from the Staten Island ferry. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

My wife goes 39,000 feet up every week with a bunch of strangers. My ethnic backgrounds clash inside me. And my gritty, poetic city -- where I read Walt Whitman on Brooklyn Bridge and drank in Dylan Thomas' tavern -- is illegible. It's not my story anymore. I guess I'll be drinking champagne Sept. 11. Here's to my marriage. Here's to Manhattan. Here's to the dead and the dying. I don't think Toby Keith is ever going to record that song.

As our daughters played, Daniel Watts and I looked up at the sky. It was one of those diffuse, dreamy Bay Area canvases not seen in New York City. Even on nice days, the New York City sky is a clutter of clouds, factory steam, pigeons, gardens atop brownstones, electronic tickers in Times Square, planes buzzing LaGuardia.

Our anniversary plans were to fly to Seattle. The flights were grounded. So instead, we drove down Interstate 5 to Disneyland. There were no lines. It took us only a few minutes to get on the Mad Tea Party and Aladdin's Oasis. As we were walking around the new Tomorrowland, a loudspeaker asked for a moment of silence. Jeannie and I and Clara, dressed in Belle's yellow dress from Beauty and the Beast, stood still, in the Happiest Place on Earth, with our heads bowed.

Over the next few weeks, I called people in New York. Such rules are unstated, but one was that you were allowed to call anyone during those weeks afterward, even if you didn't know them well.

I called my old next-door neighbor, who was in finance. Although we were not close, I was relieved he was alive. I told him so. He said people in his firm had been on an open phone line with people in a tower right after the crash. They were trying to help -- until the line went dead.

Jeannie knew some of the pilots and flight attendants. Still she flew again as soon as the FAA allowed -- about a week afterward. And still she went through her pre-flight ritual: laying out her flight wings and wedding ring on the kitchen counter the night before.

I woke up that first morning and put her half-empty coffee cup in the sink while she was somewhere up there on her way to Dallas or wherever. She had been quiet so as not to wake us. But I had lain in bed at 4:30 that morning listening: The shower. The sound of bare feet on hardwood floor, and then heels. The door opens. The door shuts. Silence.

For a time, some flight attendants would ``call in scared.'' But Jeannie wasn't scared like that, wasn't scared like me. She didn't vividly imagine getting her throat cut with a box cutter, or smashing into a building and leaving her husband and daughter behind.

A month or so after the attacks, I flew to New York to research Al-Qaida terror suspects for an article. I was nervous on the plane. I found myself sizing up an Indian man sitting near me. He probably sized me up as a violent racist. We both looked away.

As my cab sped through Upper Manhattan, I lowered the window and breathed in my New York -- the smell of hot asphalt, urine and arroz con pollo.

But near the bottom of Manhattan, choking dust hung in the air. Even the hermetically sealed, machine-gun guarded courthouse reeked of an odor like my Auntie Margaret's house after she died.

Joshua Gropper, a college buddy, sneaked me up to the 41st floor of a building to look down on the still-smoking chasm of ground zero. A lot of writers have tried to describe the immensity of the devastation. I knew how big those buildings were. Every once in a while, years ago, my friend Joe Stetich and I would lie on the sidewalk between the 110-story twin towers. The skyscrapers seemed to sway as though they were about to fall.

I had covered the bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993 for a chain of newspapers based in White Plains, N.Y. I grabbed Jeannie -- then my girlfriend -- and we caught a cab down the surrealistically empty West Side Highway as far as the cops would let us go. Then we ran to the giant building puking smoke.

This was not my neighborhood, and these victims were not of my tribe. They were from Westchester County or Hoboken. I scribbled down how scared they were as they blindly groped their way down endless stairs. What a story! Terrorists striking at the heart of the city. I felt jazzed that night, and slept just fine in our apartment on West 82nd Street a dozen subway stops away. I slept more soundly then than I do now in my bed 3,000 miles away.

Right after Sept. 11, kids at my daughter's Yick Wo Elementary School drew pictures of planes and flames and people with Xs for eyes -- falling. We explained it to Clara in that sanitized tone young parents reserve for sex and cigarettes: Bad Men.

My Lebanese great-grandparents made shoes and babies, grew tomatoes, opened a store, invited everyone over for lamb and stuffed peppers and laughed when they drank arak. My great-grandfather let me twirl his handlebar mustache.

Grandfather Herbert Blum went from being a bankrupt grocer to a developer who put up buildings that still stand today in Washington, D.C. -- not far from where the plane crashed into the Pentagon.

A reporter once wrote about my parents during the early '70s, comparing their odd union to the Suez Canal. They later divorced, for non-political reasons, negotiating uneasy terms over their Arab-Jewish-American confused children.

For months, I saw the Sept. 11 Commission Report in bookstores but never touched it. No problem. Then one day, I decided a cool-headed synthesis might help exorcise my demons. I picked it up in a library and peeked at the introduction: ``Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.'' That's all it took. I rushed to the wall of the new non-fiction section so no one could see me, and broke into tears. I didn't take the book out and haven't looked at it since.

The pizza was as good as ever, eaten religiously -- folded, point first. But the city? It seemed as cold and alien to me as Helsinki. I pretended I still belonged, as though the scar was mine. But I was a tourist -- not different from the guy wearing a NYFD T-shirt and a knock-off Rolex he bought on Canal Street, the one who is convinced he has three-card monte all figured out.

My friends and I drank too much before tumbling from a cab at ground zero, which was lit up like an alfresco showing of Les Misérables. We hung on to the security fence for a while and finally agreed on nothing more profound than to go to Brooklyn to drink more cheaply. Manhattan -- my Manhattan -- was indifferent to anything that came before the planes hit. Indifferent to me.

Groggy and confused, I lie in bed early in the morning almost every time now, listening intently: The shower. The sound of bare feet on hardwood floor and then heels. The door opens. The door shuts. Silence.

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