Union Square is situated about one-third of the way up from the southern tip of Manhattan. Like many of the squares in the City, it isn't square but shaped something like a vase that's wider at the top than at the bottom. It covers three, maybe four acres, and was originally called Union Place. During the early part of the preceding century, it was regularly the site of fervent union rallies.

Union of another sort, however, has been celebrated on its lawns and pathways since the attack on the World Trade Center. Within hours of the buildings' collapse, citizens looking for some way to mourn the death of a collective illusion the illusion being that somehow the United States was impenetrable to terrorists began carrying candles to the small and well-tended plot of land. At the same time many of the friends of relatives of people trapped in the twin towers came to attach photographs of the missing to the low metal fences. "Missing," as the days dripped by, became the needed euphemism for "dead," but who was callous enough to say so out loud and shatter yet another hope?

I didn't get to Union Square until a full week after the catastrophe and then without design. I was headed somewhere on the far side of it and only realized as I approached that I was about to enter the transformed area I'd been hearing about and catching glimpses of on the news. I figured I'd see what was what and then continue on my way.

My intentions evaporated within seconds of arriving on what was a balmy late, late summer evening. I was suddenly circulating among hundreds of mesmerized strollers. Flowers had been decked everywhere; monuments covered with American flags many of them drawn by hand; messages on string, ad hoc memorials made out of, for only one stunning instance, white petals. Music floated above heads and into the trees like perfume. A gentleman with a red-white-and-blue bow tie paraded with his wife; couples camped out on blankets.

Curiously, I had a sense of having been there before. Within an instant, I realized that I certainly had been there before. It was the 60's all over again. I'd fallen through a time warp and landed once again where flower children bloomed as did a longing not for war or mindless retaliation but for peace and understanding. The scene and the mood were both unrealistic and surpassingly real.

After I had walked around the grounds for about 20 minutes or so, I saw a friend coming toward me through the crowd. Michael was wearing a yarmulka (it was the second day of Rosh Hashana) and looked greatly troubled. "How are you?" I asked him. "Numb," he said. "We're all numb," I said. He said yes and then, "You don't know this, but I was in the building." He explained that when the planes flew into the buildings like suicidal vultures (my image not his), he was on the Twin-Tower concourse level in the New Balance branch he managed. He'd run out with his staff of three, had gone back into the building when he was told it was safe and then ran out again. I was talking to a survivial-column statistic for whom I had long had affection.

Before we parted I mentioned that I had stopped to read a few of the innumerable messages anonymous contributors had taped on the walls. (To read them all would be to spend the next week reading.) The one that stuck with me began and I'm paraphrasing "What happened to the bodies in the World Trade Center disaster? You're breathing their ashes now." A grim observation, I thought, but also greatly uplifting. If we were inhaling the dead, then they were with us. We were they and would carry on for them and as them.

Union, indeed.