We Gather Together

By NANCY GIBBS

Thanksgiving has always been a feast day for the gods of paradox. It's an ordeal to travel and yet we do; family reunions can be wildly stressful and yet painful to miss. It was invented by a bunch of Puritans who celebrated freedom by throwing a party, and so bequeathed us a holiday both secular and sacred, with parades and prayers that dare us to reckon with all that has changed, and recognize all that has not.

This is the kind of holiday we need right now, an intrinsically complicated one that comes at the end of a bitter harvest and yet finds something sweet to celebrate. Everyone is a pilgrim now, stripped down to bare essentials and a single carry-on bag to sustain us in a strange new world. So no wonder people are making a special effort to get home this year, set the table, unfold the napkins, make the time for a messy conversation with the people who know us best. This is where we find out how we are really doing on the character test: Have the events of autumn left us humbled, or hardened? Bitter at all we feel we have lost, or grateful for all that we once took for granted?

And if the answer is that we are entertaining both at once, hope and despair at either end of the table, we had better learn to do it gracefully. "We're living through an eclipse of normality, a twilight landscape," says Edward Linenthal, author of The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. "The sun isn't quite right. It's a little darker than it should be when you look at it." And in the strange half-light, people react to the same events in opposite ways. Bars show CNN instead of ESPN because patrons want the latest news, but a family doctor in a Chicago suburb cancels her subscription to the New York Times because the relentless coverage of fear and threats was taking a toll on her. Peace Corps applications are up 72% in San Francisco, even as Harvard alums fight to restore ROTC, and 100 times as many Smith College students turn out to meet the CIA recruiter as did a decade ago. People decide to get in shape in case they have to run down 50 flights of stairs, while others abandon their diets because fudge is a great antidepressant--and if the world ends tomorrow, they don't want their last meal to be a celery stick.

In the past two months, our public conversation has changed almost beyond recognition; arguments that were unimaginable last summer are now the stuff of talk shows and chat rooms. Should we torture terrorist suspects? Embrace racial profiling? Seal the borders? Bust the budget? It may be the surest sign of a healthy democracy that in the wake of an attack that stopped a nation in its tracks, we have begun to move forward again in every direction, with less consistency but more urgency, engaged in an argument with ourselves and one another over what these times demand of us.

Much of this public conversation is hosted in New York and Washington, two cities with deep wounds and abiding fears. But the private conversation too has changed--about our families and faith and finances, about how long it will take to get back to normal and whether that is even possible. Will we have to reintroduce ourselves, even to the people who have known us the longest? Hello, I used to be highly competent and deeply cynical, but the edge has flaked off and I can barely make it out the door some mornings. Hello, remember when I was a pacifist? I believe in war now. Excuse me, I refuse to spend my life putting a gas mask in my briefcase and my mail in the microwave. Yes, I know you now go to Mass every morning, but I don't know what I believe anymore, so don't ask me to say grace. Hey, Dad? Can we start over?

HOMEWARD BOUND

We've known for weeks that this Thanksgiving would be like no other. It's not just that more of us will drive instead of fly, or take in strays who can't make it home, or carve out a few hours to help in a soup kitchen, or stop in for an extra church service, though all these are likely. We are aware, as if we were truly all one household, of the families who will face an empty chair at the table, the little boys sitting up straighter than last year, their father now gone, the touch football in the afternoon played with uncles who know they are no substitute. We feel for the families of soldiers and police and fire fighters who can't go off duty, off alert. But since most families were not touched so directly by the attacks of Sept. 11, the impact has been absorbed day by day, one fretful adjustment at a time.

"I don't think anywhere in the country there will be a conversation going on without the change in people's lives being a topic," says Paul Ohrt, a Los Angeles accountant who took a job in New York City last year, even though it meant moving away from his family for 18 months. After Sept. 11, he told his bosses he was done with bicoastal living; he plans to be back home in Los Angeles by Thanksgiving, thereby joining the chorus of people who talk about the wake-up call, the rearrangement of priorities, the growing importance of family, the shrinking importance of work, money, stuff. "They can offer me anything anywhere, and I wouldn't take it," says Ohrt of his bosses. "It's not worth being away from the family."

In a stressful time it's a powerful tug, the urge that pulls us home; but many of us had set out even before Sept. 11. Both in private conversation and in popular culture (see ARTS & MEDIA), you could sense a change in the domestic weather: family dysfunction is now taken for granted, so the pressing question is what to do about it, and the prevailing answer is, Just get over it. As the parents of the baby boomers aged and began to pass away, the generation that once defined itself by rejecting its parents and all they stood for have found themselves wanting to go home again, realizing now they should hold their parents close, because the world is a scary and confusing place without them.

Psychically speaking, the holidays are always a tender time. "But this Thanksgiving is the biggie," says Mary Courtney of New York University's Child Study Center. "Having a unifying ritual can be good, but we don't need people sitting around in a pile sobbing or starting to compare their levels of pain. But it can be hard not to. Even I call my own family back in Minnesota, and they talk about how traumatized they all are. I want to say to them, 'I've been working seven days a week on this at the center of the trauma since Sept. 11!'" Courtney and her colleagues are so worried about the looming holiday that they are posting a special primer on their website to help families get through their gatherings unscathed.

Courtney is in some ways most worried about families that have the most to be thankful for, those in which one member escaped the Sept. 11 attack and has been living in a parallel universe ever since. "It's impossible to explain to anyone who wasn't there," says Michael Serio, a freshman at Pace University in lower Manhattan whose dorm room shook when the planes crashed three blocks away. An aspiring doctor, he ran to the scene and spent the next 36 hours helping the rescue workers, setting up IVs for dehydrated fire fighters and hauling away debris and body parts. In that time, he could not get through to his mother and father outside Baltimore, Md., who feared he was dead.

Since then he's been talking to his parents and siblings several times a day; he likes to hear their voices, but they're not always speaking the same language. "I think this is what it must feel like to come back from war," he says. His father would love to see him leave the big city and finish school closer to home. "He's aged five or six years since I dropped him off at that school," his mother says. "And he has no fear; he gets on the subway and goes all around the city. And I'm so on edge that every time he calls, I think something new has happened."

For families spread out across the country, Thanksgiving may be the first reunion between those whose lives have been completely rewired and others who have had little trouble "getting back to normal." Some have already had a preview of how the nervous system evolves as you head deeper into the heartland. Dino Maniaci, 41, is a graphic designer who lives part time in lower Manhattan with his boyfriend and part time in Madison, Wis., where he runs a business; his family is still in Milwaukee, and on visits home after Sept. 11, he has sometimes felt like a veteran of a foreign war. "In New York we were strategizing about how to prepare: we need batteries, a flashlight, water. Then you go back and say, 'What are you guys doing to prepare?' and they say, 'What do you mean?' And it doesn't feel as important there. It does seem a little neurotic and fatalistic to have the same code of conduct there as I have here. Then I come back and there's anthrax, and it's all real again."

It is not just the refugees from New York and Washington, however, who will return home with war stories to tell and scars to compare. All families have their free spirits and their sentinels, and this year it will be intriguing to see who has swapped roles. Among the Wootens of Nashville, son Luke, a record producer, calls himself the Chicken Little of the family. He's the one who stockpiled water and bought the gas masks, though they turned out to be too big for his four- and five-year-old sons. When the clan assembles next week, he expects to discuss what they would do in the event of another attack. "I'm not saying we should move to the mountains and wait for the end to happen," he says. "But I think it's wise to have a contingency plan." His wife Nicole has talked of her mother's farm in Gatlinburg, Tenn., as a possible refuge.

Luke and Nicole Wooten are expecting their third baby on Thanksgiving, so this year the family will be coming to them--turkey in the maternity ward, if it comes to that. Actually Nicole has been reading up on home birthing; hospitals seem like risky, contaminated places these days. She's also worried about playing host to a big event when her kitchen is being remodeled; maybe this is the year to have Thanksgiving pizza. "The holiday is not about making the perfect cranberry sauce," she says.

As in many households, the inevitable political conversation promises some surprises this year. Sisters Amanda and Shelley are the liberal Democrats; they lovingly describe Luke as "almost a right-wing extremist." And yet they find themselves changing seats, sharing views. "I've always been a pacifist, but I've shocked myself at how my views toward Bush have changed," says Amanda. "Before this, my heroes were my parents. But now I've come to appreciate leadership." Shelley, meanwhile, is bracing herself for the plane flight from San Francisco, but says, "A lot of people in the city, in their 20s, feel rootless. Being with my family is very grounding." The vulnerability she's been feeling lately has helped her decide to move to Nashville next year, to be near Luke and his family. "Being close to my family is a lot better than being close to cool bars."

The Wootens may have reached a new political consensus, but families that like to argue about politics will still find lots of meat on the table. The only change they expect might be a new humility; that however much the left and right wings may disagree about the most promising path to peace, the goal is shared, as is the awareness of just how hard it may be to reach it. Benjamin Cerniglia is a Marine corporal at Camp Pendleton in California, awaiting orders to ship out at any time; his brother Joseph, 18, is a college student in Greensboro, N.C., and an avowed pacifist. They had an e-mail fight three weeks after the attacks and have barely communicated since. "He thinks I am anti-American, which I'm not," says Joseph, "and I think he's a right-wing conservative, which he resents." But the younger sibling is mourning the loss of his brother as a close confidant. "I feel really sad now. He was someone I could talk to if I had a serious problem." He is trying to muster the strength to ask his brother's forgiveness. "I'm not going to change my views, but I regret being somewhat malicious with my words."

Among families split and frayed by old fights and disappointments, people find that the attacks have provided an occasion to do what they wanted to do anyway. "There is something about the imminence of mortality that moves people to make peace if they can," says Frederic Luskin, a fellow at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., who conducts forgiveness workshops around the country. "I've had a number of patients say to me, 'It's hard to take a grudge seriously when you look at the World Trade Center.'" The baby boomers, he notes, are "a psychologically savvy generation, and they realize that in order to grow you have to resolve some of the residual conflict left over from childhood."

When Molly Rudberg was eight, her parents divorced, leaving her with an ache for a father who was so often absent when she needed him most. "Many weekends were missed, as well as prom nights, homecoming dances, soccer games, evenings of homework or just simple advice," says the Chicago marketing strategist. "I finally threw in the towel when he couldn't make it to my older sister's high school graduation because he had to be overseas." Though father and daughter wound up living just four blocks apart, for years Molly couldn't bring herself to reach out. Soon after Sept. 11, however, they began meeting for breakfast every Tuesday. She knows the healing is going to take a long time. "Sept. 11 happened; and though many, many precious lives were lost that day, I have no doubt many lives were saved as well," she says. "It's emotionally draining, but it's worth it," she says of the reconciliation breakfasts.

Calamities may reinforce reflexes more than they work miracles. This crisis, says clinical psychologist Jeffrey Slutsky, "can serve as a catalyst for reconciliation if the people involved were already primed for it. But it takes more than even these traumatic events to change people's character." In fact, crisis may serve mainly to reveal character, for better or worse. Jeanne, an art director for a magazine in Northern California, was planning her March wedding in New Orleans; her fiance was a New York City stockbroker working one block from the Twin Towers. After the attacks, she expected him to hop the first plane, train or automobile to be with her. Instead he wanted to hunker down with his brother in Connecticut. "He's telling me he wants space. And I'm telling him I want him here with me. Watching all this unfold on TV, I never felt so alone and detached," she says. On Sept. 13, she broke off the engagement. "I want to be with someone who, if tragedy strikes, gets on a train instantly to be with me." So her wedding dress will just hang in her closet for a while. "I don't know what I'll do with it," she says. Her stunned fiance visited her for nine days in October, hoping to change her mind. She says she won't. "Life is too short to have continued the way I was going."

So while it is true, as the romance experts initially reported, that Sept. 11 led to a spike in business for dating services and sales of engagement rings--especially near military bases--the whole story is more complex. A sudden uncertainty about the future has had a clarifying effect in both directions. With a newfound urgency, unattached people are seeking either instant comfort through casual sex or an end to wild-oat sowing and a commitment to commitment. It's not a scientific survey of careless coupling, but eight weeks after Sept. 11, the number of unwanted pregnancies has risen at clinics supervised by David Nova, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge Inc., in Roanoke, Va. "People are looking for comfort," says Nova. "Some find it in food, some reach for each other. Pregnancy rates have always gone up in wartime." To manage the trend, Nova has begun to distribute red-white-and blue condoms.

Meanwhile among the commitment converts, single men and women talk about the stories of the final phone calls made from the burning towers and wonder whom they would call. "Everyone feels more vulnerable now," says Bill Pinsof, a clinical psychologist who heads the Family Institute at Northwestern University, "but it can be especially hard on unattached people." The matchmakers say they don't have enough staff to keep up with demand. You can hear it in the personals: LEARNED MY LESSON--LIFE IS TOO SHORT! reads the ad in New York magazine. Divorce lawyers report a drop in traffic--perhaps only a temporary blip but again, as with the reconciliation movement, it may reflect a trend that has been building for years: the divorce rate dropped 21% between 1981 and '98. "The true antidote to terror is love," Pinsof argues. "It's all we have in the face of death. People don't think, 'I wish I had written that novel or sued an extra client.' They think about their relationships."

Like getting married, deciding to have a baby is a testament of faith in the future. But for many people tragedy has made it almost impossible to plan--not a vacation, not a new job and certainly not a new baby. Some young families with one child who were thinking of having another say they have pulled back for now: the world is too frightening a place, and it's hard enough to protect the child you have without making it twice as hard. There are also fears about the additional financial pressure during recessionary times. But other families conclude that taking that leap is worth the risk, an affirmation of life and a chance to provide the older child with companions in a harder world. "I even have single moms coming in and telling me they want to have another child so that should something happen to them, their first child won't be left alone," says Dr. Iffath Hoskins, a New York City obstetrician.

While some fertility specialists saw patients put their plans on hold after Sept. 11, the more common response was an even greater sense of urgency. Resolve: the National Infertility Association had a 50% jump in its website traffic after Sept. 11. "Looking around at everyone touching and holding their kids made it all so much more raw for us not having them. We felt really lost," says Stephanie Greco from Boston, whose attempt at in vitro fertilization on Sept. 13 failed.

Of all the tasks of parenthood, the first instinct is to keep your children safe. But there are no safety locks, no stair guards for this moment, and parents of six-year-olds and 26-year-olds find themselves confounded by their inability to do their most basic job. "I feel it has changed my relationship with my children," says George Egan, a Pittsburgh, Pa., investment banker, of the fallout from the attacks. He and his wife Annie have two sets of twins, ages 3 and 6. "When I go upstairs at night to check on them I now feel somehow less confident in my ability to keep them safe. I try hard to keep them out of harm's way. But now there is a new element to their reality, over which I have no control. "

No parent likes to see a child frightened; it's a wound both to your heart and your pride. Yet particularly in communities most directly affected by the attacks, children are explicit about their new fears. Researchers from Sesame Workshop surveyed children recruited in shopping centers last spring and again a few weeks after the attacks. The dominant concerns of last May--litter and guns--have been replaced by burning buildings, plane crashes and nuclear explosions and a fear of losing their parents. On the other hand, it was heartening to learn that the kids who earlier surveys showed were likely to count Britney Spears and the Rock as role models now worshipped fire fighters and police.

Older students find themselves approaching adulthood in a transfigured world, and no one has the road map. Some have started keeping two lists of potential colleges, says Suzanne Liberty, vice president for enrollment management at Clarkson University in tiny Potsdam, N.Y.: "One for if everything is O.K., and one only with schools within driving distance in case there's another attack." According to TIME's poll, two-thirds of Americans believe that the events of Sept. 11 will define a generation the way the Kennedy assassination did. UCLA now offers courses on "Navigating Between Blithesome Optimism and Cultural Despair" and "Implications of World Crises for Student Stress and Academic Achievement," in which students will write a journal and interview one another. But on most campuses, rattled students have to fend for themselves. Mental-health services are mobbed; at Syracuse University there's now a 19-day wait to see a counselor unless it's an emergency. At Spirit Rock, a Buddhist meditation center in Northern California, attendance at teen meditation classes is up 30% since Sept. 11. Sophie Clavier, a lecturer at San Francisco State University, says her class in international relations has become "a group-therapy session." The students, she says, normally nervous about speaking up, "have been openly insecure, asking the same questions I'm getting from my 11- and eight-year-old kids at home. They want to know if they'll be O.K. And they come to my office hours in tears."

It's not just the decision about where to go to school that weighs on families; it is simply harder to send children out into an uncertain world, whether for the traditional eighth-grade school trip to Washington, a spring-vacation trip south or a summer abroad. The Teitelmans of Oak Park, Ill., have an idea what they will be talking about around the table next week: What will son Matt, 15, do for his summer vacation? Matt has been saving since he was a little kid for a summer trip to Israel. His sister Joan, 18, who went there last summer, says it was a great adventure: "I basically came home and said, 'Matt, you're going.'" Then the world changed, and now parents Andy and Nancy are struggling. When Israel was just about the only place on earth with frequent suicide bombings, Andy says, "I really had my doubts about what kind of responsible parent sent their child into the only country that has that potential. But now we've all been shocked into realizing that we're not particularly safe anywhere. If the risk is imminent anywhere, then I have a lot less hesitation about Matt going to Israel." Nancy has reacted in the opposite way. "The things that have happened since Sept. 11 are just so horrendous that it's difficult to get your brain around them," she says. "It seems as if the Middle East is dissolving into anarchy."

THE GREAT AWAKENING

Along with the reaffirmation of family values, there has been a much-discussed reaffirmation of faith, a religious revival triggered by trauma that saw churches and synagogues and mosques flooded with worshippers in the days following the attacks. But how do you measure the breadth and depth of rediscovered belief? The American Bible Society says sales of Bibles since Sept. 11 are up 42% over the same period last year. Zales Jewelers is selling more crosses. The Religion News Service says Koran sales in the U.S. have quintupled since the attacks. Even after the initial burst of fervor subsided, many churches and synagogues report, attendance is up 5% to 10%, though some in places like Manhattan are still seeing twice as many people as before. Ministers find that people are not simply more interested in faith than before; they are especially interested in evil. "Since Sept. 11, I have to confess, I've had as many thoughts about the devil as I have about God," says David Marutiak, a senior manager at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. "You have to wonder just how evil something has to be before it's a sign of something incarnate rather than just another human issue."

Where interfaith alliances were once viewed as sort of poor stepchildren to mainstream denominations, such groups find themselves flooded with interest and inquiries from people whose hope for a peaceful outcome rests in cross-cultural religious understanding. A Judaism and World Religions program at Valley Beth Shalom, a conservative synagogue in Sherman Oaks, Calif., drew 1,400 people to hear a speaker on Buddhism. "I hear people say, 'Isn't it wonderful how we're coming together as a nation?'" observes the Rev. Don Sperber, pastor of the 700-member Grace United Methodist Church in Denver. "I'm troubled when the most common song I hear sung today is God Bless America, and I keep saying, '...as well as the other nations.' I'm not opposed to patriotism, but I'm opposed to having it be blind to the reality of the total world. I've been trying to select hymns that have a more global perspective."

Jere Lucey, 43, a Manhattan real estate banker whose 21st-floor conference room provided an unobstructed view of the bodies plummeting from the World Trade Center towers five blocks away, ducked into Old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street as he and two co-workers fled the war zone on Sept. 11, "just kind of collecting our thoughts." Since then, God has taken a higher profile in his mental life, reflecting a subtle change in his faith. He had attended Mass only occasionally; that hasn't changed. But he finds himself praying more, and differently. It used to take a great victory or tragedy to bring him to his knees. Now he prays three or four times a day. There is the small petitionary prayer each day as he gets on the subway "that I'll get out again," the prayer of thanks "when you look up at a really blue sky" and the less definable prayer "when you get out at Fulton Street, and you smell the Trade Center."

His view of God has not been changed by this; unlike some people, he has not let his mind dwell on how his faith in a merciful God can be reconciled with a merciless act. Instead he has reaffirmed his definition of God as the "ultimate Regulator." Says he: "I think God is like the Securities and Exchange Commission. He just creates federal regulations that people need to comply with, and if you're a bad actor, the SEC comes down and they investigate you and try to put you out of business and prosecute you." This uncluttered faith may be what made it possible for Lucey to hope again after the first few days following the tragedy. "There were these magnificent sunsets," he says. "Magnificent. You could say it was just the souls that were rising."

Alongside the revival in religious belief, there is also a fresh secular faith so powerful that pollsters are seeing numbers they have not seen in a generation. The police and the fire fighters--the face of public authority at the street-corner level--are bathed in a bright new light. "Heroism used to be seen as the exception," observes Eli Silverman, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, "and now it's seen as the norm." Officers themselves see the difference in attitudes every day. Strangers walk up and thank them for being there, for doing their job. "In a lot of people's minds, it never registered that we do more than take people to jail and hand out tickets," says Officer Mark Flowers of Eugene, Ore. "I think people have a different way of looking at the police. More people wave, more people smile at you now."

President Bush, meanwhile, maintains an approval rating of 87%, according to last week's TIME/CNN poll, paralleling the increased faith in government generally. But that trust is not blind. "Americans expect government to step in here and do its job. It is not a glassy-eyed love of government," says Paul Light, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who co-authored a recent report on changing attitudes. "What we're seeing here is a demand for action. It's a tenuous surge in trust." The number of people who say they have "a great deal of confidence" in the government's ability to prevent more attacks has slipped from 41% to 25%, according to the TIME/CNN poll. The President did his part last week to bolster public faith in the government's antiterror campaign. In his speech Thursday night, Bush managed a more subtle version of his exhortation to get back to normal, wherever that is these days. "There is a difference between being alert and being intimidated," he said. While these times require vigilance, he also called on citizens to perform community service or volunteer in some way, whether to tutor a kid or join a neighborhood watch or help out at a hospital.

It was as though the President understood that like the religious revival, patriotism is personal, especially for those for whom it is new. Among families who always said the Pledge of Allegiance before high school football games and didn't have to go out and buy a flag, not much has changed. But for the eternal skeptics, whose views were defined by Vietnam and its aftermath, who viewed the Gulf War as being more about oil than justice, the new patriotism represents a kind of homecoming. The same is true for many whose lives until now were defined largely by their differences. "I was very skeptical of the new unity back when people first started waving flags," says Brandon Wolf, 54, a computer programmer from Houston. "I'm not skeptical anymore." As a gay man, he was struck by a sudden sense of belonging. "There was media coverage of gay families, gay pilots and gay heroes. The Red Cross responded without blinking that it would honor gay and lesbian relationships when determining who would be provided assistance. And then to top it all off, Jerry Falwell got a public whipping. I am nearly immune to him, so when he blamed gays for the tragedy, I just rolled my eyes. I was stunned to see that mainstream America seemed to have told him that he finally went too far."

Whether it's the stress or the fear or the sense of purpose, the issues people find they have in common overwhelm what once divided them. "I think people realize that we are one country and we have one goal, and that's to live and survive," says Peter Devonish, 42, a Jamaican-born printer in New York City's West Harlem. "People stop putting first politics and color and rich and poor and just realize that the problem that faces me is the problem that faces you. We see the security guards in the World Trade Center--little people were affected by the terrorist attacks too."

So, of course, were Arab Americans, many of whom suffered that day and have suffered since from a special pressure and scrutiny from neighbors and strangers alike. Jamal Baadani, a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps who was born to Yemenite parents and raised in both Egypt and Michigan, knows this intimately. "I was out to dinner with one of my fellow Marines in uniform," he says, "and someone went up to me and started talking to me about what was going on, and she said, 'Yeah, those Arabs are all knuckleheads,' not realizing I was one. And another day, a woman came up to me and said, 'Where are you from?' I said I was born in Cairo. She said, 'You must be a terrorist then,' and she said it very seriously, so I asked her with expletives to leave my presence." Since the attacks, the Los Angeles resident has launched the Association of Patriotic Arab-Americans in the Military, just to drive home the point.

For the first time in 31 years, Thanksgiving this year falls during Ramadan, the month-long period of fasting and thanks celebrated by Muslims all over the world. So in many households this year the two holidays will merge. Muslims in Iowa--old families from Lebanon and Syria and new immigrants from Turkey, Tunisia, Pakistan and Afghanistan--will gather in Cedar Rapids at the oldest mosque in North America and break their Ramadan fast with a Thanksgiving feast of turkey and stuffing, grape leaves, flatbread, cranberry sauce and kibbe--a Lebanese dish of cracked wheat, meats and spices.

GETTING AND SPENDING

In addition to food and faith and family, Thanksgiving, of course, also marks the official start of the holiday shopping season, and because our malls are our museums, you can get some sense of where we are by what we buy. Sales of sewing machines, the perfect apocalypse accessory, are way up: stay home, save money, sew your own drapes and dresses. Craft sales in general are up in a nesting nation, as are sales of roasting pans, squishy furniture, New Age music, DVD players and anything to turn your home into a movie theater so you don't have to go out to a real one. Beer sales are up nearly 7% over the same period last year; bottled water is up 20%. Pet adoptions are on the rise; so are sales of purebred puppies and teddy bears. The marketing can get desperate: a Denver furniture company advertises its mattresses with a picture of "Mike Ziegler, Area Fire Fighter" and the tag line "This is Mike. He can't afford a bad night's sleep." Maureen Wilkinson, owner of Acorn Travel in River Forest, Ill., sharpened her sales pitch. "Are you uncomfortable leaving your family behind?" asked the ad. "Take them with you! Family reunions are great fun on an Alaskan Cruise."

The most important spending trend may be that people simply aren't doing it as much. In September consumer spending experienced its largest monthly drop in 14 years. October saw the biggest increase in unemployment in more than 20 years: 415,000 jobs lost, with the prospect of more layoffs to come, which alone was bound to have an impact on people's sense of economic health. Throw in shrinking 401(k)s and a woozy stock market, and it all makes for a reverse-wealth effect. "With Sept. 11, you magnified those economic fears and put personal-safety fears on top of it," says Steve Miller, CEO of Bethlehem Steel, America's third largest steelmaker, which declared bankruptcy last month. "People are scared to death, and that means they're not going to buy a new refrigerator or a new house."

Kylie Noble and her husband Allen, a partner in a machine shop in Scappoose, Ore., have been watching their finances more closely since Sept. 11. "I'm a coupon person and a rebate person. I don't buy what's not on my list," she says. "We haven't been out for a while. We are going to see a movie this weekend for the first time since Sept. 11. It's not that I'm afraid. I would call it discernment, watching things a little more carefully. I am more aware of recycling things. And we just sent some blankets to one of the homeless shelters downtown. When the economy is bad, those on the bottom are hurt the most."

And of course there's the opposite live-for-today impulse. A wealthy physician in Chicago, formerly renowned among his friends as a world-class tightwad, suddenly had the urge to buy "a ridiculously expensive" surround-sound stereo system, notes a longtime acquaintance. He has also been adding feverishly to his wine collection. Another acquaintance, an Illinois auto repair-shop manager, suddenly decided that he and his wife needed to gut their kitchen and install $6,000 granite countertops, a $4,000 convection oven and a Sub-Zero fridge. He also plunked down $4,000 for the fastest computer and latest high-tech screen. "His wife is a nervous wreck because of his wanton spending," their friend says. "This is a man who normally drives 20 miles to save a quarter on a jar of pickles. He has always lived within his means until now." Lately he wants the best of everything, "and it's all on credit cards. He has told his wife not to show him the bills. He thinks they may as well spend their money on their home since they're going be holed up there anyway."

It's possible that some people have reacted to the new pressures by throwing themselves into their work, but they are hard to find. Much more common are stories of people pulling back a bit, if they can afford to, taking the events of the fall as a chance to ask hard questions about how they use their time, whether their boss actually deserves more attention than their children. Jaffe Dickerson, a senior partner for a law firm in Los Angeles, lost a close friend on one of the hijacked United flights. The impact finally hit him a few weeks ago as he contemplated the speech he was supposed to give at a conference in Montreal the next day. It was for a group he had been trying to bring together for years, a perfect networking opportunity. "I was sitting in my office looking out the window, and I said, 'I don't want to do this,'" recalls Dickerson, who is the father of two teenage daughters. "It hit me like a thunderclap that I didn't want to go. So I got on my computer and told the conference organizers that, based on the circumstances, I would be canceling and spending time with my family."

He has found in recent weeks that his clients have other lives as well and are actually eager to talk about them. "I have started having dozens of conversations with clients where we just talk about our kids, something we never had a chance to talk about before, and I mean talk sincerely," he says. "You ask people questions now about their families because you really want to hear the answer. All of us realize we may not get that chance to have that conversation again."

It is too soon to say whether the combination of rewired values and a recessionary economy will prompt large numbers of people to change careers, lower their expectations, do what they like instead of what they're told. But you can catch a glimpse here and there: more and more employees are asking to telecommute, work from home, keep flexible hours. Of the new students in a massage-therapy program at San Jose's Trinity College, half have either quit or been laid off in Silicon Valley. Last month four of the school's graduates were hired to work full time giving massages at nearby tech giant Cisco Systems. Bosses are realizing they have to be more accommodating or risk losing people they need.

Before Sept. 11, Gian Luca Fiori, a Boston wholesaler who imports marble and granite from all over the world, used to hop on a plane to Italy or India to inspect stone. After Sept. 11 he called his suppliers and canceled all his trips. "I asked them to send me a digital photo," he says. "I can make the decision from here." Last year he logged 120,000 miles on American Airlines; this year he expects to cut that in half. At some point he knows he will have to get back on the road--his business demands some face time--but the temporary hiatus is great.

In the week after the attacks, the number of inquiries about joining AmeriCorps, the program that puts volunteers to work in struggling communities, jumped 30% and has held steady since. "It made me turn outward rather than inward," says new volunteer Andrew Karpinski, 23, who had been planning to do graduate work in English. "I think this whole thing has been especially difficult for young people, because our generation has been defined by O.J., Monica Lewinsky, stuff that was really trivia. Our generation has never had anything real to deal with." The impulse to postpone a career track and do some community service, he says, is not a matter of patriotism. "I think the logical response is to step back and think, What have I done for other people? I think people want to do something more for the community again. I think that's something that had been lost during the good times we had."

It is typical of these divergent times that when young adults decide they want to help, the surge of interest is felt from Habitat for Humanity, which has seen an increase of about 20% in volunteers in the Northeast, to the National Security Agency. The NSA received more than 19,000 resumes in the eight weeks following Sept. 11, nearly quadrupling its monthly average. Since late September, a one-year teacher-training program at DePaul University in Chicago has fielded double the usual number of calls from people who want to start teaching in the city's failing public schools. Recent applicants include an American Airlines flight attendant who wants to trade her overseas route for more time at home with her children and a real estate developer who feels guilty about displacing poor kids to make room for expensive condos.

In fact when people talk about how their lives and prospects have changed, the context may be fear and sorrow, but the response reflects great hope and resolve. This too marks a part of the Pilgrims' bequest. Whenever our ancestors came, it is likely they were willing to trade certainty for opportunity, to face a dangerous passage in order to arrive in a better place. This passage feels plenty dangerous now. But it has also given our children new heroes and our families new muscle and our beliefs new force, and that is more than enough to be thankful for, on the day we celebrate gratitude's birthday.

--Reported by Harriet Barovick, Jodie Morse, Benjamin Nugent, Julie Rawe and David Van Biema/New York, Wendy Cole/Chicago, Rita Healy/Denver, Broward Liston/Miami, Michelle McAllope/Houston and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Harriet Barovick, Jodie Morse, Benjamin Nugent, Julie Rawe and David Van Biema/New York, Wendy Cole/Chicago, Rita Healy/Denver, Broward Liston/Miami, Michelle McAllope/Houston and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles