(FORTUNE Magazine) – I hadn't known it before Sept. 11, but I was starting to enjoy middle age: hectic and insanely busy but generally pleasing and more or less free of friction, fear, anger, and anxiety. That old Joni Mitchell line--"Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you got till it's gone"--has never seemed more apt than it does now. Though varying widely by circumstance, all our lives have changed, and, to be perfectly honest, not for the better. We are learning to cope. We are learning to identify silver linings, as in, "All of this is going to make us stronger." Or, "It's good for us, ultimately." Which may very well be true. But going to the dentist is good for us too. That doesn't make it any fun.

I know I'm treading awfully close to whiny-butt territory here. Compared with so many, I have absolutely nothing to complain about. Nothing like the widow of the New York City firefighter with three kids. Nothing like the mother and father of a Marine dug in outside Kandahar or, for that matter, the orphaned Afghan kid. But the unassailable fact remains that the quality of my life has been diminished, and I am at once frustrated, scared, and just pissed off.

Deconstructing those emotions, I realize my pre-Sept. 11 life floated on a cloud of subconscious assumptions. Such as, go ahead and buy some pricey piece of New York City real estate; it'll appreciate handsomely--it always does. Now I ask myself, Who the hell would want to live here anymore? The stock market? Retirement? Not to worry. Wait a couple of years, and you'll end up ahead when the market comes back. It always does. Now I say to myself, Right, you'll come out ahead--in the year 2525. And then there are my kids. In the back of my mind I must have thought, This is America--my kids will never know terrorism. Now I wonder, Has it scarred them much?

It's the kid part that is the most disturbing, of course. How much do you explain to elementary-school children? How much do they know? Our elder daughter, who's turning 8, had nightmares. It's hard not to when Mom and Dad look at each other nervously whenever planes seem too close. My younger daughter, who's 4, talked about it once, sort of: She just jumped up and down and started waving her arms.

Then there was the time I was paranoid about anthrax. We had taken our kids to work after Sept. 11, as we sometimes have to do. Then the anthrax-letters-to-the-media thing happened. The next week my younger daughter got the flu. Was she just sick? Or was she sick? And then there was the day my accountant called when I was out and asked the babysitter for our new address so he could send us a package. Our babysitter refused to give him our address, but our elder daughter overheard that some strange man wanted to send us a strange package and called me up crying. And we ask ourselves, Why do we live in New York City anymore? And then we say, Why should we let the terrorists make us move? And then we say, Who cares? We should just move!

New York has changed in a million ways in the past 12 weeks. It is more somber. Muted. Burst. And in many ways tied up in knots. Buildings have one entrance open. You walk...all the way...around the block...to get in. And then you show your ID. And show it again. And again. The mail is slow, inconsistent. I don't even pay attention to it at work anymore. I'm frisked going into Madison Square Garden for a hoops game. The subways will be rerouted for years, and in some cases forever. Only multiple-occupancy vehicles were allowed at bridges and tunnels. F-16s buzz Columbia football games. There are military personnel at Penn Station. Soldiers with long guns at LaGuardia. (One was drawn to me recently as a security lady took particular interest in my toiletry bag. Somehow I had put an emergency fluorescent glow stick in there by mistake. I couldn't explain, and it was mighty suspicious.) And on and on and on. Even if all this is necessary, or appropriate, or to be expected, it's still always a reminder.

The rest of the country is by no means immune. Traveling to Tallahassee the other weekend to watch the Florida State-Georgia Tech football game was an eye-opener. Yes, the whole Southern football-extravaganza thing was over the top as usual, but what I noticed was the security. Wow! Every state trooper from Key West to Kissimmee must have been there. I left the game early (sacrilege!) to catch a flight back through Atlanta, and as I approached the security checkpoint, bored personnel jumped to their feet. It looked as if I was the only person to have gone through there in the past hour. Uh-oh! That's right: a full search. Stopped just short of a body-cavity check. Sheesh!

I got home that night around 11, but my wife was still awake, and we chatted. I was tired, though, and soon drifted off to sleep. Man, it was nice to be back in my own bed. All of sudden, it was morning and I woke to the sound of a large commercial jet outside my window flying low over the Hudson River. Too low! I watched, horrified, as it knifed into the water and then realized that another big plane had gone in the water just a few minutes before. I saw them both sink. I couldn't believe it. Then I woke up in the dark, my eyes darting around the room like a snake's. I had never dreamed like that before. This is going to take a long time.

And I think of the people I knew who were killed on Sept. 11. I was lucky that none of my closest friends perished, but still, I think of those people, and I sometimes think of how they died. And I try to remember to forget. But then I open a newsletter from my college and in a necrology there's a startling cluster of three or four names with the date of death: Sept. 11, 2001. And a million little jolts just keep on coming. Like pondering the dirt--really part ash--on the windows of our apartment. What was in that ash? Or my wife casually asking me last week, Just how far do we live from the Trade Center? About five miles I said. Five miles.

Of course, things are improving bit by bit, but just when you think it's over, it's not over. While at work at CNN the other day, I saw a piece about a guy who plays Santa and opens kids' letters to the North Pole and that whole bit. This year the guy has to wear rubber gloves. Give me a break! Please?

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