"Daddy," my eight-year-old son said recently as we were discussing the impending end of August, "I can't think about September without thinking about Sept. 11."

My 12-year-old daughter, on the other hand, doesn't want to talk much about what happened. Tears well in her eyes and she shakes with fear as the horrible memories come flooding back.

Hannah and Zack, my two oldest children, have been deeply affected by the assault on Fortress America. Payton, my two-year-old, has no concept and will have to be told about what happened.

Not so for the bigguns. No one they knew died in the attacks, but they do have a cherished relative who worked in lower Manhattan who was forced to climb through the rubble -- watching bodies fall from the towers -- as he escaped. They have other relatives who live and work in New York whose fates we did not learn for tense hours as telephones became useless as a result of network overload. And, like millions of other people, they watched the towers crumble and disappear, ending thousands of lives.

My wife has an overwhelming feeling of sadness when she remembers. Me, I have a very deep, unresolved anger. I watched the towers go up. I watched them come down.

We are, of course, not alone in how visceral our memory is. And knowing that made me realize that City Paper had to put out an issue commemorating 9/11.

In every newsroom in the nation, debate has raged like an old Clairol commercial.

A lot of people -- even here -- say the last thing they want to do next Wednesday is remember. Somehow, however, I think that, come 8:46 a.m., most people are going to stop whatever it is they are doing, if even only for a second. I really do think that Zack is not the only one who can't think of September anymore without thinking about Sept. 11.

At City Paper, the biggest struggle was not what to put in the paper -- it was decided early on that we should look forward, not behind -- but what to put on the cover.

About a month ago, after visiting family in New York, I decided to head north through Brooklyn on the way back, toward my favorite span in the world, the Brooklyn Bridge, instead of crossing the Verrazano. There is a spot on that drive when it really hits me as I look across to Manhattan and see the gap in the skyline, where the towers used to stand.

Every time I have seen that view since Sept. 11, I get the same feeling of anger and outrage. That was the shot, I was convinced, for the cover.

But it didn't work out that way. Thanks to some poor directions on my part, photographer Mike Regan didn't get that shot. The shot he did get, of the Manhattan skyline from the Brooklyn promenade, was stunning, all pastel colors backed by an amazing, cloudy sky.

Without the Twin Towers, lower Manhattan loses an amazing amount of its identity. What remains is almost non-descript, an any-city devoid of its most noticeable landmark. And while that speaks volumes for what happened and its impact on New York, the image didn't meld well with our headline, "Where Do We Go From Here?"

Without the Twin Towers, it was not immediately recognizable where the here was.

We tried several iterations of a cover image. We tried an updated version of the cover we used last year -- a red, bit-mapped view of the smoking Twin Towers that made it onto a poster of 24 front pages around the world. We tried variations of the New York skyline, either silhouetting the buildings against the beautiful sky or using the natural vivid late afternoon colors.

But nothing really told the story of "Where Do We Go From Here?" until editorial art director Brian Hogan used a picture Regan took by wheedling his way into a tower overlooking Ground Zero.

Showing the vastness of the devastation, 18-wheelers dwarfed in the remaining pit, the shot perfectly sums up the theme of this week's cover package.

One question facing my wife and I -- the same question facing all parents with kids old enough to remember -- is what to do on Sept. 11.

I do know a lot of people are also struggling with this. A contact in the convention business was telling me that nationwide, business leaders are twisting themselves into contortions to avoid doing anything on Sept. 11.

"How can we have this meeting on Sept. 11?'" intoned my source, mimicking in a deep voice the question asked by many.