Just the other day, it occured to me that I no longer get that panicked feeling when I hear tons of fire trucks hurling down the street. For the first two years after 2001, like plenty of other New Yorkers, I would turn on CNN every time I heard more than three sirens in the distance, even if most of them were rushing to break down the door of a 5th Ave. apartment where a poodle had set off a motion detector, or maybe to rescue people like me and Paul, who get trapped in their bedroom due to a defective door latch (I promise to tell that story once I've worked it through in therapy, darlings...).

Yesterday at work, our entire block was filled with fire trucks, and what appeared to be every uniformed police officer in the tri-state area. The whole neighborhood smelled like smoke, although nothing like the smell we called, simply, "Trade Center" (everyone in NYC remembers it, in the unrecordable history of scents), a smell you would come across in random patches for a full year after "the events of ..."

I work three blocks from the building that was hit yesterday. "A small plane has hit a building on 72nd Street ..."

I'm sure it was disappointing for the Republicans running for office that it wasn't a terrorist attack. It would have been further proof of Bill Clinton's incompetence.

Still, any phrase with the words "plane" and "hit a building," especially less than 3 blocks away, strikes fear in the hearts of all of us in this city. It didn't seem likely that a terrorist would want to attack a bourgeois apartment high-rise, unless they were from the Pottery Barn Liberation Front. But you never know.

Several of the kids at school saw the whole thing, because the playground is on the roof (if you live in New York, you don't think it's weird to let 5-year-olds experience "the outdoors" on a tar roof). This is something they'll be telling their kids, by which I mean their shrinks, when they're older. By which I mean when they're 5 1/2.

But here's the thing - if this sort of thing can happen as a freak accident (which it is, unless you consider the Yankees a terrorist organization -- and assuming you're not talking about how Gen'rul Sherman marched his horses through your Gram'ama's plantation in Sou' Carolina, thus chipping that soup tureen you see before you, as the story goes in my family) --- what would happen if someone in a small plane harbored malicious intent???

Lucky that terrorists never go to flight school.

That's why it's hard to take the Department of Vaterland Securitat über seriously. They happily let "pleasure craft" - not to mention commercial airlines - fly over the East River, within dirty-bombing distance of Henri Bendel. Henri Bendel.

Is nothing sacred?

Not coincidentally, Henri Bendel is a fine retail outlet for 24/7 Lip Plumper. However, unlike the multi-ton aircraft that fly only a quarter of a mile from easily traumatized Franco-American (not to be confused with Chef Boyardee) children, MY LIP PLUMPER is a danger to this nation. I'm sorry, I still haven't gotten over that one.

(NOTE: when flying this weekend, I noticed that they've relaxed these laws somewhat; you can now take "travel sizes" of prohibited items, because they realized that it would be hard - but perhaps not impossible - to hijack a plane with hair gel.)

But seriously, I have to wonder if the powers-that-be (by which I mean Karl Rove) don't actually want New York to be attacked. It's like we're in some terrible cartoon and the Coyote has sent off for some Acme Bullseye Paint, and we're watching the montage where he strategically spreads it all over the desert, I mean, New York City.

Hopefully, somewhere, there's a falling anvil looming overhead to foil the plot, just in the nick of time.