“I think that I don’t want to sit down in front of the TV if there are any specials,” Whitlow said. “If anything, I will be spending the time with friends and talking about it.”

Some current Harvard students held off their return to Cambridge so that they would be in New York for the Sept. 11 anniversary.

Madeleine S. Elfenbein ’04 said she stayed in New York to participate in the ceremonies commemorating the anniversary.

“Tonight I’m going to the ‘Our grief is not a cry for war’ rally-vigil in Washington Square Park to gather with fellow New Yorkers to express our opposition to state terrorism in response to our tragedy,” Elfenbein wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “Tomorrow I’m going to a local church to participate in a ceremony where I will help to ring the bell 3,000 times to commemorate the victims of a year ago.”

Margot Kaminski ’04 will be remaining in New York—but not for the anniversary. Kaminski’s driver’s test is scheduled for 9 a.m. this morning.

“I was not a particularly happy person when I realized the test was scheduled for Sept. 11,” Kaminski said. “Everyone else in the world will be saying prayers, and I’m going to be taking my road test.”

But Kaminski said she will actually be happy to be doing something mundane on the anniversary.

“I’m really against a lot of the memorials because I think a lot of it has been commercialized and is a little bit too sappy,” she said. “My family feels similarly that it makes more sense to go through the routine of your life than to sit and carp on it for a while.”

But Kaminski is a little nervous about the fact that she will be returning to Cambridge this afternoon. The thought of flying on the anniversary of Sept. 11 is slightly unnerving, to say the least, Kaminski said.

Baratunde R. Thurston ’99, a former Crimson executive and the first class marshal for the Class of 1999, has the distinction of having being born on Sept. 11. He was celebrating his birthday last year with a visit to his mother in the suburbs of South Boston when he learned of the attacks.

Though some born on Sept. 11 have decided to celebrate their birthdays on alternate days or not at all, Thurston said he plans on celebrating his birthday—in honor of Sept. 11.

“On midnight, Sept. 11, 2001, it hit me when I got back to Boston that...for the rest of my life, my birthday is going to be like D-Day, but worse, and I realized I’m not going to be going out to the clubs to celebrate,” he said. “But then I realized that’s probably the best way to deal with it—we’re alive and in pretty good shape, and let’s celebrate it while we’re here.”

Commemorating the Anniversary

Ceremonies and prayer services have occurred throughout the New York region all week long, including a ceremony held Monday in Battery Park to unveil 25 new names—those of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers lost during last year’s attacks—engraved on a police memorial there. There was also a candlelight vigil held in Nassau County, Long Island, on Monday night, to remember the 300 Nassau County residents who never returned home from work on Sept. 11, 2001.

The official anniversary ceremonies commenced around 1 a.m. this morning with bagpipe and drum processions beginning in each of the five boroughs and ultimately converging at Ground Zero. They will march down the ramp to the floor of the seven story-deep excavation, where they will remain until the beginning of the ceremony at the World Trade Center.