TAMPA, Fla., 11 September 2003 — A nation still horrified by the Sept. 11 attacks will mark the second anniversary with moments of silence and bursts of patriotic song, by gathering in peaceful memorial gardens and busy public squares, and by reaching out to each other.

In Parkland, Fla., a 55-pound piece of steel wreckage from the World Trade Center will be unveiled as a new piece of art. It has been designed so that years from now, school children can touch it and feel a bit of what was lost.

In Portland, Maine, plants from the garden of a couple killed on American Airlines Flight 11 will bloom at a memorial honoring the seven people from the state who died.

In West Virginia, workers at a steel mill producing decking for the rebuilding of 7 World Trade Center will ask the public to sign their names onto a steel plate that will become a part of the new structure.

And in Tampa — home of Central Command and US Special Operations Command, the two leading commands in the war on terror — Harley-Davidson riders will raise money for the widows and orphans of police officers, firefighters and Special Operations forces who have died.

Organizers of the memorials say they are looking for ways to honor those who perished in the attacks and to keep alive the sense of community which permeated the nation in the days that followed.

“It was something our generation never experienced. We lived this wonderful immune life,” said Elaine Diaz, a spokeswoman for Ferman Harley-Davidson in Tampa, which is organizing the motorcycle ride. “It helps bring people together and it helps us feel united.”

The sites where more than 3,000 people died that day — Manhattan’s ground zero, the Pentagon, and the field in Shanksville, Pa., — will again be center stage for the day.

President Bush will observe a moment of silence on the South Lawn at 8:46 a.m., the time the first plane hit the trade center, and will attend a prayer service. Later in the day, he will meet troops wounded in Iraq.

A presidential proclamation designates Sept. 11 as a national day of prayer and remembrance and as Patriot Day.

Vice President Dick Cheney has agreed not to attend today’s main Sept. 11 memorial ceremony at Ground Zero, in order to keep security levels manageable, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday.

President Bush had led the mourners at the devastated World Trade Center site on the first anniversary of the terrorist attack, and this year had decided to send Cheney as his representative.

But Bloomberg said he had asked the vice president to skip the event because of concerns that the extra security measures required for Cheney would have “inconvenienced or delayed” the members of victims’ families wanting to attend the morning’s Ground Zero event.

“The vice president has graciously agreed and we look forward to his presence in our city as we honor those who were taken from us so tragically two years ago,” Bloomberg said. Instead, Cheney will attend a memorial service later in the day honoring fallen officers and employees of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the World Trade Center site.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will take part in a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

At 10:06 a.m., bells will toll in the rural communities throughout southeast Pennsylvania, where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed. A 2,000-pound bell that was brought to the first anniversary of the attacks will toll 40 times — once for each of the victims — at the Living Memorials Project in Somerset County.

In San Francisco, a 5-mile-long stretch of American flags will be unfurled along the waterfront by volunteers. The same flags were held by about 1,000 people circling the Statute of Liberty on Sunday.