September in Manhattan is just not the same

The skyline looks wrong. For a moment as I am driven into midtown

Manhattan, I think I’ve traveled five hours to the wrong city. An

alternate city. Not the city of my birth.

In a way, perhaps I have. New York is not the same place I left in

early September 2001. That was before the twin towers came down.

Before the numbers 9-1-1 started to have a double meaning. Just

before.

Everything is different now. At least that’s what the politicians

and the pundits say. Americans have been touched by terror. We’ve

entered into a war against it. We know fear.

But what strikes me during the week as I walk on miles of

Manhattan soil, from the Upper East Side to Times Square, from

Greenwich Village to SoHo, is how fearless we all seem to be.

Unafraid to speak our minds, ride crowded subways and congregate by

the thousands to hear a free Bon Jovi concert.

I count my years in Septembers, as does my twin sister. This past

one was difficult for us both. We faced our mother’s mortality when

she flirted with death, and then in a way we each faced our own. My

sister’s asthma came back with a vengeance. I had a flu virus for 20

days -- the last seven of which had me spiking with a temperature of

103.5.

Like the city, we spent much of the year in the shadow of death.

Aware of how time can slip away when we least expect it.

Aware, too, of the idiosyncrasies of life.

I have flown cross-country 12 times since the 11th. Yet I spent 11

months of the year flipping the radio station whenever a Sept.

11-related song came on, changing the channel at visions of the

towers falling and refusing to open the Newsweek magazine I bought

the week after that day.

Then August came. Now September is here.

I turn a corner in the city and find loss. A wall at the Union

Square subway station is adorned with a laminated sheet naming those

who died at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

Relatives and friends have highlighted the names of their dead,

leaving messages for their loved ones. “We miss you, Daddy.” “God

bless.” “Save me a seat at Heaven’s pub.”

It is that last message that stays with me on the ride back to my

sister’s Upper East Side apartment. A wink and a nod.

If there is one thing I have learned this year, it is that we are

made stronger in the face of adversity. And, to steal from Stephen

Sondheim, whose “Into the Woods” is back on Broadway, every moment is

a moment when you’re in the woods.

* JENNIFER K MAHAL is the features editor at the Daily Pilot. She

can be reached at (949) 574-4282 or jennifer.mahal@latimes.com.