Even for all those years when the start of school meant nothing to me personally, September always felt like the beginning of the year. I'm not one of those people who think the city is dead in the summer, and I never take vacation in the summer, and I go to church and read serious books and even eat hot soup in the summer. Except for wearing seersucker, my life doesn't change much in the summer. But still... right after Labor Day commuters take the subway back from the tourists, summer blockbusters are replaced by more "artistic" endeavors, I can turn off the air-conditioning at night, my tickets for the new opera season arrive.

These past few years, though, September has come to mean something else. Maybe it's the angle of the sun that sets me off, maybe it's those intrusive electioneering telephone calls leading up to Primary Day -- but at some point around now I start to realize that I'm being unusually sensitive, hyper-emotional, and I'm tending to duck whenever a plane flies overhead. Since 1990, I work just two short blocks south of the World Trade Center site (I loathe that canned term "Ground Zero") and so, like many of us, live with a constant awareness of September 11th. Yet this is the week in which it all emerges from the background and takes over. I can't think of another event of my adult life which has so indelibly marked my memory's calendar. How many more years will pass before September no longer means a really bad case of the jitters?