Last Tuesday night, I had a date with my 13-year-old daughter to see the Imax version of “Iron Man 2” at a theater on 42nd Street. In a first for us, she would take the bus in by herself from our suburban New Jersey home to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. There would be a phone call before she got on, a text or two on the way in, and then a call when she arrived and walked across the street to my office. She is mature, quietly confident and careful, and had taken the trip with others many times before, so it seemed pretty straightforward.

Except this was just three nights after the failed bombing attempt in Times Square. And on Monday, as if to punctuate the mood, there were some fairly loud booms on 40th Street right next to the New York Times building on Eighth Avenue, where I work. Some people fled while others gawked until a firefighter barked: “It’s not Disneyland, people. Get the hell out of the way.” As it turned out, the explosions came from some blown transformers beneath the street, a quotidian event in urban life, but in the context of the scare Saturday night, taking on deeper portent.

As a parent, I confronted a new calculation. Asymmetric warfare had advanced from downtown to Midtown, from 2001 to the present moment.

As a reporter I had covered the aftermath of 9/11 and now found myself revisiting long-buried worries. I decided not to share any of those dark thoughts with my daughter. We hadn’t discussed the failed bomb, and besides, how do you explain that some people a long way away may wish her dead even though they don’t know her? In the end, we stuck to the plan, lining up with many others at the AMC Empire 25 near Times Square, having a moment, together, in one of the gaudiest, grandest places on earth.