Home Again

Starbucks on Greenwich,
with a tea. From the Tazo estates of Darjeeling - really?

The fellow beside me locked his laptop to the his chair and looped the cord around the pedestal of the table. And now the lock is stuck - he's going at it with wire cutters. His backpack is also locked - to the chair. "Lucky this time I didn't lock the jacket too" he said as he went out for the wire cutters. Remarkable. On an overnight train in India and he'd lash himself to the bunk.

Back in New York, almost a week now. Lots of pictures going up - so many more to come - but no writing. My road chattiness fades out on home turf. Which is a shame, still stories to tell so will cast back in the next few entries and cover ground too quickly gone over before.

News on the home front not huge - everything spun along without me. Catalogs massed, the plant on the kitchen table survived a month without water, R didn't go to the gym all that much but did photograph the Gates, and bring flowers to the airport, Cin and Ian got another month closer to the Argentinian departure, John and Nadine went to Arizona, Pam downstairs missed me, more tax crap came in the mail, new waitstaff faces at Schillers, bunnies and eggs in the Duane Reade windows. I can now wear different clothes every day, go to the gym, get enormous coffees on every corner, burn through $100 in a matter of days and I can't smoke anywhere, no matter how much I pay.

And March hasn't flipped us forward into Spring yet, still winter coats. But there's central heating throughout the city and infinite hot water.

Shrugging back into the clothes of a month ago and all of a sudden I was never away. You can fill the last month with anything. Today, from just now, circles back and can be seamlessly soldered to the today of my departure. And everything that's come in between exists in a time-out time that solo travel and time changes and foreign cultures allow.

From my plane notes:
This morning, thirteen hours away, doesn't seem possibly connected to the now of this flight. The thread back seems arbitrary, might stretch to any morning, and still it's too thin. Travel disrupts and propels us into a new, linear, open-ended space.

Realized why I like travel, why I specifically begin to feel my peace right at the start with the preparations that attend departure. They're ordained.

Passage through the airport is a relegated series of steps (when did they do away with departure customs?), choices for shopping, souvenirs limited but appropriate – over-priced but saved you a trip to Grand Central, in-flight reading is varied but in the scope of what a trip might warrant, and there's aspirational stuff as well. In the aerie blandness of Terminal 1 I can test the same perfumes and creams I try in Bangkok's duty free, re-familiarize myself with department store brands and heady claims. I can feel the separation from my New York self beginning, and the ties to this other mode of mine taking hold.

There's less possibility in the airport, still less to do and see on the plane itself. But the strictures of the space, the limited scope of what you can listen to and even eat, somehow free me to focus on the creative. I'm freed in a way the infinite of New York, my own apartment, friends and access to all manner of communication doesn't allow, seems to in fact insight the opposite – a closing down of my creative cells.

That's my big reflections for this Friday.

Hugs

C