Back, Safe, Home Again

(I quote, of course, from that great work, Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.)

I'm back home after a somewhat grueling trip to New York and Boston, where I had a concert engagement.  I brought my son along, and while, like so many children on the spectrum, he has difficulty dealing with the mundane disruptions and pettty annoyances of quotidian life, he proved to be a champion traveler, handling many hours on buses, trains, subways, as well as new faces and strange places, with impressive aplomb.  We also had the great pleasure of seeing old friends and family, and the time spent with my great friends Rosie and J. made this trip deeply enriching for me on the level of bones, marrow, and soul.

As I walked the streets of my old neighborhood, I was welcomed so warmly by my old neighbors and shopkeepers that I began to wonder if my former sense of alienation there, on account of my for-that-part-of-town ethnic otherness, had been a delusion.  Perhaps one of my many flaws, after all, is the sense of being alienated everywhere.  (Nonetheless, as my fellow former-Bronxite readers who know whereof I speak can attest, if you're not Irish in the old 'hood, you do become the object of certain amount of suspicion.)

More later.