In the summer, in the city

Hooray! I made it safely back from a stunningly fantastic trip to NYC, which you can read about here. It was a great break from the insanity of the end of summer on Cape Cod and the ramp-up to Labor Day weekend, during which I intend to revert to my old hermit ways and stay locked up in the house, and I had a ton of fun admiring the hipsters with their extremely Never-Seen-On-Cape-Cod clothing, and just reveling in being surrounded once again by people speaking lots of non-English languages, with lots of non-WASPy features and such.

This area is pretty maddenly homogenous, and it is so very necessary to throw oneself periodically into the fray of an international city like New York to remind oneself what the world really looks, sounds, and smells like.

While I was there, my cell phone rang more in 24 hours than it usually does in a week, which made me feel very much like a real New yorker, striding down Lexington with my phone plastered to my ear. One phone call was particularly odd, as it came from one of the folks I edit for -- a pretty huge corporation that is based in NYC -- and it was strange to field the call while I was, like, ten blocks away from HQ.

I felt like I should offer to drop in and meet my contact face-to-face, but then I came to my senses and realized how very grungy and on-vacation and really-not-from-around-here I looked, and kept my mouth shut. For all I know, my contact has a mental image of me as some smart-looking sophisticate who happens to be a big geek about grammar and punctuation. And who am I to disillusion her?

But now I am home again where, it is true, most of us are blond and blue-eyed and don't go around in fantastic, cutting-edge clothes like we got them out of a trash can (oh, this old thing?), but where I can see so many more stars, and smell the ocean through the window, and walk barefoot outside on Sunday mornings to get my newspaper.

Which is, of course, the Sunday New York Times, so that I can read about all the concerts, restaurants, lectures, and shows that I'm missing, and start planning my next trip.