We arrived back in New York this week after a 3 week vacation in Vancouver, seeing friends and spending time with Ada and Andrew. Which means everything is reversed. Normally, we might go to New York for a vacation, and then return to work in Vancouver. Now it's the opposite. So now that time in January when you settle back into normal working life is happening in New York. So where is home, exactly?
When we arrived in Vancouver after being away so long, everything felt strange. All the automatic things you do in a home as a matter of reflex had been forgotten. I couldn't remember where things were. (Where are the sharp knives?) In some cases, though, Ada had moved them as she readjusted the family home to suit her routines. But very quickly everything becomes normal again.
The biggest change in New York now for us is that we have brought our dog, Maggie. She couldn't fly with us because of Air Canada's byzantine sets of regulations, so she flew on her own on Cathay Pacific. I went to JFK airport at 6 AM this morning to pick her up. I needed to rent a car, because the process involved going back and forth between several destinations in JFK's enormous cargo area, which looks like the kind of place where bodies can be disposed of. I encountered very slow and laconic paper pushers in the cargo office, but the highlight was an extended conversation with a US Customs official who had received extensive training in the the Kafka and Monty Python divisions of bureaucratic studies. I wish I could reproduce the exactly sequence of bizarre and insinuating questions and comments that ensued (between long pauses while computer screens were contemplated and documents stamped). When I told him that we were bringing Maggie here for 2 and a half months, and then she would go back to Vancouver, he said "Do you really expect me to believe that?" It may have been a joke, or maybe not. He also said that my dog would never be the same again and that he didn't know that they let mixed breeds into the country (I think that was a joke). Even the process of getting to see someone was bizarre. I was told by a friendly bystander to stand at a specific spot in the middle of a large room, and wait until some arrived to help me.
But at last, I got Maggie, and we drove off to the Upper West Side. Maggie seems very excited to be here, and did her first big poop on Broadway. So now we are dog owners in New York, and have reason to go to some of the infinite number of pet stores on the Upper West Side.
Culture awaits!
