I didn’t really miss New York at all when I was on the island. It’s weird to call it “the island” because that makes it sound tropical but one can’t really call it “the isle”, can one. That sounds even weirder.
Anyway I say I didn’t really miss New York. That’s not to say I didn’t miss my friends (I did) or I want to give up life here and move to the island (I don’t) but homesickness only affects me when I feel that the place I’m in is not fulfilling me in some shallow or meaningful way that home does fulfill me.
Does that make sense? When we were in Kent, at the B&B getting ready for Shiv’s wedding, we needed to eat. The inn was in a residential part of the town and there was nowhere easily walkable. So we looked at the menus for the area that the hostess provided. After three tries, finding out one place didn’t deliver until 5 and another place wasn’t OPEN until five, we had to order from Pizza Hut. Who didn’t even want to deliver to us because we were at a hotel, until Stuart convinced them by use of cunning exessive politeness to bring us food for which we’d pay hard-earned money.
That was a shallow moment because the whole world doesn’t have to be like New York. But in New York I can get sixteen kinds of food from cultures around the globe delivered to the park bench I’m sitting on at three seventeen in the morning on Christmas Day. That’s fucking awesome, by the way. So I had a shallow moment, where my inner brat lay down on the floor and kicked her arms and legs around and said WAHH TAKE ME HOME.
I had a more meaningful kind of homesickness the next day, at a pub in Covent Garden with friends where we went to kill time before our flights. Stuart and I decided to go for a little walk through the busy square, watch a little Punch and Judy, and just generally revel in not carrying our heavy suitcases. It was nice to be walking along hand in hand in the perfect English summer sunshine, watching all manner of people stream past us. We sat down in one of the alcoves and watched a string quartet play recognizable classical music. I turned to Stuart and said, “You know, for all I say London is just like New York so I might as well live at home, we don’t have string quartets.” I went on to think, we also don’t have this gorgeous summer weather, we also don’t have cornish pasties or quince jam or wonderful canal holidays or sheep, SO MANY SHEEP. Okay, that’s England, not London, but you get where I was going with that.
Then, almost unbidden, I thought of the blind Greek accordionist on the N/W that I like to call Themistoklis, who played Fools Rush In for a solid year and always says in heavily accented English, “Ladies and Gentleman, your donations are greatly appreciated.” I thought about Leroy, the black guy with nothing but his thumbs who, when he asks for money on a Friday because you’ve just gotten paid, says, “If you can’t give me your cash, then just give me a smile!” And how I always smile. And I thought about how we might not necessarily have classy string quartets with more charm in them than all of the Bond actors combined, but how there’s nothing quite as awesome as walking through Herald Square and hearing a saxophonist play Girl from Ipanema and wonder what he knows about you, nothing quite like the guy that plays Edith Piaf songs on guitar in Brooklyn, and how much I missed those things.
So really, it came down to realizing that for me, walking through Covent Garden on a busy Sunday felt like a moment in a pleasing Richard Curtis film, but walking through Astoria on a muggy Sunday to have lazy breakfast at Tastee Corner, well, feels like normal life.

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