NEW YORK RE-ENTRY

So, 96 days later, 2 planes and 22 hours after I left my wife's little house in Ushigomeyanigicho, I dragged my overweight luggage (and self) up the 3 flights to my Brooklyn apartment. In the 23 years that I've been living in New York, this was the longest I'd ever been away from my apartment. The usual feelings of dislocation aside, it was a particularly bumpy return to NY life, because in the interim, my car had been unregistered, driver's license revoked, internet service cut (literally, time warner had actually cut into my line to fix someone else's service next door) along with a few other issues, like losing my rehearsal space so that my piano needs to be moved (somewhere? it won't fit up the stairs to my apartment). After I suppressed the desire to hop on the next plane back to Tokyo, and muttering the somewhat unsatisfying mantra of "there's no place like home, there's no place like home" I began dealing. I arrived on tuesday, taught all day at Queens college on Wednesday (fortified by my 2 hour commute on the way there--a bit less on the way home) spent Thursday and Friday at various Department of Motor Vehicles (might I recommend, Yonkers? The ambiance is particularly bracing!) then off to Cleveland to visit my mom. Still, it was nice to be back. Had a pleasant hit at Cleopatra's Needle with the Yoshi Waki and Quincy Davis. Which, of course, is WHY there is no place like home. The music. I had never played a gig with Quincy and he is a great player. (Yoshi, I've played with many times so I KNEW how good he is.) If you live in Ushigomeyanagicho, great as it is there, there isn't the steady stream of great players coming into town that makes the New York jazz community like nowhere else in the world. Also the bagels are much better here. So, I'm back in town, or will be tomorrow, for a while and (mostly) glad to be here.