Bi-coastal

I'm returning to the West Coast this afternoon after 9 days on the East, for family Thanksgiving. A very nice time. They're a good bunch, my family, and very good to me. I am very lucky.

I have not always felt so comfortable among my kin. But one think I have learned, and try to help some of my family-conflicted patients see, is that the way things are is not the way things need always be. Families resist change, but they (including me, of course) can change over time. And sometimes for the better.

I remember remarking to my mom some years ago that we seemed to be getting along more easily, not making each other irritable and unhappy the way we used to. She replied very matter of factly, Well, we're both too old for that stuff. Takes too much energy. Nature sometimes accomplishes what grace cannot.

Most of the time I was out on the North Fork, rural-ish and pleasant and highly Caucasian.  I am aware not only of the cold but of the leafless trees, something you rarely see in SF.

Sunset comes only 20 minutes earlier than on the West Coast, but with the flat landscape and the trees, it seems darker and greyer. Went bowling with a sister and bro in law; new lanes look like a Las Vegas casino. Very enjoyable.

My time in NYC, well, it just continues to feel like a place I don't belong and would never want to live again.

I suppose that's natural in some ways. We've both changed in the decades I have lived elsewhere.

NYC is not really about the "diversity" it trumpets and worships. It's about co-existence, a horse of a very different color. People of all kinds mix on the streets and in other public spaces, but at the end of the day they go home to places where people like them live together, by race and class. That's how humans are. And as the LGBTQ types like to say, Deal with it.