I haven't checked in here in a while. I've been on vacation and then renovating my house in Venice Beach to rent it out. I just arrived in New York but don't get to see my new apartment until Monday. I can't wait. I feel like a homesteading widow who's ordered a mail-order bride to come take care of him and the youngins. But so far I am thrilled with New York City, one of my many homes. I moved here when I was sixteen and left when I was twenty-seven, but I never went to school in the city so I am only a New Yorker in as much as I am a guy from Connecticut and Michigan as well. My friends tease me all the time about this. When someone asks me where I'm from I always hem and haw. I don't really feel as if I'm from any one place. The United States, I guess.

But walking around Brooklyn, where I'm staying till my Manhattan place is ready, getting lost on the subway, seeing an art film with a friend and Sonny Rollins for free tonight at a park at Lincoln Center thrills me to the core. New York! It's the Paris of North America. I couldn't be more thrilled to be anywhere in the world.

The kids arrive in a few days and I can't wait to see them again. They're with their grandmother, their mother's mother, down on a lake near Atlanta. Realizing that if we stay here they will grow up to be sophisticated New York kids instead of Westside of LA kids blows my mind. I wonder how this all will effect their personality.

In the craziness of the moment they arrive the 2nd, their school and mine starts the 5th. As a faculty brat myself I've always looked to the Fall as the time for new beginnings. This, my friends, is a big one.