IT SLEEPS, I TELL YA...

It’s not true, what they say about New York being the city that never sleeps. I arrived at JFK after 9 p.m. after a full day of travel from Vancouver. Not that it actually amounted to that. You just lose three hours and, along with a “quick” connection in Seattle, the day somehow quite literally flew by.

As things were timed, I went without a meal. Airport food prospects are dismal for me even under normal circumstances. In Seattle, the only choices near my departure gate were McDonald’s or a fish chowder spot. Not real options for a quirky vegetarian. (Side note: Why is it that McD’s is finally introducing a veggie burger in Europe but not in North America?) By the time I figured out NYC transit and dealt with a subway delay due to evening maintenance—this week only, of course—I got to my Chelsea hotel at 10:57. Whole Foods, my go-to for a healthy meal, closes at 11 and I couldn’t negotiate the mechanics of self check-in on time to drop off my suitcase, run the block and a half, race in and grab any salad with the word kale or citrus. Yep, Whole Foods had the nerve to get some shut-eye.

That left me walking the streets of Chelsea, passing on a 24-hour diner with one patron on a stool and searching the shelves at 7-Eleven. I settled on a highly unhealthy pint of Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream and then, just to be sure I wouldn’t awaken hungry in the night, opted for a cheeseless Domino’s pizza.

How the hell did I from healthy Whole Foods to total junk food? Slippery slope. Maybe it’s what I wanted all along. Maybe I had something to do with that medical emergency on the plane at SeaTac that resulted paramedics coming aboard and a family having to get off. Ice cream! And pizza! Let this be my What-Happens-in-New-York-City moment.

The woman taking my pizza order made no effort to repress her disgust. “You want no cheese.” Not posed as a question. More like a wad of phlegm she was spitting back to me. If there was any subtext, it was, Why haven’t I quit this f*#king job? If she had the chutzpah of The Soup Nazi, she’d have declared, “No pizza for you.” The best she could do was deny me spinach as a topping. “It’ll be burnt.” Huh? “If the pizza has no cheese, the spinach is gonna burn.” Pretty sure she made that up. How would she even know? I got the sense “hold the cheese” wasn’t a thing. Translation: You wanna f*#k with me, I’m gonna f*#k with you. So I asked for onions. If they burn, I like ’em even more.

I’m sure there was a lot still happening beyond the two blocks I walked to grab dinner. (Pizza and ice cream! Together!) And I realize Whole Foods should not be a Big Apple barometer. The weird thing about walking around Manhattan is, after a while, it always seems I’m either walking in circles or the same few establishments have multiplied in a bad retail cloning experiment: Duane Reade drugstore, Le Pain Quotidien, Pret à Manger, nail salons, souvenir shops and Johnny’s/Jimmy’s/Joey’s Pizza. (Apparently women know enough not to ascribe their name with mediocre pizza by the slice. Yeah, New York, I called your pizza mediocre. But then maybe I carry grudges. None of these guys, not Johnny, not Jimmy, not Joey, have ever had vegan pizza in the window. Not once.)

I could have headed back out in search of non-Whole Foods night life after eating every morsel of my pizza and ice cream. (Surely it would take a few hours to go up two waist sizes.) Of all nights, this first night would be the easiest for me to go yawn-free until closing time—whenever that is—in some gay bar in Chelsea or Greenwich Village. (That’s where they are, isn’t it?) Midnight is only 9 p.m. back home, 2 a.m. is only…yeah, yeah, you can do the math. But it’s telling that I Googled Whole Foods before my trip but not gay bars. I decided I’d rather stay in and read the label of my colorful Ben & Jerry’s pint, fretting over how much fat and how many calories were in each mouthful. It led to a different kind of action. I promptly Googled my jogging route to the High Line and beyond and then set my alarm for eight, an Are-you-crazy?! five in the morning back in Vancouver.

I really like New York City. I just don’t do it the way everyone says you’re supposed to. Maybe I’m not cut out for this city. Maybe I should be booking trips to Omaha or Saskatoon instead. But I’ll take it in the way I want to, all the shoulds and supposed tos be damned. And maybe that’s pretty close to the New Yorker mindset after all.

THINKING OVER A DO-OVER

Walking the dogs this morning, I glimpsed the For Sale sign perched on the other side of my laurel hedging. It warrants a mention since I haven’t noticed it in weeks. Like the rhododendron that is suddenly blooming,…unremarkable, and then it pops out. That sign has been pitched in the lawn for three months now. I glanced to make sure it hadn’t been vandalized. Of course it hadn’t. I guess I never fully shook that urban mentality.

Although it’s still All Quiet on the Nest-Turn Front, my move back to the Vancouver area got a boost this week with a job offer for a position arising in the summer. I accepted. Rather than activate the panic button over what I’m going to do with the house, I turned my thoughts to reestablishing myself in the city.

There’s excitement, but I’m also concerned about settling back in a city that I’d essentially fled. Absence can make the heart grow delusional. What am I heading back to? I have no doubt I will love the amenities, having a choice in pools, in libraries and gyms. That delights the adult-onset ADD in me. There’s also the expanded food options to add variety to my vegetarian lifestyle: Choices, Whole Foods, Vij’s, Annapurna, The Naam. Shopping, parks, tennis courts, cafés,…it’s easy to glamorize the possibilities.

And yet I only need to take a critical look back to the way things were when I left five years ago. I was nurturing a nascent hermit lifestyle. While I often tell myself that friends stopped calling once a ferry ride created a divide, most of my friendships had been downgraded to acquaintance status (if that) during the last five years of an unhealthy relationship and in the time that followed when I was so worn down by one person that I couldn’t pull myself up to deal with any person. The move to a rural area allowed me to heal, but by then time and space had comatized so many other relationships. Is resuscitation possible?

I’ve had countless episodes in life where I’ve cut off a friend or let a relationship decay only to revive it after a heartfelt mea culpa. If there was something strong enough in the beginning, it came back. In truth, any fractures rarely amounted to solely being my doing. By initiating a reconciliation, I allowed the friend to also have a moment of truth.

Why have I had so many of these experiences? Am I an ass who flits about, sucking what I can from a relationship and then moving on? Some days I can portray myself that way. But, no, I don’t think that is the case. Friendships bloom, evolve, fade, destruct as Life Happens. I happen to be an achingly nostalgic person who rarely settles for the dismissive observation that people move on.

I’ve been lucky. Reconnecting has always been positive. Things don’t go back to the way they were, but that person regains a present storyline in my life. It pales to what once was, but I am grateful there is still something.

I do wonder if my luck is about to run out.

My Vancouver friendships have whittled down to two. There are others I see on occasion, but they are no longer people I feel an urge to call when in crisis or when I’m excited about getting a new job. Returning to Vancouver is a chance for a do-over, but I am preparing for the fact that some doors won’t reopen. In some ways, it may not be radically different from if I’d chosen to relocate to Ottawa instead. I’m going to have to be pounding the pavement, making the phone calls, signing up again for gay tennis and gay volleyball, finding a volunteer organization, rebuilding.

Part do-over, part start over. So, yes, I am excited, but I am also scared. At forty-five, I wonder how much I can change in myself and how many second chances remain.