Major Paradigm Shift

Who said you can't go home again?
Last night, through an uneventful flight from Paris, I landed for the umpteenth time, at JFK International Airport. It is an airport I have passed through innumerable times but this time, for some reason, it feels different.
First of all, it is the first time I am home in 9 years without my son. It is my first time home, in 9 years as just, well, Lesley-Ann. The other thing is, I have purposely made no airport pick-up arrangements just so that I could ease myself back into the harmonic cacophony that is New York City...
At the train station, as I wait for the E train, I am entertained by large groups of teenagers: It is Halloween, and youngsters are, by the droves, headed into the city for the annual Halloween Day Parade. A racial hodgepodge of kids take the seat opposite me on the train: there's white-faced chocolate boys with ghoulish make-up and fish-net attired young Latinas dresses as zombie nurses. I can't resist: Can I take your picture I ask? After all, this is New York and if there is nothing New York kids love more is having their picture taken. I'll post the pic soon ;-)
As I am rumble through the city of my birth, I wonder, how could I ever have left? I recognized myself in everyone I see: the teenage Guatamalan mother, the thick-thighed girl who yells, "What the blood Clot!" The elderly Korean mother who rests her head on the shoulders of her daughter, the brothers hanging out on the corner who yell after me, "What up Sis?" How could I ever have left? The cultural tyranny I feel myself subjected to in a foreign land melts away and reveals a Lesley-Ann who is whole, who is fixed, who is me.
Who ever said you can't go home again?