I can see it in lights.

After a whirlwind weekend at home to celebrate my mom's birthday (saw The Forgotten and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow--both of which were fun, but I wouldn't put either on my list of favorites), I returned to New York this morning via the 6:30 AM train. I also took the train up to Massachusetts on Friday night. As I anticipated in my last post, I finished reading Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premiere Mental Hospital, and I had a bit of a shock when someone I knew showed up in the book! One of my parents' friends from "back in the day" whom I met many times when I was younger was interviewed because he used to work at McLean and was named as Livingston Taylor's music teacher; they even played with the Dead at one point. For anyone who's not familiar with Liv, he's the brother of James Taylor (Fire & Rain, written in part about his time spent at McLean). Liv is a fantastic musician in his own right, a singer-songwriter like his brother and their sister, Kate. Liv is also the uncle of my favorite musicians, Ben and Sally Taylor. Ben and Sally are the progeny of James Taylor and Carly Simon's ill-fated marriage. But "that's another story for another time," as Michael Ende writes in The Neverending Story.

After I finished Gracefully Insane, I picked up the National Geographic magazine that I had picked up at the train station. I used to love to read it when I was younger and was a proud subscriber to World magazine for many years until they broke my trust by putting a snake on the cover. [Every month when the magazine came, my father took it first and ripped out any pictures of snakes that appeared within its pages.] I hadn't really paid much attention to what was on the cover; I just felt like reading something other than Glamour or US Weekly or something like that. I came to an article on American Indian (what they're referred to in the article) tribes and slowly flipped through, not really reading it. I came to a map of the United States that represented the ten largest tribes in modern-day America. Kanatsiohareke, where I spent two weeks with the Bear Clan Mohawks in high school, was one of the tribes listed, so I decided to go back to read the entire article. The tribal leader with whom I spent time when I was there was quoted and interviewed.

So, I'm not really sure what the point of all of this is, but I was thinking about how when I was younger I would become so excited whenever the weatherman said my town's name on TV: I was sure he was speaking directly to me. I was positive that Martha's Vineyard was named after my best friend's sister, Martha, and that George's Island was named after my friend Molly's father. I guess what I'm trying to say is that after years of believing that I knew someone who would be mentioned in the press, I finally found two that I knew in one day alone.