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My car service driver just wouldn't shut up. He was from Russia and proceeded to tell me on the 30 minute drive from JFK that New York should have gotten the Olympics, Russia was better with communism, and that my name is the name of a girl.

All I wanted to do was recline and watch the blur of urban landscape come into sharp focus as the BQE took me home. All I wanted was to see the water towers, the brick, the steel, the haze, and the grit of my town.

I have spent the last six weeks listening to people. And asking questions. And more questions. It's what I do. Perhaps if I wasn't exhausted of listening to strangers, I would have enjoyed this man with the thick accent and the tendency to swivel in his driver's seat and look at me in the eyes despite the fact that we were driving sixty miles per hour.

Red Hook was there soon enough. I signed the voucher. I pulled my suitcase from the trunk. A woman appeared at the doorway of my apartment and bounded into my arms. Wordless, I pulled Corie close and knew that I was finally home.