In the distance I saw a palm tree: An absurd thing to find in Queens, but I took it in delighted stride. It felt like a sort of divine symbol, and I was overcome with a rare serenity, a sense that perhaps what I had always felt to be two such disparate, disjointed extremities of my life – my childhood in New York, my adulthood in LA – had finally merged to become one life, well-lived. And why shouldn’t there be a palm tree in New York? After all, New York was, once upon a time, a tropical island. And I, once upon a time, was a New Yorker. As I pondered the nature of roots and change and integrated identities, the car drew closer. It turned out to be a pigeon’s nest on a telephone pole, but what can you do?
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