Tomorrow, well before dawn, Maria and I will get up and she will drive me to the train station in Albany, where I will catch a 5:55 a.m. train to New York. It is a beautiful ride down the Hudson, I’ll bring a book, listen to music. will carry two  big bags, one for my camera, one for an extra lens or two.  It will be a long day, a fruitful day, I will learn something and feel something, that is what it means for a writer to be alive.

I’m going to talk to some of the carriage drivers, the story feels incomplete to me without a clearer sense of them, and of how they feel being put in this intense and uncertain position. They seem to be forgotten in the conversation, I want them to tell me if they will drive those “cruelty-free” eco-friendly fake vintage electric cars, I need to look into their eyes when I ask them. I always am drawn to the human side of stories, I always was.

It is a curious pilgrimage to me in a way, the  outsider’s journey, this is so much of my life, it is so familiar. I loved being a reporter because I was always the outsider who could peer inside, and then leave. I am not one of the horse people, I am not one of the animal rights people, I can’t imagine that in six months I will not be writing about something else. I am an outsider everywhere I am, it is in my bones.

Yet the carriage horse story has caught me, captivated me, gotten into my head as few things have. Perhaps the horses really are talking to me, perhaps this is, as some have suggested, a thing I have been waiting to right about for years, it incorporates so many of my ideas and feelings about animals. Still, I wonder why I am getting up yet again to go to New York again, hauling all of my bags around. Again.

In all of my life, the only place I know I have really belonged is with Maria, in her life and our life together. I am never an outsider with her, I am home where I belong.  I am an outsider everywhere else, I know it and accept it and when I go to New York and wander amidst this mesmerizing and closely knit tribe, I know I will be an outsider again, I am not looking to join, to be on the team. That is not what I want, I know it and they know it. I am different from them. It is not my destiny to be on any team but the one right here all around me tonight. I accept that, I am learning who I am.

But still, I want to hang in there with these people, in one way or another, we are on this journey together. One of the old carriage drivers, long retired, came up to me in New York during the Liam Neeson appearance and he gave my hand a ferocious shake, I was surprised by the grip of such an old man. “I think you are Irish,” he said, “you write with your heart.”

And my heart tell me to go. Again. I’ll be back Thursday night.