Life in Chicago

Irrevocable Changes

Sure, maybe it's just because I miss him. Or maybe it's that they really do have the same eye color. Or perhaps it's simply that my little daughter with her jowly cheeks and practically-bald head actually looks like an old man. Whatever the case, sometimes I look at Veronica and I get a flash-sense of my father.

It's surely not impossible that she could resemble him in spirit or even features, but the apathetic 17-year old in me tends to discard any such notions, insisting that it's just that I miss the man. I have to admit though that if there's anyone in my family whom I would want Veronica to be like it would be my father.

And I do miss him. Profoundly.

My father was 57 when I was born. He and my mother had been married for three years. She was forty and they had met late in life and had both been married twice before each other. My father had three grown children who were in their thirties and my mother had none.

My Dad grew up in Michigan during the depression. He was a bomber pilot in WWII, a prisoner of war in Germany and he came home a changed man. He made a lot of mistakes in his early life, wasn't always a great father or a great husband and he tended toward the self-important. But by the time he met my mother, he'd owned up to a lot of those faults and was well on his way to being an incredibly good man.

My mother helped him with that. She demanded that from him. And he from her. They made each other better people. The best marriages do that, I think.

My father loved to tell me how it was him who convinced my mother to have a child. He would lean back in his chair, swirling a glass of scotch and peering out over the bridge of his nose at me, his daughter, as he would tell me that he knew, just knew, that having a baby would irrevocably change my mother's life. 

Thinking back on those moments with him, the resolution in his voice, as my own little daughter entwines her fingers in my hair, I can't help but gasp with emotion for this great gift he gave her. And how wild that he would be up for having another child after he had already raised three.

But here I am.

It wasn't until after my mother died that he and I truly became close and that I really came to know him for the man he was. Oh, I loved him so much. He was such a good man by then. When my mother died I was eighteen and he was 77. We made an unlikely pair, but sometimes those are the best kinds of anything.

About a year after my mother died was when he moved to California from Atlanta, where we had all lived as a family. I was living in New York by then but I flew out to visit him often.

It was funny to see him living alone. Sometimes it was sad but a lot of the time it was just interesting. My mother had been such a force, dominating the household in all areas. It was her taste in art and furniture that filled the rooms. It was her cooking that found our table and her hobbies that took precedence over my father's.

He was living in Garden Grove,  a patch of Southern California about 45 minutes south of Los Angeles. He was familiar with the area having lived in Pasadena in the 1950s and the climate was good for his health. The modest, 2 bedroom condominium he took over from his deceased sister suited all his needs and was the place where I stayed and thought of as home in a way, when I visited from New York.

The condominium was in a little gated complex, a pool at its center, with a plethora of young families living all around him. In the mornings and afternoons the place was noisy with the sound of 7 and 8 year olds going to and from school. My dad often kept the front door open out of loneliness, and he would wave to the families from his perch at the kitchen table where he scanned the LA Times and sorted through catalogues.

When he moved into the condo he got rid of my aunt's outdated, avocado green sofas and heavy curtains and replaced them with slick blinds and a set of black leather couches. He hung modern art on the walls and put up large, framed photos of my mother everywhere. He even picked up a couple of lava lamps for the credenza, their place there by the front door never ceasing to make me laugh.

One month, after I'd sent him some essay I wrote in a college creative writing class about not having a home to go home to after my mother's death, I arrived for a visit to find that he had completely redecorated the guest room. A sign hung on the door that said, "Claire's Room" and inside he had put a pretty feminine comforter on the bed and had dug all my old stuffed animals out of storage to put in an armchair in the corner.

I was also surprised by how much my father suddenly began to cook. He looked up recipes on the NY Times website on a regular basis and was always trying out something new on me or his neighbors. He made apple pies and marbled breads, he made meaty lasagnas too and he even canned a bunch of strawberries one summer. Those seven years we had together after my mother died were unexpected and as each one slipped by I found myself more grateful for this time allotted to us, even if I wasn't always up for admitting that it was my mother's death that granted it.

I loved my father, loved him like I hadn't loved anyone before. I think as children we all love our parents unconditionally, but as we grow older and come to know them for the people we are we get to love them in a way of our choosing. It's a different kind of love than the obvious one we first feel. I never really got past that adolescent love I felt for my mother, not with her dying before I escaped adolescence.

I've been thinking about my father a lot lately. And maybe it really is because sometimes I look into Veronica's eyes and see his. She has the most remarkable blue eyes, but they're not the same blue as mine (a greenish-grey-blue or Greg's, a pale seagreen blue) and when I look into them long enough I get this inexplicable flash of my father.

But maybe it's something else entirely.

This morning I slipped quietly out of bed, careful not to jostle her milky, warm little body still curled under the covers and I tiptoed into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. It suddenly struck me that a little over a year ago I was waking up in the mornings with a feeling of ennui, with an unexplainable flatness. My life, even with all its love and adventure still felt dulled and heavy.

And I thought about that again this morning, after she had awoken and I was holding her in my arms, her little hands clasped around my neck, her face nuzzling into my neck as I spoke in soothing morning tones, my cheek brushing against her soft, downey head. The flatness has gone away. It's been gone for a long time. Life, these days, feels the opposite of flat.

And it was then that I knew, just knew, that my father, wherever he is, is happy for me.

Friday Morning Worries

Dear Bug,

If something were ever to happen to me, this is the letter I would most want you to read.

I think a lot about what it would be like for you to grow up without me, your mother. I suppose it has a lot to do with my having lost my own mother and the fact that I constantly fret about my own mortality. Well, actually I go back and forth between incredibly serene moments of understanding about the ebbs and flows of life and death and then extreme anxiety about having to leave this world before I'm ready. And your presence my dear, makes me feel like I'm not ready.

There are so many things I want you to know, so many things I could say. I could write you a letter every day for the rest of my life and probably not say it all. Nonetheless, there are a few choice things I would definitely want you to know if I weren't around.

I think a lot about how, if I were to die now, you wouldn't remember me. You would have no memories of our sweet, little relationship. I think about how that's true for the next three or four years. That in order for you to remember your mother I have to stay alive for several more years. I do know that even if you didn't remember me I know that I would have still had an effect on the person you are. I take comfort in the fact that all the love I've given you, all the care I've provided will always make you that much more of a secure person.

But enough of all that. Here's what I want you to know.

I love you like I've never loved anyone. I love you in a way I didn't realize was possible. I love you in this profoundly transcendent way. This way that, even if I weren't here, you would still be surrounded by my love. It's a love so big that it's never going away. Not when you're 20, not when you're 47, not when you're in your seventies and a grandmother.

I want you to know that I'm always going to proud of you. Even if I were to die today, you can be certain that when you're making your first science fair project or running your first track meet or graduating high school or college or losing a tooth or skinny a knee or taking your first step or going to your first dance or getting engaged or having a baby, that I'm proud of you. Even if it seems like I couldn't possibly be proud of you because I'm not there, I just will be and you have to accept that.

Death is such a strange thing, little bug. It happens to all of us. And it can be so sad and so scary and so unwanted. But the truth of it is that because of death, life is important. Think about it for a moment. It's true. Death gives us meaning. It gives us goals and aspirations and makes us think about just how much we love one another.

I don't know why I think about it all the time. I guess because both of my parents died so early. And because I work in hospice (really need to get a new job next year). But I do. I think about how long I have to live this life. How long I have to love you. To love your father. To be a mother, a wife, a woman, a writer. I think about places I want to see and things that I want to taste and feel. I think about having more babies and I think about you, you, you and your life and all the things I want to see you do and taste and feel.

And all those things make me certain that I just couldn't bear to go yet. And then I think, well, if I did have to go, I'm so very grateful for what I've done and felt and tasted here in my 31 years. You and your father and my mother and father have the height of it all. There's just nothing more important than the people we love.

But I digress. It's a drizzly Friday morning in October. You're 4 and a half months old. You weigh sixteen pounds (my aching back reminds me of this often). You love to suck on your big right toe and you've been squealing and laughing more than ever this past week. You don't have too much hair but you have the prettiest blue eyes and the softest rose-colored lips. You're nursing as I type this and one hand continually brushes against my shoulder, pulling at my sweater and grazing my face. Your eyelashes cast soft shadows on your cheeks and your warm little body is flush against mine.

There is no way I could love you more than I do in this moment. And it's something that will last forever.

I'm certain of it. 

Love,

Mom

Just Because

We had a really lovely weekend.

Yesterday was Greg's 31st birthday.  We started celebrating on Friday with a dinner with friends at Nightwood, officially my new favorite restaurant in Chicago. (Greg and I like to play this game where we ask each other what 3 restaurants we would return to if we moved away from Chicago and Lula is always my number one. Well, Nightwood is the latest feat by the Lula folks, so it was pretty incredible.)

On Saturday we drove out to the middle of Illinois and went hiking at Starved Rock Canyon. The drive was a little far and the canyon a little crowded but it was really nice to get outside and enjoy the fall leaves and crisp air. That night at home we ate tacos and watched Rosemary's Baby.

And yesterday was Greg's birthday. He shares his birthday with my father. My father would have been 89 yesterday (!). October 11 also happens to be my parent's wedding anniversary. They would have been married 34 years. My mother always said that she gave herself to my father as a birthday present and my father always said that she was the best gift he ever received. 

The three of us spent Sunday at home. I was in the kitchen for hours, working on a birthday cake and a lasagna to take to Greg's sister's house for dinner. Greg and Veronica spent most of the day following a football game on the computer and making each other laugh. And in the evening we had dinner with Greg's sister and her husband and their two kids.

It was a really nice weekend. The kind of weekend you dream about when life is giving you harder ones. It was the kind of weekend you wonder if you'll ever have again when you're dealing with a loved one who has an illness or when you've just gotten laid off from a job and you wonder if life will ever be normal again. It was the kind of weekend I used to dream about when my mother was throwing up from chemo or when I was brushing my father's dentures before giving him his nightly dose of morphine. Just one of those classic-life-is-good weekends.

And while I'm glad that my past experiences ensure that I appreciate these weekends more than I might otherwise, I also wish they didn't leave me with such a morbid edge to all things good. The more that I love Veronica, the more that I fear losing her. I remember going through this when I fell in love with Greg too. Before we were engaged and married I worried constantly that for some reason or another I wouldn't live to see those things happen. I used to beg some unseen force to please, please just let me live long enough to marry this man whom I love so dearly. And now I find myself begging again, please, please let me see my beautiful daughter grow up.

I don't know if this is normal. I don't know if my other mom friends experience this or if it's just a result of the loss I've experienced in my life. The moment I find myself loving something, I can't help but think of what it would feel like to lose it. I want to get past this. I want to be able to simply enjoy a perfect weekend, not because I know its opposite, but simply because.

The Turtle Fountain

The summer I was 15 my parents and I went on a three-week trip to Italy. One of my father's best friends was an Italian man named Gastone Nardoni who lived in Rome with his wife Allesandra and their two sons. I can't remember how he and my father met but they'd been friends for years and the Nardonis had always been a part of our lives, visiting us and sending their teenage sons to live with us one summer. My mother had met Allesandra for the first time when my parents honeymooned in Europe and the two of them had hit it off famously.

The summer that we went to Italy we stayed in Rome for a week, visiting with the Nardoni's before continuing on, just the three of us to Venice and Florence. We completed the trip with a week in Tuscany, again with the Nardonis and some of their friends, altogether 10 of us rattling around in an old farmhouse on a hillside. We spent the day at a little pool on the property, vineyards rolling out in every direction, and at night we drove the little winding road into town for gelato.

I had turned 15 just before going to Italy and was about to enter into the height of my angst-ridden years. I spent a lot of that trip listening to Soul Asylum on my headphones, refusing to smile for the camera and writing in my journal. My mother was wonderfully tolerant of this phase, always managing to engage me no matter how stubborn or resistant I was being. Now that I'm a mom myself, I can only imagine how hard this period must be on parents. Just the thought of Veronica putting on a pair of headphones and turning her back to me already breaks my heart.

One of the ways in which my mother was good at engaging me was by taking me for long walks. It's something we always did in the summers on Cape Cod, the two of us walking for hours along the shoreline. If I was moody or sullen my mother would just remain quiet as we walked. Inevitably I would open up and begin talking little by little. By the end of the walk I would have poured out my heart to her and we'd be a pair again, walking side by side, our bare feet dusted in foam from the waves.

We took one such walk together around Rome one afternoon. We'd spent the previous few days with the Nardonis and their sons and sons' friends who were all a few years older than me. I'd begun feeling left out and a little insecure and I think my mother could tell I was beginning to disengage. So one afternoon we went for a long walk, just the two of us, through the city.We walked through the old Jewish ghetto, exploring the crumbling buildings and meandering up little, winding alleyways.

Eventually we happened upon a tiny piazza and the sound of trickling water drew our attention to a beautiful little fountain in the center of the square. The fountain consisted of four sculpted men lifting four turtles into the topmost pool of water. We took up seats at a little outdoor cafe and sat in the square for a long time letting the tranquility of the moment seep in. It was a welcome respite from the usual bustle of Rome.

My mother was in remission from colon cancer for the first time that summer. She'd been diagnosed the summer before with stage four colon cancer and the last year had been a roller coaster of surgeries, tests and chemo treatments. Even though our financial resources were beginning to dwindle, my father had scheduled this trip, eager for all of us to get out of the anxiety-laden routine we'd been stuck in for the last year. Sitting there at that little cafe by the turtle fountain that afternoon in Rome I think my mother and I felt peaceful for the first time since she'd become sick.

Later that night we described the piazza and the fountain to the Nardonis. "Ahh," Gastone had exclaimed, "Piazza Mattei and the Fontana delle Tartarughe." He went on to explain how the square was little-known to tourists and a favorite of Romans. He told us that although another sculptor had originally designed the fountain, it was Bernini who had added the turtles.

The rest of the trip was pretty wonderful, but after we returned home it was always that day in Piazza Mattei and Fontana delle Tartarughe that my mother recalled most fondly. She died a few years later, of the same cancer that had so considerately gone into remission that summer in Italy, and a few months after her funeral my father sent me back to Italy. Just as he had taken our small family abroad that summer when I was 15 to escape my mother's illness, I think he sent me across the Atlantic again in hopes of helping me evade the pervading presence her death had become.

My friend Liz was living in Spain at the time and we bought the requisite Eurorail Passes and spent a month cavorting about Europe together, that trip making for a dozen more stories to be told another time. Before we left though, my father handed me a ziploc bag and told me to take the contents to Rome, to the Fontana delle Tartarughe. The bag my father handed me contained a portion of my mother's ashes. This was a ritual I was already becoming familiar with, although the thought of scattering my mother's ashes without my father was a daunting one.

So, once again in Rome, now at the age of 18, Liz and I traveled to Piazza Mattei, accompanied by Gastone and Allesandra, and while the three of them hung back I emptied the bag of ashes into the fountain, that afternoon spent with my mother swirling into muddy pools of cloudy, gray water. It was only then that I truly realized why that hour in the piazza had been so special to her. I'll always miss those walks I took with my mother, miss the hidden squares of the world and ourselves that we would inevitably uncover, given enough time.

 

 --

I recently wrote about Fontana delle Tartarughe for Trazzler.com and my trip has now been chosen as a semifinalist in a writing contest. The trip that gets the most votes by September 15th wins a paid writing contract. If you'd be so kind as to vote for me, I'd really appreciate it. You can do so by visiting my trip page here and clicking "Add to Wishlist."

Responsibility

Before I had children I used to think about what it would take to make me feel okay about bringing another life into this world. I still think about it a lot. On my runs through the park on Tuesday and Thursday evenings I look around at all these couples with two or three children trailing back behind them, lugging baseball bats and wobbling along on little bicycles and I wonder how conscious any of us are about bringing in all these new lives.

There are already so many people in this world and so many children who already need homes. Is it really responsible for us to just go on, blindly making more people? Should we have a better reason to do so? And a better reason than what? Do we even have a reason to begin with?

Al I know is that when I fell in love with Greg I wanted to create a family with him. I wanted to make a whole person out of the two of us and the love we felt for each other. And somehow that felt like reason enough.

Even now that Veronica is here though, I still wonder how responsible it is. But sometimes I look down at her face in my arms and I think about the incredible distillation of lives combined within her. I see myself and Greg, my parents and his, their parents and grandparents -- all these lives and lifetimes and coincidences and hard work and dreams pursued and failed and realized, all condensed into one tiny, new person. And then maybe I think that that's the point -- to keep taking the best of the best of the best of us and putting into a new life so that we can continue to evolve as a species and create the best population of people possible. 

All I know is that I want, more than anything, to raise her in a responsible way as possible. I want to teach her to be kind, to contribute to the world in a meaningful way, to help others and to not take for granted this life she has here.

Missing

V is going to see her grandparents today and they couldn't be more excited to get their hands on her. Greg's parents are wonderful grandparents. They're so involved and interested and generous. I think if we lived in the same city they would be over every day, wanting to spend time with Veronica and give us a break and even doing chores around our house. They adore their family and make all of us their number one priority. It's really quite amazing.

Veronica is their 5th grandchild and one of my sisters-in-law is due with number 6 at the end of this month. But you would never know that she's number 5. With each new one that comes along they act like it's the first all over again. I think Greg's dad tries to video chat us every night, just so they can sneak a peek at V. We prop her up in front of the webcam and she snorts and fidgets and fusses and they coo and clap at her through the screen. It's pretty endearing. I constantly feel lucky to have married into this family.

Still, every time I say "Veronica's grandparents" or tell her like I did this morning while she lay, smiling up at me from her changing pad, that she was going to see "her grandparents" this morning, something feels like it's missing. I think it's that when I say "grandparents" I am only referring to two people, not four.

Veronica will never know my parents. She'll never know what it's like to have them fuss over her or scoop her up after arriving from the airport. My father will never hold her on his lap and my mother will never teach her how to make cookies. She probably won't ever really think about them, except in an abstract kind of way, as mommy's parents who died a long time ago.

I wonder what kind of grandparents they would have been. I bet my dad would want to teach her weird tricks like he did with me -- funny card tricks where you fool someone into believing that you can guess every card in the deck or tips for how to hold your breath extra-long under water. My mom would make her dresses and knit sweaters and constantly send food in the mail. She would spend long hours in the kitchen, patiently letting Veronica experiment with recipes of her own fancy, letting her squirt food dyes into dubious cake mixtures and baking them, even though they're bound to be inedible. She would make treasure maps for her too, burning the edges of the paper for authenticity and hiding a bag of coins somewhere in the yard. 

I miss them not just for Veronica, but for me too. I miss the support and guidance and reassurance they could provide. I miss how they'd be proud of me for becoming a mom, a wife, a grown woman. I miss them for their smiles and wisdom and light and laughter -- all qualities I hope to see emerge in little bits of pieces through my daughter now and then. She'll know them, even if it's only by knowing herself.

The New Me

Ever since V was born everyone has been saying that she looks like a "little Claire." I have to look at her in some kind of M.C. Escher way to really see it. Mostly she just looks like Veronica to me, but if I squint in the right way I can suddenly see how she really does look like me.

Yesterday while Greg's parents were over we looked at an old album of my baby photos. Turns out she really does look like me. It's strange to see this miniature version of myself (with less hair) but really amazing too.

(Below I've alternated photos of me and V, beginning with one of me.)

 

Letter

Dear Veronica,

Today you are one week old. I can hardly believe that just days ago I was walking around with you in my belly, that I didn't yet know you.

I already want you to be an infant forever. I spend whole hours just looking at your little body, your lips and eyelashes, your little hands and expressive toes, running my fingers along your upper arms and neck, all that soft, soft skin. It already brings tears to my eyes to think that one day I won't get to do these things, that you'll be big and on your own in the world somewhere.

I did, in fact, weep yesterday as I held you in my arms in bed in the late afternoon. The rain was coming down outside and a cool breeze pushed rhythmically through the windows. You made soft little sighs and pushed your hands around my body as you slept and I wept for all that it means to have a child.

I thought of my mother and my father and their first week with me. It’s so easy to imagine my mother in the same place, in bed in the afternoon with me , running her fingers across my little cheeks and hands.

I thought about how much I want to spend the rest of my life watching you grow up, about how I never want to say goodbye to you. I thought then about each of my parent’s deaths, about those quiet moments between when they were here and when they were not.

And I thought too, about what’s been missing in my life all these years since they’ve been gone. About how, if they loved me nearly as much as I love you, then that’s been the thing that’s been missing all this time, such a heartbreaking thing to lose.

And lastly, I thought about how happy my parents would be now, to see me here, you in my arms, my husband peeking in on us now then – everything I would ever want for you. And something then seemed complete.

Love,
Mom

Only the Lonely

I read an interesting blog entry in Motherlode yesterday, written by a mother who has a four year-old daughter and who doesn't intend to have any more children. She wrote about all the pressure she faces from her peers about providing a sibling for her daughter and she wants to know what's wrong with having an only child. Interestingly enough, she's an only child herself.

I'm also an only child, and being so has definitely made me adverse to the idea, not sympathetic to it. I think that even if I hadn't lost both of my parents I still wouldn't want to have just one child. It's not that I don't understand all the reasons that parents could choose (and sometimes not have a choice like my parents, who couldn't have more) to have just one child, it's just that I don't want to do it myself.

Throughout my entire childhood I wished that I had a sibling or two. I think I forgot about the idea for a while during my self-centered adolescence, but after losing my mother, the fierce desire to have someone else in my life who knew her and loved her as I did reared it's head. And now that they're both gone, I can't even imagine how amazing it would be to have someone in my life who shares the same memories (kind of) and experiences that I had growing up.

I read through dozens of the comments in the only child piece yesterday. Some people were incensed and wrote that having only one child was selfish and terrible (poor China), but I was really interested to see how many people wrote in to say that they wished they were an only child, that just because you have a sibling doesn't mean you'll like them or have a relationship with them. And I suppose that's true as well.

But then I think about Greg and his siblings. There are six of them, altogether. They're all about 2 years apart and Greg is right in the middle. For the most part, in comparison to other sibling sets I've met, they're all quite close. And while they may not always get along or approve of each other all the time, they really do love each other and share an amazing bond. 

And I know that even if Greg and I only end up having this one child, it will have so many wonderful cousins and aunts and uncles in its life that it will never lack for family or shared memories. But all the same, I definitely want to have more than one child. When Greg and I are gone, and even long before that, I'd like for my children to be able to have each other, to be able to sift through a shared experience of this strange life, and of the life that Greg and I, in particular, introduced them to.

On Making Choices

We returned home from Atlanta last night. It was such a nice trip -- much more so than I anticipated. (You can actually read about our activities in detail on today's She Wrote, He Wrote.) I'm not sure what I was expecting out of this, my first return in close to four years to the city in which I grew up. Previous trips have been so fraught with an untidy barrage of unexpected emotions that I think I was bracing myself for something worse than it turned out to be.

In fact, it wasn't bad at all. I think, for the first time in a long time, I feel quite content and secure in my current life and home. So much so that going to Atlanta and being immersed in old memories of my parents and my childhood still didn't stir up too many feelings of painful nostalgia or longing.

All this to simply say that in the past my trips "home" have been difficult. I've stood in the green grass facing houses I lived in with my parents and wept freely for what once was. Those urges still rise up in me sometimes. They're so old and familiar at this point -- to react with sadness and despair at the life I've lived, the loss I've experienced. Sometimes I find myself slipping into those old thought patterns for no real reason. I'll find myself feeling sorry for myself and it takes a while to remember that I don't have to do that anymore.

I'm not sure what that moment was, what the exact breaking point in my life was, that let me finally realize that I didn't have to hold on to these feelings, this identity, this sadness anymore. I'm not sure what it was that helped me to finally realize that I indeed had the power to simply let go of it all. In any case, it was about a year ago when I finally began to do just that.

But letting go isn't an easy thing, I don't think. It can be one of the hardest, maybe. For me, at least.

About a year after my mom died, when I was about 19, I began to experience severe anxiety. I suddenly grew fearful of everything -- cars and airplanes, illnesses, friendships, the future...you name it. There were nights when I would literally sit up until 3 or 4 in the morning, holding my knees to my chest in an attempt to keep perfectly still in an attempt to stave off the imaginary aneurysm I was sure was going to strike at any moment.

And it's taken me years to let go of these fears and obsessive tendencies. But all the same, yesterday afternoon on the flight leaving Atlanta, I felt that old (and fierce) fear of flying flood through me. It's the most desperate kind of feeling, one of isolation and sadness and resignation. But as I sat there in my little airplane seat on the tarmac, I took a breath and seemingly stepped outside of myself for a moment. I don't have to be afraid of this. This is a choice I'm making, this fear and anxiety. I don't have to carry this around with me. And I willed myself the opposite.

I choose to be brave, I repeated in my head over and over as we lifted into the sky, sunlight flooding across me through the window. The plane tilted and I peered out across the tangled landscape of my childhood and palpably felt myself moving forward into my life.

(In other news I've been named Blogger of the Week by the San Francisco Chronicle!)