Well, it's only fitting that Life in LA comes to a close...
...and Life in Chicago begins!
Please visit my new site, Life in Chicago, where I will be blogging regularly on all things Claire and all things Chicago.
I'm leaving this site intact so feel free to peruse the pages. Use the About Section if you're just getting started, scroll through my archives, or just check out the handy links on either side of this page.
I'm sitting on the deck again. It's not quite 9AM. I'm eating a banana chocolate chip muffin and drinking coffee and it is, in fact, wonderfully windy today. It's cool out and the sky is filled with big, blustery clouds. The air smells like rain and I realize that I had forgotten about the smell of rain, like depth and possibility.
I spent most of yesterday crying. For no real reason. My life just feels so upended and all the things that make me happy and sparkly and adventurous don't seem as present or as plangent. But feeling sorry for myself is really quite lonely and unoriginal. And it's something I've already spent enough time doing in this life.
Greg came over last night and I made the loveliest dinner of spicy chicken sausage, farfalle and a spicy tomato-basil-vodka sauce, topping it all off with a heaping dollop of ricotta. I'm realizing as I write this that it's one of my strongest tendencies: cooking to ward off insecurity.
I've been doing it for years. When I moved back to Vermont after my mother died when I was eighteen it was the middle of winter and I was dreadfully depressed and isolated. And so what did I do? I cooked. Night after night. I spent my afternoons wandering the aisles of the local grocery store, picking out ingredients for whatever recipe I had chosen from The Joy of Cooking and then I spent the evening carefully destroying the kitchen in my attempt to make Potato Leek Soup (serves 6-8) or a flaky pastry crust for Quiche Lorraine (100,000 calories per serving).
I went on like this for months, cooking and crying and soothing myself in this strange culinary sort of way. I've refined the process a bit in my older age, reducing the crying, cooking healthier dishes, lessening the isolation and adding in a nice bubble bath here and there.
Okay, I'm rambling. I'm procrastinating.
Thanks to everyone for all the input on what I should do about Life in LA. Despite all of your wonderful suggestions, I'm still unsure. A couple of months ago I bought the domain www.clairebidwellsmith.com and I would like that to be my actual url, I think, but that still leaves the question of what to do about the title of the blog. And it's been Life in LA for so long that it does feel sort of strange to change it.
But really. I live in Chicago now. I need to do something about this.
The Windy City isn't so windy today. It's just a little breezy. I'm sitting on my deck in my new apartment drinking coffee and writing in my various journals.
Last night, sleeping alone in my new little house with its high ceilings and tall windows, I woke up almost every hour, opening my eyes to take in the open door frame, the quiet rooms beyond, the dresser in the corner. Around 3AM I lay curled against my pillows staring out the bedroom window and realized that I could see the very top blinking tips of the spires on the John Hancock building downtown.
I've been in Chicago for five days now and so far it's been mainly spent unpacking and organizing my new home. On Monday there was a lazy afternoon stroll by that beautiful lake and on Saturday night friends from Los Angeles were in town. We went to the most amazing restaurant, Tango Sur, and then later a group of us ended up sprawled across the big leather bar chairs at the W downtown. It all felt wonderfully normal and relaxed.
I've been trying to be good at keeping my insistent worries at bay, tamping down the threatening stress levels which mainly stem from money and job issues but yesterday, after a day spent job hunting and wiring money into overdrawn bank accounts, I came home and collapsed in a sobbing heap on my bed. I curled up against the pillows and just wept.
And it was a funny sort of crying I realized after a while. Or perhaps the most appropriate kind of crying. Because as I lay there, tears staining my pillow, I realized that I wasn't crying because I was sad or particularly scared or worried. Because I'm not. I'm not sad that I moved here. I don't really miss Los Angeles or my old home. I miss my friends but I know we'll see each other soon and I can always call them. And I'm not even that stressed about the other things. Although money and a job loom transparent right now, I know their edges will sharpen soon enough.
I was simply crying for the enormity of it all. Eventually I picked myself up and drew a warm bath where I soaked for a long time letting all the tension of the past few weeks dissolve and dissipate.
And now here I am, a Wednesday morning, on my deck with my pets and plants and cup of coffee. I have a full day ahead of me with job searching and working on my book and other submissions. I have emails to return and things to unpack, laundry to finish.
Oh, something funny about my new apartment. Below me live a bunch of college guys and they're all very young and sweet and funny and they happen to have the only laundry in the building and it's free but you have to actually go into their aparment and down into their basement to use it. And they don't mind at all. When I hesitated to just walk through their back door (which they never lock) and into their kitchen with my laundry basket they assured me that I would get used to it. And over the course of the evening I kind of did. I tip-toed through their living room several times, always one or two of them sprawled across the couches, playing video games, drinking beer, or passed out snoring softly.
I'm really kind of delighted by this aspect of my new life. There's something so funny and sweet about it all. I'm going to make a big batch of banana chocolate-chip muffins today and I think I'll leave some on their counter the next time I go through with the laundry.
Oh, and I really need to figure out what to do about LIFE IN LA. Any ideas?
Well, I officially live in Chicago!
I arrived on Friday in the late afternoon. The last day of driving flew by, my foot pressing harder and harder on the gas pedal in anticipatory energy.
My boyfriend was waiting for me at my new apartment when I arrived and, with the help of friends, we unloaded all my stuff into my new place. The last couple of days have been a blur of unpacking and organizing, trips to Target and Whole Foods, waking in the middle of the night to stare sleepily out foreign windows.
The strangest thing about being here in Chicago is that it just doesn't feel strange at all. When I left my aparment alone for the first time this afternoon and walked to the train station, I felt perfectly at home, as though I'd walked that walk a thousand times.
It's warm afternoon as I write this. I'm wearing a grey t-shirt and the stereo sounds good. I've got dinner plans and I can hear the train going by.
I'm 29 years old and I live in Chicago. My whole life is happening right now.
I'm writing this from room 131 of my hotel in Rolla, Missouri. I'm only about eight hours from Chicago and my new life.
I'm feeling a little lonely and sad, this my third day on the road.
My hotel is kind of nice and quiet. My only dinner option is a Steak & Shake just outside on the corner. But that's not too bad, I suppose. I haven't eaten at Steak & Shake in a long time. My Dad and I used to go there a lot in Atlanta when I was growing up and later in high school I often went there late at night with my best friend, Liz.
After my mother's funeral, when I was eighteen, after I'd dutifully and numbly said all there was to say to all the people in attendance at the service, Liz and I hopped in her car and went to Steak & Shake. We sat in a booth together, just the two of us, and we ate a brownie sundae. My mother was dead. There was nothing to say.
Liz's beautiful sister Jen died last weekend. Of cancer. I still haven't been able to wrap my head around it. She was so young and Liz is so young and we're all so young and all these things keep happening...births and deaths and weddings and moves and it all just continues to surge forward with the most horrifyingly beautiful and streaming force. All the same, my heart is breaking for Liz. And any other week I would have been at her side through all of this, just as she has been through all the major events of my life.
I didn't think about too much today, my third day of driving. I just kept winding down the road, my foot hard against the gas pedal, and the day slid by quickly. Every once in a while little thrusts of anxiety about tomorrow would sift through me. I'm nervous about my new city and my new life, nervous that I won't love my apartment as much as my last, or of things being hard for a while.
When I arrived in Rolla this evening it turned out the hotel I had reserved didn't take pets and there was a sudden sinking feeling of trying to find another hotel and then there was a minor backing-the-truck-up in the parking lot fiasco and I almost cried but there was just no point. Instead I took a deep breath, figured out how to get out of the parking lot and found another hotel that accepts pets.
After I lugged everything in, cats and litter pans and laptops and suitcases, I poured a glass of Charles Shaw into a little plastic cup and sat outside on the concrete steps looking out at the sun setting in sheets of gold over the highway and the rolling green forests. I thought about how a year ago I couldn't have handled any of this. I would have probably dissolved into tears at the hotel problem and cried even harder about the truck-backing-up fiasco and then I realized that a year ago I couldn't have even driven across the country by myself in a giant truck with my car and my cats and everything that I own.
Thinking about all of this quelled my anxiety about Chicago. If I can handle all of this, I can certainly keep forging ahead. I can make a new life for myself in this new big city. I'm done crying and being afraid of moving forward. I want to live my life.
I'm writing this from room 114 of my hotel room in Erick, Oklahoma.
Today I drove another 11 hours and a total of 620 miles. It's torturously slow-going in this truck with the car behind.
Today was exhausting. More so than yesterday. It feels as though a month has spanned since I left Los Angeles, but really it was only yesterday morning.
I spent the majority of the day driving through New Mexico which was lovely and endless.
I'm feeling a bit more cognizant and a bit more settled into my move to Chicago. Last night, exhausted, and lying in bed with the cats curled around me it suddenly all hit me. I don't live in California anymore. My lovely little house in Venice which has served as such a sanctuary for so long is no longer my home. I won't see my California friends very often anymore. All the things I was planning to do had I stayed in Los Angeles have now evaporated.
It was a strange feeling and I almost cried but I was too tired. I spent most of my eleven hours today thinking about my new life in Chicago, all the things I want to do and places I want to see. I thought about how I'll set up my new apartment and about the ferocious job search I will soon embark on. I didn't think about the snow until just now, but even then it's a fleeting thought and won't be real until it is.
I stopped for gas in Tucumcari where Nyree wanted me to stay and made friends with a nice guy at the gas station who was driving alone to Florida. We talked about how boring and lonely these endless hours on the road can be.
And then I powered on. Through thunderstorms and a stiff neck, through cat cries and roaring trucks, and now here I am. In Erick, OK with a baseball game on in the background and the cats curled around my legs.
Tomorrow is another day and another 10 or so hours to Rolla, Missouri. And then Friday into Chicago.
Wish I could write about my dinner but Erick's only restaurant closed minutes before I arrived.
I'm writing this from a booth in Jerry's restaurant in Holbrook, AZ. The full moon is hanging low and luminous over the dusky plains of Arizona and I've just order a Bud Light and the Catfish Special.
I left Los Angeles this morning at 7:30 AM. I'm driving a 16 foot moving truck towing my car on a trailer behind. Just me, my two cats, everything I own, and barely enough gas money to get to Chicago and my new life.
I'm so exhausted as I write this. I drove for eleven hours today. It really wasn't too bad. Yesterday I had a minor melt-down about driving the truck with the trailer (a last minute kind of forced decision) but it's really not that bad. And the cats—after an intial hour of constant yowling—have been very good. They are currently hiding under the bedskirts of room 112 and my navy bean soup has just arrived.
My last week in Los Angeles was a whirlwind of packing and friends and stressing out. I don't know what I would have done without all of my incredible friends. All week they showed up to help. Liz and Amber, Timbre and Abby and Lien. Aoife and Brian and Will and Francesca. And Rhonda, always Rhonda. They packed my stuff, labeled boxes with funny names and drawings. They gave me hugs and pep-talks and hooked my car to trailers. They loaded moving trucks impeccably and carted off left-over food.
I will never understand how I've come to be as lucky as I am to have these people in my life.
I've hardly been able to think about my new life in Chicago. Every moment of the last couple of weeks has required such meticulous attention to the present, the list of things I MUST do today, to making sure I'm not taking other cars out as I drive down city streets in my moving truck, not letting the cats make a run for the hotel room door, thinking about my route tomorrow. It's exhausting and strangely zen. I haven't shed a tear over the actual life changes.
I didn't cry saying goodbye to my friends or my favorite client, to my little home or to Venice. I just kept my foot steady on the gas pedal and since there isn't even a rearview mirror, I didn't look back.
There was a moment today, driving through a stretch of pine trees when I felt the anticipation of Autumn, something I haven't experienced in five years. I felt that old sense of September, of Fall, of things starting anew even as they're shifting form.
Tomorrow night I stop in Oklahoma and the next night Missouri. I'll roll into Chicago and my new home on Friday afternoon.
There's more to say, much more. More about being 29 and alone on the road, about changing my life and all the things to come, about letting go of the past and moving forward into my life but my catfish is here and it looks really good.
I have officially begun my last week in Los Angeles.
Yesterday I hosted a lovely little farewell brunch at my house and all my favorite people came and the house was filled with laughter and mimosas and embraces and remembrances. Afterwards I went for a swim in the ocean, lying on the beach after, the salt water drying against my skin, my eyes closed to the luminous sky and ocean curving before me.
In the late afternoon I drove down to Orange County for perhaps the last time ever. I wanted to say goodbye to my father and to my time spent here with him. I drove the drive I've driven hundreds of times: the 405 South to the 22 East into Garden Grove. I turned the car onto Golden West Boulevard and then onto Lampson, pulling right into the old condo complex where my father lived for a while and where he died.
It all felt so familiar. Not sad, not even nostalgic, just familiar. I realized how long Southern California has been a part of my life. Long before I ever lived here I used to visit. My Aunt Jean and my grandmother Lulu lived here when I was growing up and often my parents and I would fly out for a week or so. The wide open boulevards and sparkling blue skies seeping into my being at a young age.
I drove around for a while in my Dad's old neighborhood, remembering all the time we'd spent together there. I even drove by his old grocery store and the bank, the Blockbuster where we used to rent movies and the old 1970s library on the corner. I didn't feel sad though, rather I enjoyed the feeling of something familiar, the sense of place and past evoked.
Afterwards I went to my Dad's favorite restaurant, an old windowless steakhouse with leather booths where he knew the bartender and all the waitresses by name and where we used to go whenever I visited him from New York. I sat at the bar by myself and I ordered a vodka martini in honor of my father and in between bites of filet mignon, I wrote him a long letter in my journal.
I told him how grateful I am for my time in California and how grateful I am for how much he loved me. I looked over at the booth where we used to sit together and I remembered his funny, bushy eyebrows and the way he used to laugh with a sparkle in his eye. I thought about how, without him, I would never be this woman, happy and kind and peaceful and young and alone at this old steakhouse in Garden Grove, California.
Driving home on the sun-flooded 405 I knew that my time here has come to a close. I knew suddenly that it was always going to be this way, that I was always going to leave California one warm August morning when I was 29, my foot on the gas pedal as I move forward into the rest of my life.
