Life in Chicago

Monday Ramblings

I've had a hard time writing here lately, not because I don't have things to say. I do, I do. But because I'm just swamped with all kinds of stuff. Last week was a big push to finish the final edits of my book and now we're moving into this really dreadful time of having to sort through and pack up our house.

Ugh. I have moved so many times in my life and it never ceases to stress me out.

I've been particularly emotional about it this go around, as I try to sort through all of my parents belongings. I was driven to tears twice yesterday, just feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of my parents stuff that I have. I'm talking Spode china and Waterford crystal decanters, dozens of beautifully framed photos, art work, boxes of their clothes. I have my father's wedding tux and his army uniform, in addition to his old favorite sweater, a pair of pajamas I remember him fondly in and his large collection of Borselino hats. Then I've got my mother's wedding dress and one or two boxfuls of clothes that I remember her wearing often, and which I just can't bear to part with.

I've got their report cards and my father's airforce records. I have my mom's art work and her sewing machine and the coffee table that was in her living room in New York before she even met my father. I've got my own baby clothes that my mother saved and boxes and boxes of family photos. Yesterday I started crying when I came across a stack of old film reels, the topmost labeled "Claire's Homecoming."

I want to keep all this stuff, I really do. But I can't continue to drag it around with me for the rest of my life. I honestly don't know what to do about all of it. I get so emotional going through it that I don't even know how to pick and choose or repack any of it.

On a lighter note, it SNOWED here last night. Normally this would make me rant and rave, but I just don't care anymore because we are leaving 6 weeks from tomorrow for a new life of snowless winters.

And in good news, the book is DONE. My editor called on Friday to say that my most recent batch of edits were superb and not to touch a thing. She seriously made me promise not to do anything else to it. I swear I could work on this book until the moment it's in your hands and still probably not feel done.

The art department is working on mock ups of the cover as we speak. It may or may not have a family photo on it, which I have mixed feelings about. This potential did cause me to upload a bunch of old photos to a Flickr account, if you're interested though. I'm particularly fond of this one of my parents, taken on their honeymoon in Italy in 1975.

Anyway, I warned you that this would be a rambling post. Hope your Monday is less snowy than mine.

 

Two Out of Three

Greg and I went out last night to the Hoyt's opening downtown at Hotel 71. I wore a cute dress and we sipped cocktails and gazed out the window at the city skyline. Sometimes I forget how to be just me and Greg, but sometimes I remember, and it's perfect.

Tuesday Morning Explanation

I've been working until 10pm the last few nights, trying to finish up edits on my book. It's almost done! Which is both terrifying, and exhilarating. Mostly terrifying. No matter how many times I read it, it's still hard to imagine that other people are going to be doing the same, en masse, less than a year from now.

Anyway, this post is meant to be an excuse-me-from-posting-anything-of-substance-while-my-brain-is-sucked-into-an-anxiety-ridden-editing-vortex.

More soon!

Home from New York (Again)

I got home safely from New York on Wednesday night. Despite my separation anxiety and the fact that I didn't see any of my friends while in the city, I still had a remarkably fun trip. I wasn't kidding when I said that Manhattan is like an ex-boyfriend that I never quite got over. I'm still in love with that city, and even though I know it's not where I'm supposed to be, some part of me will always belong there.

For reasons that are beyond me, I ended up wandering through Times Square on Wednesday morning and it was magical, as only Times Square can be. The brisk morning air and the gaggles of tourists, buses steaming past and the honking taxis. There was nowhere else that could have made me so happy in that moment. I watched a man trying to take a photo of himself with his cell phone and offered to take it for him, if he would take mine. He told me he was from Argentina, and took this photo of me.

(There are a couple more photos here.)

After that I took the train down to the West Village where I had lunch with my agent, Wendy. We had a long, languid lunch in a restaurant filled with publishing industry people, and I talked over my ideas for my second book which I've already begun working on. At one point Wendy looked at me and asked, "Did you ever think you wouldn't sell your first book?" I could tell she thought my answer would be no, but the opposite was true.

Even though all of this is what I've wanted for my whole life, there have been so many moments in which I never thought it would happen. Sitting in a restaurant in the west village with my agent, about to head off to a meeting with my editor at Penguin, still feels like a dream. Not a breath goes by in these moments when I'm not acutely filled with gratitude.

Wendy and I parted ways on Carmine Street and I wound my way over to Hudson and the Penguin offices where I spent the afternoon with my editor Denise. We went over the final edits for my book (it's almost done!!) and I hung out in her office while she went to a meeting about my book jacket. Everyone says that it will all feel real when I see the book jacket for the first time, and I think they're probably right.

After that, Denise and I went to one of the most perfect little bars (which I can't remember the name of) and drank St. Germaine and Cava cocktails, before going to dinner at Little Owl. At 6:30pm I hopped in a car to the airport, tipsy and full and happy, and I almost cried as we drove over the Williamsburg Bridge and out of Manhattan.

I'll be back, I thought. And soon.

 

Last Minute Trip to NYC

I'm in New York right now, specifically on Long Island. I have a quiet afternoon to myself -- a rarity in my life these days -- before I embark on what is sure to be a strange experience tonight.

I'm in New York mostly to meet with my editor, but also to do the thing I'm going to do tonight, a thing that I'm actually not going to talk about here just yet. The thing has to do with the beginnings of my second book and I'm not quite ready to talk about that yet. But yes, I've lost my mind and already begun work on a second book, while in the throes of finishing the first one and making a cross-country move.

I never said my life was boring, did I?

I wrote a completely different post last night that I've decided to trash, and replace with this one. Last night's post centered around my separartion anxiety with Vera, but now that I've arrived here safely and have already video-chatted with my sweet girl, I'm feeling a little better.

It never gets easier though. The leaving. This is the fifth time I've been away from her (none of those times lasting more than three nights), and each time I can't help but come close to having a complete breakdown. Last night I started crying as I put her to sleep and after she was down I made my way to our bedroom where I cried into a pillow until Greg came in to comfort me.

It's moments like these that make me realize just how deeply the wounds from my losses run. That an overnight trip to New York to do really exciting things, can seemingly rip me in half and dredge up a thousand emotions that all tie back to the loss and grief of my parents, is quite startling, and quite sad.

I don't want to be like this forever. I don't want to have extreme anxiety about leaving my little girl, about flying on airplanes, about going out into the world and not coming home. Every time I've said goodbye to her before one of these trips, I can't help but worry that it will be the last time I see her, and then I make myself sick with dread. I've nearly canceled trips, gotten off airplanes, or hauled her along with me at the last minute, every single time.

In the days leading up to each trip I become stricken with irrational fears. I'm terrified that she will have to grow up without a mother, that I'll be gone before she can even remember me, that I'll be replaced by someone who isn't me, that she'll feel alone and abandoned in the same ways that I have felt at times in my life.

But each time, I force myself to do the thing I'm intending to do. To kiss her goodbye, to drive away, to get on a plane. And now here I am, out in the world, on my own. I'll be home by tomorrow night, and Vera and myself and Greg will all be stronger for it. (Or at least that's what I'm chanting over and over in my head during moments of turbulence.)

Banana Muffins with Kahlua and Dark Chocolate Chunks

I'm one of those people who is a firm believer that alcohol only enhances food. A cold beer with a platter of fish and chips. Red wine in your beef bourguignon. Penne with vodka sauce. Sauvignon Blanc in asparagus risotto. Or one of my favorites: Kahlua in Banana Bread.

The alcohol in all of the above burns off in the cooking process leaving your food with a flavor and a moisture level hard to beat, and this is especially true in this recipe.

I'm going to warn you now that Vera helped make these, so they may appear a little messier than yours will.

The Last Time I Moved to California

The last time I moved to California I was twenty-four years old. I'd been living in Manhattan's East Village for four years, finishing my BA at the New School and bartending in Union Square. I desperately did not want to leave New York.

I had an internship at Time Out New York magazine and had just been asked to apply for a job there. I had a group of friends that it had taken a surprisingly long time to make. I was irrvocably in love with New York, with the buildings and the streams of people flowing up and down the sidewalks, with the artists and the street people, the pampered patrons of the restaurant I worked in, and the motley group of waitstaff that I made fun of them with.

At age twenty-four I drank too much on a regular basis. I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, and I was tall and thin and a little defensive most of the time. I missed my mother all the time. She had been gone for six years, a period of time long enough for the young girl I had been when she was alive to completely dissolve into a lonely and anxious young woman who wasn't quite sure of who she was supposed to be.

I knew that I did not want to leave New York. All my life, growing up in Atlanta and in Florida, I'd had this ache to be somewhere else. But for the first time in my life, living in New York City, there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

But the whole time I'd been in New York, my father had been living by himself in Southern California. After my mother died he had moved to Garden Grove, a little town about 45 minutes south of Los Angeles, and ever since then he'd been not-so-patiently waiting for me to join him on the West Coast. His health had begun to deteriorate rapidly and we both knew he couldn't be alone much longer. Once I graduate, Dad. I'll move then. I told him that every time I went out to visit, letting him drive me around the strange California landscape, knowing he was hoping I'd fall just as in love with it as I was with New York.

At the time I thought that was impossible, but then I realized that I was more in love with my dad than any place I'd ever been, and I knew that our time together was running out.

I left New York on a bright hot day in late June and made it to Los Angeles the day after the 4th of July. I'd never seen my father so happy. He was beaming. He wasn't alone anymore. I couldn't help but smile with him.

I spent the next year getting to know Southern California, and trying not to miss New York. I lived in a beautiful old apartment in Hollywood, and worked a series of odd writing jobs where I got to know LA in its true form. I also spent seemingly endless amounts of time with my father, taking him to doctors appointments and visiting him in the hospital every day when he got really sick. Eventually I left LA to move into his condo with him where he died one warm August evening, barely a year after I had arrived in California.

I had every opportunity to move back to New York after he was gone, and I almost did a hundred times. Instead I moved to Venice and found a little apartment on the canals where ducks quacked softly in the dusk air and bougainvilla draped itself along little white bridges.

I fell in love with Los Angeles there. With the great, rolling Pacific Ocean, with the salty air and the swaying palm trees. With the barefoot surfers and the morning sea mist. With the eclectic artists and the hipster writers, with the group of friends who quickly became my family. It was more than that too. It was something about the light and the air, about the feeling of possibility shimmering in the morning air.

And so when I fell in love once more, this time with Greg, I left Los Angeles knowing that maybe one day I would come back.

 

Trip to Madison

We went up to Madison, WI on Friday to visit our friends Kate and Tarek (the ones who got engaged a few weeks ago).

We only went for one night, but still managed to pack in a lovely lunch at Graze, a stop in a heavenly cheese shop, a tour of the Orpheum Theatre and the Modern Museum of Art where Kate & Tarek will be getting married this summer, a lovely homemade dinner, and even a trip to the recently-famous capitol where Veronica tried out a little protesting.

See all the photos from our trip here.

On the drive up there, streaming past winter farmlands dusted lightly in snow, I was quite aware of my dwindling time left in this part of the country. Although I never quite felt at home here, I've been grateful to get to know it all the same.