Where I Was From

California

I threw away my anchor necklace today. Who needs an anchor when you're already home?

Labels: California, memoir

posted by Leah @ 8:44 PM 0 comments

2008 Recap

No probing survey this year: just books. And a couple of very serious magazines. Top five are bolded.

1. Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey – Karen Wilkin
2. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life – Bryan Lee O’Malley
3. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder – Lawrence Weshchler
4. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller (re-read)
5. Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott
6. Bone – Jeff Smith (complete series)
7. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – Michael Chabon
8. Scott Pilgrim VS the World – Bryan Lee O’Malley
9. Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness – Bryan Lee O’Malley
10. Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together – Bryan Lee O’Malley
11. Red Eye, Black Eye – K. Thor Jensen
12. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age – Modris Eksteins
13. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men – David Foster Wallace
14. Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen
15. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner (re-read)
16. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
17. A Light in August – William Faulkner
18. Absalom, Absalom – William Faulkner (second aborted effort)
19. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
20. Journal of Ride Theory Omnibus – Dan Howland
21. The Beauty Myth – Naomi Wolf
22. Girl with the Curious Hair – David Foster Wallace
23. Buckminster Fuller: At Home in the Universe – Alden Hatch
24. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann (aborted effort)
25. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
26. Berlin: City of Stones – Jason Lutes (re-read)
27. Berlin: City of Smoke – Jason Lutes
28. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf (re-read)
29. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil – George Saunders
30. The Second Tree from the Corner – E. B. White
31. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt – Aimee Bender
32. Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond
(33. The New Yorker)
(34. Harper’s)

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 11:59 AM 0 comments

Please stop calling me crazy for moving someplace as grand as Chicago

Last night I was invited to a dinner party at the home of someone I’ve been on a couple of dates with. I wasn’t quite ready to meet all his friends at once, but accepted out of curiosity, since he was cooking vegan food and was itching to prove to me that said food can be completely edible when done right. He was completely right on that account – I was pleased to see that lasagna and tiramisu can be completely amazing with zero dairy in them. I don’t really have a useful place to store this knowledge, but there it is, just the same. I also managed to sucker myself into daring that I could be a vegetarian for the rest of the month (with the exception of Soup Night next week, but not the holidays…ohhh, boy), but that was the fault of my big mouth, and I don’t blame him for being smug about that.

What really caught my attention at the dinner party was the fact that here were fifteen or so Midwestern folks who couldn’t stop talking about San Francisco for the several hours the party lasted. San Francisco as the greatest place on earth. “Why the HELL did you leave San Francisco?” ad infinitum. “The restaurants are so much better there,” they said over an amazing dinner a local person had just spent all afternoon cooking them with ingredients bought at Trader Joe’s, a store that can obviously be found right here in Illinois, as well as in their illustrious Promised Land. Trader Joe’s is the same there. Let me get back to you about West Coast sushi, but after living all over the country, I have to say that in general, life is pretty much the same in all metropolises.

Words I could have applied to the cities themselves. When it comes down to it, despite the beautiful landscape and the mild climate, when you live in San Francisco, you are still living in a city. You still have to work a job like any other and wait for the train (just TRY finding parking anywhere in that city besides grocery store lots. Want a space near your apartment? $150 a month. Sorry, no street parking, even at home). There are still dull people in San Francisco. Sometimes even the ultra-sophisticates the city is famous for are complete dullards – just dullards who are extremely well-dressed, and whose monologues are about music and performance art and their dietary habits. They are easier on the eyes than Midwestern dullards, who are forced to dress down because of our unforgiving winters, and for a while it’s difficult to tell that boring talk of creative ventures isn’t actually more exciting than boring talk about practical things like work and what’s in the news.

I can stare at the websites for Bay Area concert venues and miss them until I look at the bands’ own websites, where they inevitably list a tour stop here in Chicago. I can bitch about the cold, but honestly, when it’s foggy and the wind makes even 50 degrees feel pretty damn unpleasant, I wouldn’t be taking those constant jaunts through Golden Gate Park, anyway. You adjust to different climates with surprising speed. My parents have both spent a lot of time living in Minnesota and cross-country skiing, but living in Los Angeles has acclimatized them so they are now miserable at any temperature below about 55. I would be lying pretty hard if I said it’s not a huge imposition to stay mainly indoors for four months out of the year, but I do like having the four seasons. I hate wearing layers, but the snow can be breathtaking as a visual, even when it’s literally breathtaking in that a sharp inhale makes your head and lungs ache. The ocean is majestic, but so is the architecture in Chicago. Strangers greet each other on the street here, but in San Francisco, the only strangers that approach you are derelicts demanding your change – and they appear quite literally every few yards that you walk. The rent is as steep there as it is in New York, and forget the comforts you expect here, like wood floors, windows, dishwashers, and porches. There is a lot less of that, out there. The “yard” behind my last place was just a spot where the landlord kept the building’s garbage.

Earthquakes always seem to come up in these conversations, but I feel like I should mention them just to say that I usually don’t think about them unless I’m quake-proofing a new apartment, something most people I knew out there never even bothered to do. They’re terrifying, but what city doesn’t burn down once or twice? What of hurricanes, tornadoes, riots, terrorist attacks, and recessions? Every city is susceptible to something. Even Paris goes through some shit once in a while.

None of this should be taken to mean that I don’t love San Francisco. I do plan to return to California fairly soon. I live 2,000 miles away from my family right now, and I am not the kind of person who can stay so far away for life. But that’s what it is to me: home. Not heaven. Not a dream of escaping reality. It’s where my family is, and where I’m from, and for that reason – and that reason alone – it is, to me, unique in all the cities of the world. That’s really the only reason a big city can be different from all the others.

Labels: California, Chicago, memoir, travel

posted by Leah @ 12:13 PM 1 comments

Mousing, Continued

Well, I had been hoping to find a way to start getting up earlier.

I'd been dreaming I was escaping from Sweeney Todd around 7:30 this morning. He was brandishing a butcher knife at me and wearing a flowery apron, and it was clear from his smug grin that he thought the apron was ever-so-adorably ironic. I scrambled down the side of the building and had halfway woken up when a sliding crash and scurry in the kitchen brought the cat flying into my room in hot pursuit of what I was fervently hoping was nothing. I rolled over and though the light was dim and my nearsightedness makes the world look like it's underwater, it was clear she had a mouse in her mouth.

I know cats aren't known for their kindness and efficiency in killing small creatures, but this was ridiculous. She chased it around the room for ten minutes, and every time I thought she was about to show a little mercy and finish the little guy off, they'd stop and stare each other in the eye for a while, and then start the pursuit all over again. My barely-awake instinct was to wait for her to deal with the situation so I wouldn't have to. We shouldn't have mice. We are clean women. I wanted no part in touching anything skittery and wild.

But then I saw its face. The poor little guy was round and gray and the same size as the cat's tiny fabric "mouse" toys. She seemed to think he was just a much cooler version of the toy, but what I saw was round floweret ears, twitching whiskers, and a nose like a shiny, black bead. His sides were heaving from his racing heart as he calmly stepped into the cup I held out for him. I didn't want to take him out into the snow, but I couldn't just let him live in our house. The pale, early morning sky reflected weak blue light onto the four inches of freshly fallen snow as I crept across the street in my long red coat to release him in some bushes across the street. They still had some thick clumps of leaves at the bottom where my mouse might find a little comfort as he drifted off to sleep. I gently set the cup down to let him walk out. He crouched in front of the bush, surveying his fate, and I apologized as best I could as I left him there, staring.

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 9:41 AM 1 comments

Mousing

I was stowing our deck chairs in the rear stairwell of the house when I spotted something about the size of my thumb scurrying out a frantic circle a few feet away from me. I figured it was a hyperactive bug and dismissed it at first glance, but closer attention revealed it to be an actual, real life mouse. Commence nonsensical bellowing. The mouse marked out a wilder circle on the landing, then ran straight toward me, bounced off my foot, and disappeared into a hole in the wall somewhere next to the staircase. I finished yelling, wondered why I should freak out at the sight of a mouse when the gnarliest of insect invaders leave me calm and collected, and called in The Expert.

The Expert had been watching from her usual perch on the kitchen radiator, but after poking around the stairwell with her in my arms, I realized there was no guarantee she wouldn't run for the mystery nook under the stairs that might allow her to crawl under the house and vanish for all time. Left with no choice but to dampen her excitement and take her back inside, I gave her a couple of skritches and went back to work on my computer.

It must be dull to be a resident Expert receiving so few consultations, but she does bring a cuddly peace of mind to the household.

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 5:38 PM 0 comments

Oh my my my

Theraflu is the culprit, I hope. Why else would I have woken up around three remembering when I lived downtown and someone left a grocery bag full of A-cup bras on my door handle? Did they intend it as an insult? Isn't there some way I can use the incident in a story? And late in the morning, where did those dreams come from? A family walk at the beach led to ice caves in the hills, where we skated in our shoes through tunnels that led to an abandoned subway station where the skeleton of a horse was frozen into a wall of ice. We visited my favorite childhood home, reaching not only the location but the time when we'd lived there, so all our things were still there. We were delighted and set to robbing ourselves with no clear idea how to bring our treasures back with us through time. You can't rob history. Otherwise, we'd all have a lot of amazing hats.

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 2:17 PM 0 comments

Bloomsday

A short, feverish morning at home listening to the periodic crash and roll of the brusque voices of a dozen or so German shepherds next door coaxed me toward the street, cringing at the methodical cacophany, as measured as the tides. Wave after wave of dogs. No more time to waste reading work email when I was meant to roam the streets, an afternoon's urban odyssey.

We set our clearly-defined rules and obeyed them: all cell phones were left at home, boundaries were marked between Western, Shakespeare, the Kennedy, Ashland, and North, and we meandered forth into the muggy Bloomsday heat, wandering rocks, no guarantee of any of us coming across the others. The Puerto Rican festival raged somewhere around a corner and the neighborhood drifted west to join clad in red, white, and blue but I alone dressed in blank white and slouched east toward Western, a foreigner for a day, backwards against the current.

And on into the sunbaked, drizzling afternoon. Friends were found and misplaced, some equipped with packs full of books, umbrellas, and scotch, myself carrying little more than a wristwatch. The sun and rain tired of flirting with one another and called the thick night in to take their place as the tide of patrons shifted. Barstools were gradually draped with the colorful skirts of tidier women. A different neighborhood rushing in. Ineluctable modality of the visible.

Out again into the street and away from the group with a passing woman and her bear of a dog, northward, lost somewhere between conversation and Milwaukee Avenue and finally, alone, charted a weary course home.

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 1:19 PM 2 comments

Where I Was From

I love that magical and completely illusory power the internet has to break down social barriers so that strangers can email each other on Myspace and somehow their presence in each other's personal space isn't as intrusive or patently impossible as the presence of offline strangers in one's private life can be. Someone wrote me out of the blue (since the wallpaper on my iBook is, after all, mostly blue) and asked if I ever miss California. His profile indicated that he'd left the Golden State behind this past year, as well.

Honestly, nobody had really asked before. Seven months isn't much time to cultivate longing for something as complex as a city. Or had no one been curious how I felt?

I hadn't allowed myself to dwell on the question much. Of course, I miss my friends something awful. But the place itself? Hadn't considered it. The whole peninsula seems imaginary when you're not there.

But something stirred in me and I wrote back, easily, instantly:


"I miss the strange feeling of security I derived from living on the edge of the world. And the ordinary things a person misses after moving far away: friends, familiarity, sushi. But San Francisco is so isolated, not geographically (at least until BART shuts down for the night) but philosophically. I don't miss that self-aggrandizing attitude folks cultivate in the Bay Area: I don't miss that way Emperor Norton seemed like a role model for everyone else to come to his town.

Do you miss it?"

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 12:38 PM 2 comments

Laissez les bon temps rouler

When I lived in New Orleans one of my favorite sights was the trees lining St. Charles Street. For weeks after Mardi Gras, they were heavily draped with throw beads from parade float-riders with poor aim. They looked enchanted, like rainbow-colored trees from a cartoon. You'd almost expect them to jingle when the wind passed through their branches.

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 10:40 PM 0 comments

On Masquerades

Leah: 1
Coffee: 0

I'm drinking my coffee out of a big wooden stein with a base about as wide and heavy as a horseshoe. You know what that means? I've been awake for a whole hour and I haven't destroyed any electronics by spilling into them.

Take THAT, Apple Computer!



Our New Year's Eve masquerade bash has been in the works for a while now and though serendipity arranged for my grandma to give me an amazing vintage dress for Christmas, I can't find a mask I can tolerate anywhere. Mask shopping online ought to be a cinch since Mardi Gras/carnavale aren't all that far off, but if I put on a mask with eye-holes that aren't enormous, I Freak Out. I am, after all, already myopic as all hell. I do not like to augment this handicap. You know how cats get when you put them in a bathtub? Putting a mask on my face is like strapping a little doll-sized bathtub to a cat's head. It don't jive.

Diagnosis: I might have to resort to facepaint.




The one perk of having zero readers: you can reference My Chemical Romance at will. It's just you and me today, Internet.

I do have an old glitzy mask sitting around on my desk, and it would be perfectly fine for the party except for two reasons: the eye-holes are tiny, and it brings back weird memories. I got it for cheap in the French Quarter to wear to a Purim ball back when I was living down in the swamp and all. I liked that it was relatively simple: silver with gold sequins all over it, versus the huge feathered ones in yellow, green, and purple. I was temporarily estranged from my erstwhile boyfriend, so I asked Ryan, the guy-friend most likely to own a suit, to go as my date. He was an heir of some kind, from Texas. The director of the university Honors Program liked to make fun of him because he'd worn $3,000 shoes made out of some kind of reptile to class one day. I'm not clear on how shoes can cost that much unless they're programmed to make you dance like Fred Astaire, but I digress. Ryan had good manners. We went to a ball. Everybody danced in a circle to "Hava Nagila." Ryan walked me home and seemed weirded out when I hugged him goodnight. I figured that people of his stature must bow to each other or exchange cigars, instead.

But I didn't know him all that well. Everyone in our class knew that he had a pretty intense crush on a tiny girl named Mirya who spent the bulk of her time sunbathing drunk. A few weeks after the ball, I got back with my boyfriend, and Mirya woke up in her dorm room late one night to see Ryan sitting next to her bed, watching her sleep. I heard she got very fat the next year. And he was married with kids, or rather, married because of the kids, by the time he graduated. I never heard who the wife was, but he didn't seem particularly fond of her. I couldn't say for sure - I didn't know him all that well.

Purim sure was fun, though.

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 11:35 AM 3 comments

Stormy Weather

I'm sitting in my living room with only the dimmest lamps on, watching the front windows as if they were a TV. I wouldn't know how to explain to a local why it's thrilling to me just to watch the purple panes of sky framed by the nearly-bare tree branches as the remaining leaves pulse in the whispering rain. Could someone from the actual world understand the beauty of the whole sky strobing with lightning, then tearing itself apart in a crash of thunder, and best of all, that magic moment of anticipation in between?

I think only a Californian could fully appreciate it. Only someone trapped in that odd, dusty frontier where everyone forgets the outside world, turning inward to focus on their own glamour, real or illusory. If there were seasons there as there are here, would they remember that they are on earth, after all? How claustrophobic to think that the world out there never changes, but gets staler by the year until the tension's built up, and a few times in a generation, an earthquake wipes their slate clean.

Better to have rain to perform that function right. Better to crunch through the piles of yellow leaves. I could continue writing like a deranged Robert Frost but I'll stop now with the thought that whether or not a person's been told by too many writing professors that the world is a text, people are most definitely products of their environments, and I feel so much better off now that I'm here.

Labels: Chicago, memoir

posted by Leah @ 5:06 PM 3 comments

Logan Square

It's hard to sit down and put words to the strange feeling that I'm suddenly someplace where I know something like four people total and am close to none of them. It's not a foreign country, of course - though all the signs in my neighborhood are in Spanish, which I'm comfortable with anyway. The subtle differences make it all the more alien: not knowing where to go to buy cheap boots, not having any hobbies or activities or regular haunts to go to, nobody on the planet having time for you except a cat named Spookyboots.

I guess the clearest way to demonstrate how bewildered I am is to say that while I'm writing, my bed is preheating.

Yes, apparently they can do that.

Labels: Chicago, memoir

posted by Leah @ 10:55 PM 0 comments

Pulling a Bilbo Baggins

So, it's my birthday. I've gifted myself with a Zelda haircut. I'm going to a party tonight that is only about 15% birthday-related, so I figured it would be tacky to wait til then and ask for everyone's attention to make my big announcement that I'm moving to Chicago in a month. It's not really my party, see. And I'd just end up quoting Bilbo's birthday farewell speech from The Lord of the Rings. I sure love an excuse to say "eleventy-first," but his birthday's September 22nd, not the 23rd. God, why do I KNOW that?

San Francisco: five years is too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable...hobbits. I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

*vanishes*

Labels: California, memoir

posted by Leah @ 1:33 PM 0 comments

Family reunion style

So, we threw a bash for Grandma and toured the family farm land in Iowa yesterday. It amazed the four of us in my generation to no end that this is our origin and that our parents, as worldly as they are now, come from teeny tiny Percival Iowa...


Freeman Farms' grain bins for storing corn.


My dad and his sisters.



We grow soybeans.


My sister is really excited about soybeans. Really.



Pinups don't wear flipflops, Nem.





View the full album here.

Now I'm off to the exact opposite place from this: NEW FREAKING YORK! (cue theme from The Muppets Take Manhattan).

Labels: memoir, travel

posted by Leah @ 1:32 PM 1 comments

Then and Now

Here are a few pictures from the last time we all got together, and a few from this weekend:









And here, our great grandfather John Conradi arrives in America from Germany in 1910:

Labels: memoir, travel

posted by Leah @ 1:08 PM 0 comments

Judy and the Dream of Horses

We must have fallen into a Lisa Frank trapper keeper somewhere along the gravel road that cut across the prairie this evening. Past the dry creek bed and away over the bean field we could see two rainbows, one of them heart shaped. But the real thrill of the evening came at sunset as we passed a broad, empty expanse of grass bordered by a wooden fence.

Each of the three of us cousins hails from multiple big cities, so as we bitched about the cosmopolitan things we miss now that we're here, we weren't prepared to see six horses gallop to the fence to meet us. Their silhouettes stood dark and majestic against the setting sun and our conversation instantly ended as they ran furiously toward us and stopped mere yards away to stare back. A full-body nimbus glowed around the dun-colored one, who continued to return my gaze even after the others had lost interest and returned to grazing.

We turned to head back to the house before nightfall when the countryside would plunge into absolute darkness. I suppose it goes without saying that we had no more complaints to issue about Nebraska.

Labels: memoir, travel

posted by Leah @ 11:55 PM 0 comments

Clarendon Hills

Forgive me for a moment if I wax irrationally nostalgic, but I couldn't possibly come this close to my old village after fourteen years and not spend an afternoon there.

This one is really for my family: a few shots of the last time I kicked around this town, and a few from yesterday.


Hayley (in pink on the left) and friends at my 10th birthday party. (I'm on the right)


Hayley and her folks, present day. (Jeez, Hayley, you sure are attached to that pink shirt.) These cats are insanely warm and generally kickass people. They founded a Shakespeare company shortly after I skipped town in '92, and it's still going strong at their outdoor stage in a forest preserve:









Rock on, Rice family.

We took a walk through the town, starting with a stroll past my old elementary school.

Then (L to R, my friend Ann, me, and my sister):



Now (NOT COOL, guys):



But they did put up a new one right next door. Now five times as many kids can learn about Jacques Cousteau and run really slow in gym class.



As a sidenote, Ann has grown up to be a fetching young lady. She's working on an MBA.



We all got caught in a downpour a couple of nights ago. Drowned rat style:



Back in the day (L to R: my sister, me, Hayley, and Ann, plus Ann's baby sister)



Back to the village, though...


Everything is the same!


I ran into the Browns, whose daughter was my sister's nearest and dearest in elementary school. I can't believe they remembered me from when I was ten.


Hayley's house


The tree I planted in third grade, when it was about six inches tall.

And after all these years, I was afraid my old house would have undergone some awful transformation since I lived there and it looked like this:

My house circa 1991

But it was almost the same.











We leave little pieces of ourselves wherever we live, and it's a comfortable thrill to return every so often and fit that piece back into the Jenga tower of our psyche just for an afternoon.

Labels: memoir, travel

posted by Leah @ 5:10 PM 3 comments

An Open Letter to San Francisco

My friend, my foe, my jealous, malodorous lover:

I've been meaning to have a frank discussion of our intentions for each other for some time now, but certain distractions as of late have barred the opportunity for a peaceful dialogue between the two of us. Suffice to say, I never seem to have an accurate idea of where exactly we stand. The warmest of greetings seem thin veils that poorly conceal outright enmity in your squalid night spots. You keep handing me matches and still somehow you're shocked when I burn the party down. Quite honestly, you're behaving like a bit of a pill and it's time for you and I to see other people for a while.

I'll be back at the end of the summer, and soon we'll have it as grand as it used to be.

Yours solely in the legal sense,

-Leah

Labels: California, memoir

posted by Leah @ 6:06 PM 1 comments

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

It all came to a head the other day, see. I had my passport out on my desk for one reason or another. Besides the awful, lumpy photo that somehow showed me as a fat redhead (ah, the magic of passport photos), the main identifying feature that's listed is my birthplace of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Minnesota - would I recognize anything if I returned? I must have been nine years old the last time I visited, and one or two when last I lived there. My hometown is Rockford, Illinois. But again, it's not. It's Los Gatos, California. But that was just a stopover. I'm from a village outside Chicago, that you haven't heard of. Or ask anyone, and they'll say I'm from Los Angeles. Need I mention that lost year in New Orleans? No, I don't live there any more.

Let me start over.

My name is Leah, and I'm from San Francisco. I've spent most of the few years in my adult life here, and that is more than enough to qualify it as the place I call home. I'm no native daughter of the golden west, but neither am I a denizon of the prairies. Maybe it's time I finally claimed a hometown. Let's mark it down as "America."

And now, I'm going to take a long walk around the neighborhood.

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 8:31 PM 1 comments