Change, of Course

Unemployment always throws you off, but this timing was so unfortunate. I was just starting to feel like stability in America was taking hold so our family could be still long enough for some fulfillment and satisfaction to settle in. Truly, we had been in this odd limbo since day one, always changing course, planning, moving, resting for five minutes, and then doing it all over again. It was kind of like Groundhog’s Day. Granted it was exciting at times, we had the benefit of experience many people only dream about, we had to trust each other and work together to make things happen, and our kids are still excellent at adjusting to all new things, but it was beginning to feel like one stressful situation after another and a whole lot of overcompensating--but for what, I wasn’t completely certain.

When the job search in Chicago was coming up empty, we decided to change course again. Detroit: The place where my husband grew up, where his parents still live, and where we had many really good friends. This felt right. God knows why because I honestly don’t remember. (Impatience?) But, in the end of course, God did indeed know why and he (my husband, not God) landed a great job that still keeps him happy. Or at least relatively happy as I understand it. I had very well learned by then that a husband who is happy with his work means a much happier environment at home, so I was eager to get over my impatience, embrace this latest change of course, plan and move.  

Impatience

My dear friend Lindsey, about whom I’ve previously written, yesterday shared on her blog a passage from Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest and author of many books on spiritual life. Just before reading it, I was thinking about how to express the next phase of this story which is all about grappling with patience. Of course, there are no true coincidences, and I had to insert his words here:

"Patience is not a waiting passivity until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later and somewhere else."

Even though this message might just be the most singular theme in my process of living from the inside out, I wouldn’t have believed these words nine years ago on Dempster Street however true they were. My middle name was Impatience.
 

Flux

At the end of the day, there isn’t a lot to say about our time in Evanston now. My little boy started kindergarten that fall and my girl was in a 2 year old preschool program. I just wanted to live quietly and get used to it all. I could handle what was in front of me and the adjustment was easing.

The plan was to stay on Dempster Street for a year and then find something to buy, but the company that moved us back to the States ended up going out of business and letting my husband go not quite a year later.

After months of being out of a job, my husband finally was offered something exciting with a newer company in a western suburb. He really enjoyed the opportunity, but it meant a very long driving commute and that we would need a second car. Naturally, we decided to start looking for homes in suburbs closer to his work.

These were exactly the types of places I could never see myself living in, but again, I was trying to dispel my preconceived notions about “home” and be supportive, so I tried to reason my way through this and get excited about it, too. I would have very much missed the lake and established neighborhoods with sidewalks and trees and the city at my fingertips, so thank God it didn’t work.

This new company folded less than six months into his employment and we decided to stay on Dempster Street for another year. Actually, we didn’t have much of a choice! Telecom was a bitch back then and there again was more flux.
 

Exactly the Same

We left Alisa & Keith in April that year for the first floor of a two-flat on Dempster Street. Now here is a great example of how it’s hard to go home and fall into an expectation of a lifestyle: I grew up on the far north end of Evanston. As I remembered it, this flat we rented was in an undesireable neighborhood in south Evanston, but things do change! I had to loosen my prejudice and follow my instinct a bit to realize that this part of town had morphed into a very eclectic, gutsy and somewhat creative area. The surroundings seemed to fit what we had grown accustomed to in Riga with interesting people all going about their days in varying, interesting and off-beat ways. There was a rich marrow that filled the crevices there which told me there was space to move in, grow, and ripen. The way Riga was.

Furthermore, any Evanstoninan (or other suburbanite) would tell you that it’s completely undesirable to live on busy Dempster Street, but for us it was a lot like being back on Valdemara iela minus the cabled busses. The traffic and street noise was a bit comforting. Another plus was that we were three blocks from the train and six blocks from the beach. Laundry and some storage were included, Washington School was a quick stroll through the neighborhood, and three bedrooms, a big living room, separate dining room and decent sized kitchen made it all easy to settle in.

After having our belongings in storage for so long (remember I had no sooner unpacked everything in Jaunmarupe only to pack it up again to move overseas), the semi carrying the huge container was unloaded on the street and I had everything arranged and hung in about two days. I was anxious for us to feel like participants in life again instead of a vagabonding family. Arranging a home was the only way I knew how to create some stability and balance.

Fortunately, too, the Dempster Street flat had been freshly painted with warm neutrals which, coupled with the old oak floors and thick woodwork, allowed our strange collection of things to slip in naturally. I was afraid that my version of “home” for our family would never feel like what I had conjured up in Latvia. I was afraid that America would erase it all, but in the end Dempster Street felt exactly the same.
 

Settled On

Alisa and Keith had a very cozy tri-level townhouse in Wheeling with two spare bedrooms and extra bathroom for us. They worked so hard to make us comfortable, and as a married, working couple without kids, the imposition of dilapidated us falling down on them had to have been an imposition, but they never once showed it.

We fell into a routine: My husband and Keith would drive together to the Metra station and take the train together downtown and back every day. Alisa drove around a lot for work at that time, and would often get home before the men in the evening giving us a chance to share our day as we put dinner together. I quickly enrolled Jims in a preschool program run by a long-time friend in my old North Park neighborhood, and otherwise kept my little kids entertained, tried to keep Alisa & Keith’s home intact and clean, shopped for food and put dinner together for all of us each night, and of course worked on finding us permanent residence.

Life obviously doesn’t stand still when you’ve been away for years, so even though the Chicagoland area was familiar to me, things changed. I forgot where things were and had no idea how places had evolved. Where to take sick kids to the doctor? How to begin looking into kindergarten? What did housing cost? Where to buy a car? Where to insure a car? Alisa & Keith helped us navigate all of these things and with their generosity, really took the pressure off making quick decisions in favor of making good decisions.

Finally, we settled on Evanston. It is where I grew up, very convenient to the city, right on the lake which would provide lots of entertainment in the summer, and a true city with neighborhoods and a culture—not a suburb with subdivisions and cul-de-sacs. And we decided to rent at first. Evanston was expensive and also we decided that we weren't in a great place to make a commitment as huge as real-estate purchase. Buying our little Ford Focus and committing to 2-year mobile phone plans seemed like big enough steps. In Latvia, you never had to commit to much of anything.

With a city and community settled on, I began making calls and arranging to look at flats. Like Chicago, Evanston has many flats. High and mid-rise apartment buildings of course exist, but brick buildings with very spacious 2-8 unit apartments are even more prevalent, and that’s where I steered our home search. Chicago flats are very comfortable. I’ve lived in several of them: North Sawyer was a 3-flat, flats were my homes with friends in college and after, and of course, my Great Grandma Lucy’s 2-flat meant love and old-Chicago all rolled together. They are solidly built with brick, oak, and wet plaster. They have enormous windows, vestibules, ancient buzzer systems, always a living room and dining room, gorgeous doors, and back porches. They were efficient but elegant, encouraged community and family, and were simply built to last. I learned to appreciate them, and it was settled.

While Jims was in preschool, I would drive up with my little girl, park and stroll her down the streets I grew up on looking for For Rent signs and assessing the buildings and neighborhoods from the outside. It was very cathartic walking these same sidewalks as the mother instead of the toddler in the stroller, or the little girl trying to avoid the cracks, or the preteen with a dollar in her pocket heading to the bakery for a happy face cookie. There was most certainly a full-circle feeling running through me, and as I found myself in front of Mustard’s Last Stand, next to Dyke Stadium and across the street from the colonial office building my father used to work in (top floor, last window on the left), and with the oak trees in bud and daffodils in bloom, something inside of me--louder than a nudge and quieter than a whack on the head--said there's a story in all of this.  It was about the size of a whisper, but very clear, that one day, when the time is right and the whole circle closed and everything settled on, I would have a story that I would need to write and that this day would be part of it. 

Merry Sunshine

As I wrote before, at age 13, my family moved to North Sawyer Avenue in Chicago. I hated every minute of it. I hated our new home, I hated our tiny back yard, and I hated my new school. As an 8th grader from a proper middle school in Evanston, I did not appreciate this K-8 business at the new school. I did not want to have recess with first graders. Heck, I did not want to have RECESS at all! To add insult to injury, students did not eat lunch at this institution. You walked home for lunch, thus eliminating a big social component. Not that it mattered much because I felt like there wasn’t a single person I could relate to and that they had prejudged me as a stuck up girl from the suburbs anyway. Probably this was a bit true, and honestly, I did my fair share of prejudging as well.

So everything about my little life at that age felt completely out of my control and like one giant step backward. This frustration was of course punctuated by all the daily trekking back and forth four blocks to the stupid school. After about two weeks of my walking pity party, out of nowhere a girl, a fellow 8th grader I hadn’t noticed before, started walking home with me. She talked. I talked back. This continued until we got to my house and I asked this chick where she lived—right next door, a fact she already knew. Alisa and I have been walking together ever since.

Unlikely friends had become best friends very quickly. My bedroom window and her sister’s bedroom window were only separated by the gangway (about six feet) and we would hang out the windows and talk and talk until her sister demanded her room back so that she could blast Madonna’s Holiday. Then we would swipe my brother’s walkie-talkies when our parents (and Alisa’s sister) were irritated at the amount of phone time we spent. We would have secret celebrations in the gangway with Perrier water and full size bagel dogs her Bubby would buy. We were inseparable that year to the point that for a while her dad thought I was passing her drugs through the carefully folded up notes we’d exchange on pretty paper. We weren’t doing anything even remotely questionable, though, just being 13 year old girls talking and analyzing our way through life.

In what seemed like a cruel twist of fate, as quickly as I had been plucked from the suburbs and plopped in Chicago, Alisa was plucked from the city to the suburbs. Just days after our 8th grade graduation, their family moved a million miles away (or about 20) to Buffalo Grove.

It was heartbreaking to think that we would be separated. However, through high school, college, her graduate school, deaths, marriages, births, oceans and way beyond, distance has been the only negative thing ever between us since 1984.

I could never adequately articulate what this relationship or what this woman means to me except to say that one gray day Alisa chose to walk beside me and the glorious, merry sunshine came out. Thank G_D she didn’t run.

Home Again

Chicago and its North Shore is my home. I grew up in Evanston through 7th grade and then we moved to the North Park neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. But returning to my home was both helpful and disconcerting. Helpful in that I had friends, family and a knowledge base, but disconcerting in that there’s always a self-imposed expectation as to lifestyle. There are no truly fresh starts when you go back home.

My husband was to report to his first day of work almost as soon as we landed, which left the heavy lifting of getting settled pretty much up to me. This move happened so quickly that we didn’t have time to find a place to live, but my most beautiful friend Alisa and her husband St. Keith generously offered to take us in for a few weeks until we could figure it all out.

When we got to their lovely townhouse, Alisa took one look at me (my friends can really read me like a book) and knew there was crisis. A few weeks lasted about four months, and Alisa and Keith gave us so much more than a place to stay. As Alisa has always managed to do with me, she took the scary hurt away making it ok to be home again.