full circle

I'm participating in Holidailies again this year. The concept is that you post an entry every day from December 7th through January 6th, giving web surfers plenty to read while everyone else is off doing holiday things instead of diligently updating their sites.

If you're just joining me, I've changed blogs and towns since last December. Postscript changed to Full Circle when this Angelino became a Jerseyite. When people ask me why – and they do, all the time – my shorthand answer is, "Because we missed it." Another, easy to digest answer: "To be near friends and family." The longer version is in my blog writing, here (when we made the decision) and here (a recent look back). And my travelogue of our two week drive from California to New Jersey begins here.

So now you're all caught up. I'm not sure I am.

Sometimes I stop in the midst of my daily routine and think, "How did this happen?" Sometimes I kiss Damian goodbye at school or at the bus stop and walk back up the street and look around at all the pretty Colonial and Victorian houses, at the tree's bare branches reaching to the winter sky as my boots crunch on acorns underfoot and now on snow, crusted like crispy white toast, and I think, "But this isn't my life. Is it?"

We've been here nearly three months. Long enough to settle into a routine of sorts. Dan's working now, and this week that means he's never here. So I have time to be here on my own. To listen to the wind chimes outside, to look out of the second story window next to my small blonde pine desk, the one I've had since grade school, and appreciate the pattern of blue shadows the tree trunks create on still-pristine snow. To pick Damian up, to cook dinner, to sit with him while he does homework. To shop and write and talk and think. In a way, it's not that different from my old life. I shop at Whole Foods, only the store here is far smaller. I sit at my desk and work on my novel, only now I'm wearing extra layers as I do so. In a way, life is the same wherever you go. Because it's your life, your routines, your choices.

But it's also vastly different. I love going into the city. My city. Every single time, I get a catch in my throat that says I'm home. And I love that my college roommate is just three miles up the road, that she can call me on a Saturday night and we can have brunch the next day, spending hours talking with friends while the kids play. I love that I can call Dan's folks and ask them if Damian can stay there while we go into the city for a midweek screening of a film directed by another friend. I love that I can get in touch with an old friend I haven't seen in 20 years and then actually see him a few days later. Because I'm here. So near my roots, my past, my identity.

No question, this works better for me than LA ever did. But that sugar-coats the jolt, the dissonance, the subliminal bewilderment I sometimes feel. I run out of shampoo, where do I get more? Not Santa Monica Boulevard, not anymore. We want to buy an Indonesian papier-mâché flying creature, where do we go? Not the store I remember from the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. Not from here. My old life, my old haunts, they're so close in my memory. Sometimes it feels like I could just get in the car and pull out of our snowy driveway and head into town. Into Los Angeles, that is.

Instead I find myself in Montclair, a town with plentiful charm, to be sure, but a confusing one to a city kid. I look for likeminded folk, and I suspect they're here – at least, everyone keeps saying they are, that this is a town full of creative types – but they're not scruffy artists or intellectuals. They have neatly cut hair and they run off to yoga after they drop the kids off at the bus. It's not the bohemian city life I remember from childhood. Nor is it the dyed-blonde ultra-thin constant one-upsmanship style I remember from LA. It's somewhere in between, and that feels strange.

I'm still feeling my way here. It's good, I think it could be great, but it still feels like a foreign land, this land, New Jersey.