Are Big Cities The New Small Towns?

I miss Mayberry / Sitting on my porch drinking ice cold Cherry Coke / Where everything is black and white / Picking on my six string / People pass by and you call them by their first name / Watching the clouds roll by.

~ Rascal Flatts, "Mayberry"

When we decided to move back to Chicago from Indiana last year, we held kitchen-table talks and drafted several pros and cons lists. We had immensely enjoyed the special times we had spent my family and two of our dear friends who live in Indianapolis. We knew we’d miss them if we moved, and we do today - all the time. There were other pros in our Indiana column, too: the lower cost of living, the parking lots, and the tranquility of the natural environment around us.

Ultimately, though, we just couldn’t shake the heaviest con in my home state’s column: that we felt lonely.

It’s not that we didn’t spend time with our close friends and family there. We did, and we loved it. Rather, we felt lonely because of the suburbs themselves. For us, a childless young couple, they felt insular and quiet.

Of course, I thought it would be different. When we moved to Indiana, I had imagined a Mayberry-type sense of belonging: the smaller the town, the closer the community, right?

Not for us.

People held doors, but didn’t engage in conversation; neighbors pulled their dogs away from ours, instead of stopping to say hello; And no one learned my name in Zumba class for at least two months. It felt like everyone belonged to their own social group - a church, an office, a school, or a playgroup - and we were always on the outside. My mom even paraphrased A Few Good Men to joke about our dog’s boredom in our neighborhood: “Teddy was leaving his apartment for a walk, and he didn’t see a soul, and he didn’t meet a thing.” That was really the crux of our loneliness: we missed walking out our door and seeing people, like we had in the city.

It took moving away from the big city to help us realize what a powerful sense of community urban environments foster. So we moved back, and I’ve renewed my belief that big cities are the new small towns.

As I’ve mused before, I sometimes long for simpler times. I wish I could have been born in a Fried Green Tomatoes kind of era, where everyone knew everyone and people stayed put. In fact, one of my biggest gripes about “the real world” so far has been the stark dichotomy of life during and after college: we transition from a campus life full to the brim of social activity and friendships, to an office life of sitting in lonely cubicles for 9 hours a day, staring at computer screens, Gchatting with friends who are a plane-ride away because we all took jobs in faraway places. I can’t help but wish we all lived closer together, in a simpler time and place.

While cities are hardly simple - especially this one - they do cultivate the most basic form of human communication: face-to-face interaction. These days, we real-life chat with our neighbors in the elevator and learn about their goings-on. We greet our doormen by name, as they do us, and talk about parking tickets and online shopping. We bond with dog-owners as crazy as us in our local dog park. We roll our eyes with our fellow pedestrians at errant bicyclists and honking taxis. And right now, we can hear the shouts of our fellow Blackhawks fans outside our window, and we can’t wait to celebrate with them later.

Big cities force us together, and I can’t help but love mine for it.

Chicago is our new Mayberry, and once the interest rates dropped low enough, we got to buy a little piece of it. "Sweet Home" indeed:

The new digs.

Ian smiling about the Blackhawks win.

Looking into the sunroom

Bathroom. Aka Teddy's room (he loves the cool tile)

Bedroom pics coming soon in a post about our wall art. Teaser: Ian picked out the prints in the bedroom.

Home Is Where The Heart Is

A year ago we moved from Chicago to my hometown in Indiana.  A few weeks ago, we moved back.  Instead of walking outside at night to the sound of crickets and the bright yellow flicker of lightning bugs, I now walk outside to the loud rumbling of El trains and the orange glow of street lamps.  Golden cornfields and green trees have given way to a lively cityscape of gray sidewalks and angular buildings jutting toward the sky.  We traded the 2nd floor for the 20th; car-rides for walking; and friendly neighborhood policemen for baton-wielding riot police during the NATO Summit.  It’s good to be back.  

I love Chicago.  I love it for everything that makes it unique to the world like the lakefront, deep dish pizza, and ‘Da Bears.  But most of all I love it because of the many happy memories and important life moments that Ian and I have shared together in this city.  We leased our first apartment in Hyde Park, Ian proposed to me at a Lincoln Park florist, we got married in the Gold Coast, and we brought puppy Teddy home during the winter that featured the famous Lake Shore Drive-closing blizzard of 2011.  So when I was packing up our boxes for our Chicago-to-Indiana move last year, I expressed some bittersweet concern to my aunt about leaving the city that had meant so much to us.  I told her, “We’re both really excited to move to Indy, but I think it might be hard to drive south on Lake Shore Drive one last time in May,”  to which she predicted, “I’m sure there will be some tears.”

Chalk it up to moving stress and U-Haul adrenaline, but I didn’t shed any tears the day we moved to Indiana.  We put on our business faces, plopped our belongings into our 2nd-floor walk up, and happily began our year-long adventure as Indianapolis suburbanites.  Little did we know how meaningful that year would be.

Admittedly, walking around my old hometown last year sometimes felt a little bit...weird.  Every street corner had a memory to share, and even the brand-new buildings stood as glaring reminders of what used to be there - an indelible reminder that the only constant in life is Change.  And when I saw movies at my hometown theater with Ian or went on day trips to go apple picking or antique shopping, I felt my nostalgic childhood memories of those places give way to new, seemingly-less meaningful ones. As if my adult memories are less worthy than those of my childhood.

Even though living in my hometown sometimes felt a little weird, I loved living near my family.  Childhood with my family was certainly a special time, but last year was, too.  We planted a garden with my parents, dared them to go vegan with us for a month, rooted for the high school football team together, and accompanied my aunt every Tuesday for her chemotherapy treatments. All of these experiences fought a hard battle against the prospect of moving back to Chicago earlier this Spring.  Ultimately, Chicago won.

After only a year away, moving back to Chicago was going to be easy.  We hired movers this time (whose presence on this earth I now consider to be a precious gift from 6lb 8oz Baby Jesus), and on May 3rd they arrived on time and hauled everything into their truck with frightening efficiency.  I loaded a few things into the back of our car, and fetched Teddy with those unfailable words “Wanna go for ride?” - except I added “to Chicago?” to the end.  He hopped right in and we set off to meet the big truck in the big city.

As I left my apartment and turned down State Road 32, next to the newly planted cornfields and below the clear blue sky, Teddy poked his head out the side window enjoying the sunshine and the warm Indiana air.  I put on my sunglasses and changed the radio station to a local favorite for the last time.  As I looked in the rearview mirror at my hometown in the reflection, I felt the sharp pang of bittersweetness at leaving it behind me for the second time in my life.  And my aunt’s prediction came true, just one year late.  

I love Chicago.  I love Indiana.  When your heart is in two places, maybe home is, too.

Storage Solution (aka The Rent Is Too Damn High)

Forget Ron Paul and the Libertarians.  I have found a viable third-party for our political system: The Rent Is Too Damn High Party. 

 


Mr. McMillan, I may have chuckled at a montage of your debate performances on CNN; and I laughed out loud when Kenan Thompson parodied you on SNL.  Little did I know that two years later, your words would be ringing loudly between my ears during my apartment search in Chicago.  You were right: The rent is too damn high.

In the lead-up to Ian’s job offer in Chicago, I channelled my inner apartment broker and researched the be-jeezus out of downtown rental offerings.  Here’s how my internal dialogue went during my internet-research-athon:  Oh this one’s big-dog friendly, has nice square footage, an indoor pool, some of the utilities are included, and it’s gone.  Well, this one has great views, walk-in closets, an on-site dog run, and it’s gone...

As we learned later when we contacted our real-life apartment broker, rentals in Chicago are being snatched up as quickly as cheapo flatscreen TVs at Walmart on Black Friday.  With 98% of units currently rented, the rental market in the city is crazy, and prices reflect the increased demand. So *Investment Tip Alert* we re-allocated some stock into the rental market and prepared for some sticker shock as we visited various buildings with our apartment broker last week.  

Happily, we found a great apartment in the West Loop neighborhood.  It’s dog friendly, within walking distance of everything (including Teddy’s veterinarian), has an in-unit washer/dryer, a lovely kitchen, and great building amenities.  We’re excited for the big move in May!

The downside of course, is the cost: we’re going from paying $1/square foot in Indiana to paying $2.50/square foot in Chicago, which means we're going to lose about 300 square feet.  The upside: I have 300 more reasons to go to my second favorite place in the world after Disney World: The Container Store.

Indeed, I love storage and organization, and our soon-to-be downsized apartment has re-directed my attention towards the nooks and crannies of our current furniture set-up. With robot-like vision, my critical eyes are targeting inefficient uses of space.  First target: our media cabinet, which was chockablock full of DVDs.

This media storage solution was inspired by my pre-iPod high school road trips.  Instead of hauling along a bunch of pokey, cracked plastic CD holders, I put my ‘NSync, Coldplay, and Anastasia CDs in a soft, plush zippable disc wallet to save space in my backpack.  Fast forward a decade, and Target still sells disc wallets, even really big ones that hold more than 200 discs.


After an hour of alphabetizing our DVDs and growing unappreciative of the presence of bonus discs, I'd freed up four whole shelves in our media cabinet. Anne - 1; Clutter - 0.

This is what marriage looks like.