London Calling (Kate, Katie?)

When I left Oxford last spring, I didn't expect to be back in England anytime soon. I left on a bad note, after a bad break up. I finished all my work, ducked out of term two weeks early, and headed home to Chicago to recover and to forget.
"It was a learning experience," I told myself. In the end, I was glad I'd done it. Still, I wouldn't go back--not for a while, if ever. Oxford was nice. London was great. But in the end, neither city could hold a candle to New York. And more than that, I had no desire to revisit the site of the only real heartbreak I'd ever experienced.
That's why I'm a little surprised to find myself sitting here in front of Gate 56 at Newark Liberty Airport at 8pm in the middle of the worst snow--or should I call it "wintery mix"--storm of the year. I'm hopping across the pond for the weekend to see my new boe. It is
possible, likely even, that this wild adventure may end in heartbreak. I may be destroyed once again, but the British Isles are beckoning, and I can't find it in myself to back away.

Chekov (Kate)

It was at a party on a Tuesday night where we met T----, a charming Frenchman born in Africa, now living in London.* With a grey jacket, vest, and a button-down shirt (and of course the obligatory square gasses), he looked like someone I’d have been more likely to meet in Oxford than in New York. He had stopped in the city for a week on his way back from New Zealand. His intent, he told us, was to visit with friends and look at apartments. On this, his last night, he had to admit that he’d done much of the former but very little of the latter.

“I like it,” he says of the Upper West Side. “I have a friend who lives at 96^th and Broadway.” Right in my neck of the woods—only she lives in one of the pristine condominiums and I live in a building that was once a convent.

“It’s nice,” he says, “but too many prams. Not for me.”

“I know,” I concede, “but the dogs have such wonderful, pretentious names. You walk down the street and hear ‘Chekov! Chekov! No, Chekov!’”

He is amused by this, and it is decided that I should start a blog, even though I don’t have the internet.

*But then, I don’t suppose an un-charming Frenchman has ever existed.