Twenty Years of Skipping Town
Today, Skipping Town turns twenty. I have a lot of feelings about this. And so, a few words:
On February 15, 2006, I sat down at my small desk by the window of my apartment on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn and created an account on a blogging platform called Blogger. After some thought, I titled my new blog Skipping Town. It made sense: I was just a few months away from moving from New York City to Barcelona, and “skipping town” was exactly what I was doing. The phrase was light, breezy, confident; a little reckless. Though this was unquestionably a major life move--it involved quitting my job as an editor at an office in Union Square, breaking my lease on a beautiful Park Slope one-bedroom, selling all my furniture, and closing a chapter on the city I loved most in the world, where I’d been building a life since 1999--“skipping town” left little room for what I was leaving behind. I was twenty-nine, moving abroad, chasing love, on the cusp of seeing the world. Through Skipping Town, I would document my travels, my grand adventure. I felt lucky; I felt excited; and it made sense to write about it. Skipping town was, in my mind, a writerly thing to do.
In that very first post, titled “On to the Next,” I wrote, “This blog will be a record of my last days in New York, as well as of my new life in Spain.” A period of in-between. A story of change, of transition. As the name of my blog suggested, I was already, literally, in motion.
How I wish I’d started this blog when I moved to New York in 1999. I could have documented my years as a grad student at Columbia; the long afternoons I spent grading papers at the Hungarian Pastry Shop; drafting the seeds of what would, decades later, become Each Vagabond by Name; my assortment of absurd temp jobs. I could have documented the first time I flew to Paris on a romantic whim, and my summer in the fifteenth arrondissement, besotted with a city.
I could have documented the New York experiences that moved and changed me: the Blessing of the Animals Mass at St. John the Divine after 9/11, when the rescue dogs from Ground Zero joined the Procession of the Animals; the Brooklyn borough president shouting through a megaphone “You’re back in Brooklyn now--everything’s okay!” as I, and hundreds of others, trudged home from work on a frigid evening during the transit strike; a night--so many nights--when I rushed through a crowded subway station and heard a saxophone playing and felt pure joy at being where I was. I could have documented my freelancing and my editing job and how, eventually, my Best Work Friend turned out--surprise!--to be the man I’d marry.
That’s the backstory. That’s a glimpse of my adult(-ish) life pre-blog. Those years are recorded in my journals in varying levels of detail, but they were not shared.
The sharing began only in 2006, with my first Skipping Town blog post. Living in Barcelona was, indeed, a grand adventure--it was everything it had promised to be. Andrew and I lived in an apartment on Montjuic and then, a few months later, just for fun, moved to another apartment in L’Eixample. Andrew navigated MBA finance in Spanish; I took a city bus to language classes where my international, multilingual classmates were near-fluent by week two while I struggled to memorize my -ar verb conjugations. I did freelance editing, worked on a novel, walked all over the city. We traveled extensively throughout Spain but also to Marrakech, Romania, Dublin, Venice. On my own, I traveled to Galway, Krakow, Edinburgh; with visiting family and friends I went to London, Paris, Rome. We got engaged in Girona, on an ancient stone wall.
I wrote about all of it on Skipping Town.
We sadly left Spain in 2007 and moved to California. This, too, counted as skipping town, and on the posts went. We traveled all over California, discovered Reno, got legally married in the county clerk’s office there. We had a depressing studio apartment, then a nicer apartment, and then a beautiful rented house with redwoods and fig trees in the backyard.
We got married in 2007, had Lucia in 2009. We left California in 2010. Moving back to New York felt like coming home, but after having Greta in 2011 we bought a house in the suburbs in 2012, which felt like an official end to our New York life (this is, incidentally, one of my favorite posts). I kept blogging, even though there wasn’t much skipping town anymore. The years themselves, however, kept skipping by; mostly, we were too busy to notice.
The kids went to preschool, and pre-K. They got on a bus for kindergarten and Andrew wept on the sidewalk when they left, both times. I published Each Vagabond by Name in 2016. In 2019, we brought baby Farrah home. In 2020 we locked down and found it was our natural state as a family--just being home, being together. I documented every single day of that pandemic time on Skipping Town. I published another novel that year too, The Distance from Four Points, but the pandemic swallowed it whole.
Late in 2020, we moved to Pittsburgh. Nutmeg joined our family in 2021. In 2022, the girls put their beloved American Girl dolls away for good. In 2023, Andrew got laid off and found an amazing new path building partnerships between AI-powered robots and blueberries (or whatever he does). I got my first fulltime job in decades, at Carnegie Mellon. In 2024, with my cancer diagnosis, life changed beyond all recognition. In 2026, this new story continues, running on hope and faith in science now instead of guarantees, while the world outside has turned upside-down and is no longer safe for my children.
Now look: look at what I’ve laid out here, in this handful of paragraphs. Milestones, big moves, bigger changes. I could salt in some notable experiences for the kids at school, a few home renovations. There it is: a life. Do you see how fast these twenty years have gone? Unbelievably fast. And now they’re gone.
Of course, the big moments that defined my life--the moments in the loose outline above--are memorable. However, they aren’t my life. And here’s what I’m finally getting around to saying, what makes this twentieth birthday of Skipping Town a celebration. The thing is? Those twenty years are not gone. The normal, mundane, unremarkable days that make a life (life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans) are here, in these posts.
Right alongside the trips Andrew and I took to Marrakech and Venice are the stories about locking myself out of our L’Eixample apartment and my many awkward Spanish-speaking encounters. There are many travelogues but also minutiae about grocery shopping in Spain. The California years feature a lot of wonderful weekends in Napa and Tahoe and San Francisco but also the existential malaise that NorCal seemed to embody for me, the mistakes I made as I tried to learn to cook, and the time Andrew almost got into a fight in a laundromat parking lot in Sacramento over a Lake Tahoe bumper sticker. There are a few posts (from 2008) where I mock the idea of Twitter by writing my own banal versions of tweets and disparage technology in general, one of which actually includes the line “I occasionally send a text message, but maybe once a month at most.”
Posts like this are a time machine. I read them and I’m back in those apartments. There you are, I think when I read these entries. Haven’t seen that girl in a long, long time.
You know what else I would have forgotten without Skipping Town? All the tiny moments of my children’s lives. The days are long but the years are short, the saying goes, and it is a cliche because it’s true. Like everyone else in the world, I have thousands of pictures of my kids; but for me, a picture is not worth a thousand words. A picture shows cute smiling kids, a couple of toys that made it into the frame. But Skipping Town describes chaotic moments of having an infant and a toddler, Lucia throwing toys into baby Greta’s crib late at night, Greta’s “whining schedule,” giddy outside games after a long winter, Greta’s alter-ego “Power Elsa,” Lucia’s ghost sightings in our Brooklyn apartment, the way I tracked the evolution of my parenting by how much reading I got done at the town pool (or how many meals were made of snack-bar mozzarella sticks).
There are hundreds of posts like this: moments that, at the time, meant nothing at all, and, now, mean everything.
These posts make me laugh; just as often, they make me cry. I read them and I’m there, deep in those days, home all day with those little girls. I would give anything to go back, but no amount of money or scientific brilliance in the world can take me there. If it could? I’d go back to this day, or this one. And I would stay there, living it over and over again for eternity. Heaven: just an ordinary day you thought you’d never see again, forever.
Here in this earthly realm, these words, these windows, must suffice. It is not an exaggeration to say that these posts are the most important things I have. Though they are not physical things (more on that in a moment), they are, emotionally, what I’d save in a fire.
The precariousness of Skipping Town became clear to me in 2008 when I realized I was trusting an enormous body of my writing to Blogger, with no backup. If Blogger disappeared, so would my hundreds of posts. That year, I found a blog-to-print platform and created hardcover printed versions of my posts, as well as PDFs of these volumes, and I have done this regularly ever since. In January I printed volume nine, bringing me up to date with securing 1,935 posts. The entirety of my and Andrew’s married life. The entirety of my children’s existence. All protected from the fickle maneuverings of tech scions.
And so Skipping Town is safe; it will endure; it will, despite this outrageously outdated format, continue. Am I the only remaining person who “blogs”? Shouldn’t I write a Substack or build an audience on Threads? I laugh. It’s far too late for all that. Skipping Town is what it is, and it is enough. My posting has not always been consistent, but over the past few years it has become a daily or near-daily practice to log in, record the events of the day, provide a little commentary. As with most bodies of written work, this blog has become something larger than itself. It’s a portal and a record of many times and many places, one family’s small but sacred days. A record of my life.
I’m grateful for this blog. I’m grateful to my past self for starting it, and coming back to it again and again even when the original motivation--travel, exploration, adventure--receded far, far into the distance. The glamorous experiences I initially thought mattered most aren’t what mattered after all. Instead, we have these mundane anecdotes and tiny moments, which I understand now are glimmers of grace. Thank you, Skipping Town, for holding twenty years of extraordinary, ordinary days.
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