It hasn't bothered me in years, Christmas Eve 2005 to be exact. Tonight, however, my big toe is throbbing and I'm fighting to keep the terror down. Two years ago the pain was quite spectacular. Now it's just a ache but I wouldn't call it dull. I just took a pill that has helped in the past. Quite the challenge, this.

I'm in the last polish of the book and reading it straight through is a treat for me. I really am loving it, after these three years of working on it. I don't know why I'm sick of it.

The only thing that is worrying me about it now is that I have a lot of great song lyrics in the manuscript and I'm not at all sure how Rodale wants to handle them. And with the pub date in just over two months there is very little time to do what I thought they had been working on months and months ago. My book is my baby and it's so damn hard protecting it.

Well, back to work. Hopefully that will keep my mind off my foot.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that I'm teaching at Columbia, surrounded by so many foreign students, I'm reminded how special, how particular, Thanksgiving is to us Americans. Our Halloween has successfully been imported to most of Europe, Japan, Hong Kong and the Phillippines, but Thanksgiving remains peculiar to us (and the Canadians who copied us in 1879 and who now celebrate it on the second Monday in October).

I remember when I was living in Florence, Italy, in my twenties I ate fish sticks and pasta with butter alone in my apartment that third Thursday in November. The foreign students I've polled have banded together to create a great ad hoc family of over-eaters.

Thanksgiving, like Valentine's Day, can be hell on us singles of small or diminishing families. It's always this frantic game of musical chairs to see who will take us in. In other years the kids and I have been invited to friends' houses and brought pies and champagne to make up for not knowing how to roast a turkey. Two years ago my then Italian girlfriend, the Martha's Stewart of Milan, flew in and exploded my kitchen with traditional and Italian stuffing (salami, chestnuts and I don't know what else added to it), her first roast turkey and all the traditional sides but all done in a way that was so exquisite it would have made Mario Batali throw himself into the East River.

This year I've sent the kids down to Georgia to be with their mom and their grandparents for the long weekend. In these pages I've recommended "Divorce for Healthy Child Rearing," if the parents are absolutely positive that they can no longer live together. Better to surround the child with love, when the mother is with them and when the father is with them, than to stew the child in twenty years of icy disdain and contempt. Sure, in a perfect world two loving people with some very hands-on and nearby grandparents around is the preferred way to raise a child. Lacking that, a doubly dedicated single can do a damn fine job.

That said, holidays are hard.

I've been divorced going on six years now and I still have spent every Christmas day except one with my kids, their mom and her family. It's important to me, while my kids are still so young (nine and six), to preserve the magic of that day for them.

So this year, knowing that I will see them all in a month, I decided to stay in New York. This is only my second year as a single, single father and it is hard. Back when we were living in LA their mother lived around the corner fro us and I had a live-in babysitter. Here in New York it's all Trey, all the time. Of course I love my kids to pieces. They are absolutely the centers of my universe, but I guess what I'm most thankful for until Sunday night is that I'm off the clock. I can stay out and sleep in. For four days I don't have to worry about them on the subway platform or crossing Broadway. For four days I am free and p.k. (pre-kids).

That way, when I pick them up at the gate at La Guardia Sunday afternoon I will not only be ready but I'll be eager to resume my roll as 24/7 daddy.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Chet says that I'm cruel. I try to explain that I am "strict" but not cruel. Cruel implies I take glee in punishing them. He still insists that I"m cruel. Of course whenever he goes on about my cruelty Ava makes a point of telling me how wonderful I am and that I'm the nicest daddy in the world...until she doesn't get exactly what she wants and then she cries and Chet laughs.

So the times when they are both in the same mood I relish. And to be honest they often are. After seeing Mr. Maggorium's Wonder Emporium (it begins wonderfully, is worth seeing, however the ending is lazy and dumb.) the kids rambled down the sidewalk, Ava holding Chet by the hood because he was her horsey. I just love how they love each other.

Ava is 9, Chet 6 and they still take a bath together every Sunday. I told Chet that pretty soon Ava won't want to anymore and he looked devastated. Naked is his favorite state. He flops around his bed with his balls hanging out and I explained to him that his sister didn't need the show. He explained that parents are used to seeing their kids naked. I concurred but said his sister was different and the babysitters could be spared the show as well. He is so cute though, as skinny and busy as a spider.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I turned in the final final final draft last Thursday. I haven't posted here sooner because I'm still coming back down to earth. I am slowly beginning to feel so much lighter. The book is so much tighter now but still with the post-structural elements that I like to use in my fiction.

We've had another houseguest. This time Lucia, the kids's longtime nanny has been here this weekend. There is no way that I would have survived raising the kids when they were babies after the breakup without her. We have a great relationship. We love each other but bicker and tease like brother and sister or the way that I would love to be with my ex. In fact Lucia's friends all call me her ex-husband.

We immediately fell into our old patterns of her taking care of us all. It has been wonderful. I was in my office cleaning up after the months of disarray while I was rewriting when she came in with farfalle pasta with tuna for lunch. I almost wept. I can't tell you how much I like being taken care of. I haven't had that in so very long. She leaves tomorrow morning, though. Then I'll be back to my duties as mommy/daddy/prof/handyman/pediatrician...

Posted by Trey Ellis at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It is so oddly familiar having her under the roof again, but also I feel so distant. I'm in my office re-working the book that describes the absence of her and yet I hear her in the other room like a ghost making a batch of lentils (the kids favorite). Whenever she comes she makes a lot so we can freeze it. And yesterday she was making a sandwich for herself and offered to make one for me.

It is so odd being so close with someone I was once so close to. Yesterday, trick-or-treating with the kids, we passed a restaurant, Ruby Foos, on the Upper West Side. Back when we'd first met it was called Ernie's and I told her that I had taken her there on our first real date. It was there that we first realized that we had the same birthday. I still remember the chill that went through me.

This time I reminded her and she said, "Aww," but with a hint of forced sarcasm.

In general we don't really speak much even at times like now when we're the only two around. She was watching, "Tell Me You Love Me," on HBO and I just couldn't sit there and watch it with her. Though the show is pretentious and kind of boring (though Ally Walker is one of the great actresses of her generation), it would be too heavy to watch married couples go through their problems and fuck sitting next to my ex. I like a good personal story as much as the next guy but even I couldn't subject myself to that.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)