HE REAPPEARS IN A PUFF OF SMOKE.

I’m back from a two-week trip to Chicago. It was a good trip for my daughter and me, and man-oh-man...was it nice to be in an English-speaking place for a change.

I’d love to tell you all about the trip in a fluid, James Michener-like manner—but my brain still has the numb, disconnected feel of one that has recently flown across seven time zones in the middle of the night.

So...I’ll do what other lazy writers do (particularly in the business world), and simply provide a bullet-pointed “executive summary” of the highlights. Here goes...

* I ate like a damn pig for the entire two weeks—with heavy emphasis on the type of spicy, ethnic stuff that has neither supply nor demand here in Spain. Do you want details? Do you? OK, here’s what I ate:

- One north Indian buffet (the *entire* buffet);

- One south Indian buffet (the *entire* buffet);

- One Polish buffet (eating the *entire* buffet was clearly impossible...if you’ve been to one, then you’ll know what I mean);

- Lamb biryani, chicken and chapati at a grungy-yet-killer Indian-Pakistani dabha ;

- Italian sausage with hot peppers at Portillo’s;

- Etoufeé at Heaven on Seven;

- Fried rice, hot and sour soup and pork dumplings at a friend’s house;

- Falafel, dolmades, coconut raisin basmati rice, curried chick-peas, naan and chai at another friend’s house;

- Apple and ricotta blintzes with apple cider syrup at a funky diner near Northwestern University; and

- A mountain of waffles, pancakes and breakfast sausage.

* By the way, the foregoing list is only the stuff that I ate outside my family’s respective homes. The stuff I ate *inside* the family compound included venison roasts, apple-brined smoked turkey, beef stew, prime rib, honey-baked ham, lasagna and rigatoni.

* And then there was Christmas Eve dinner. It had all the dishes that I described in my earlier childhood food meme post...plus a large platter of Cajun crawfish that was added for purposes of ethnic diversity. There were no jugs of Carlo Rossi dago-red, however. Even nostalgia has its limits.

* Despite the shameless display of gluttony that I’ve so meticulously described above, my Grandmother STILL complained that I am too thin.

* My grandmother and Uncle Tony made the fourteen-hour trip on Amtrak to spend Christmas with us. But as any seasoned Amtrak-traveller might have guessed, it wasn’t a fourteen-hour trip. It was nineteen hours. That’s the beauty of Amtrak. Their travel time-tables must be converted to dog hours.

* My daughter arrived in Chicago speaking 90% Spanish. She left speaking 90% English. It was an amazing transformation. That which she did in two weeks, I haven't been able to do in six years.

* Ten years and two daughters later, my relationship with my law school roommate (Tony) hasn’t changed a bit. My daughter and I spent a night at his home in Evanston (near the Northwestern campus). After a fabulous Asian dinner cooked by his wife, we put the babies to bed and tiptoed out the front door. Two pubs and 78 pints of ale later, Tony and I were slouched on his living room sofa watching “Full Circle with Michael Palin” on the VCR. This, by the way, is EXACTLY how we spent four impoverished, stress-filled years at the University of Illinois in the early ‘90’s.

* Nothing says brotherly love like three slabs of ribs on the BBQ smoker. Check out the photo above. That’s me and my nerdy hat on the left, my brother Todd on the right, and a very unlucky pig in the middle. We used the same smoker to cook an apple-brined turkey on Christmas day.

* Health issues run in many families. In mine, it’s skiing-related shoulder fractures. My mother must have envied mine, because now she has her own.

* Although I’m no fan of Starbucks coffee, I had to—just HAD TO—walk-around town with a big paper cup of Latte in my hand. I was feeling self-conscious. All the other pedestrians on the sidewalk kept staring at me as if I were nuts. I reckoned it was because I was the only one without a Latte in hand. Then—on the airplane flying back to Spain—I suddenly realized the true reason that they were staring at me. It was the friggin’ hat.