My possessions in Saratoga Springs now appear as decorations from a former celebration. Like side dishes of over 20 years of mixing and matching prints, drapes, sofas, chairs, tables, vases, artwork, and china. Now they’ve been removed from my experimental minimalistic living. A former lifecycle that began twenty-five years ago, and is boxed up in a big pod storage. And I refuse to meet them in the present. Friends ask me, ‘When are you bringing your furniture here? I can’t answer in words; it must crystallize, as it has this past week, when I missed my wardrobe and art hangings. Within the admired art, clothes, and sixty-two boxes (I looked at my inventory) are a haunting of memories tied in see-through knots of Dodger, my x. As a confirmed denier of goodbyes in any relationship, this one has to be nurtured with precision, and that means no reminders.
Just half the room.
The stark white walls and Amazon-assembled furnishings are stationed without emotion, memory, or love. Functional, practical, and unfamiliar. I created a new palette, like the one I used in my first studio in Los Angeles in 1976. Internally, the walls and shelves are cluttered with decisions. The edits on my book from the publisher, when will I find employment? How to engage in new friendships, where do I want to belong, or do I? Dodger was simply my belonging.
Singleness in a city that was once my home for twenty years evolved through generations; adding new policies, laws, regulations, real estate development, customs, and an impressionable celebration of the arts and culture. It has no resemblance to the San Diego I met in 1983, except for the ocean and the bordering cliffs and seawalls. That is where a continuous rolling of memory waves sears my view, and I see my youthful exuberance without limits in San Diego. I’ve always been impressed with people who truly live in the present, can’t figure that one out, maybe I’m just a past time girl.
ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS 