Sunday

July 8, 2001

two friends who dislike their pictures being taken

This morning I got up to get ready for a dog walk and a rendezvous with an old friend and I forgot to put on a tape for Wimbledon. Later I was glad, though. You can be too tied to what's on TV and fail to lead your life with real people.

FFP is missing a slice of about a week's e-mail that just seemed to disappear into nothing. I look for them briefly while we wait for SuRu to pick us up for the morning walk.

We park near Sweetish Hill and walk up to 13th Street with various detours including one up to the Castle. Then we wander back to Sweetish Hill and meet another friend, Curtis,for coffee. We haven't seen him in a while. He has a lot of good stories. I take a picture of him with SuRu but they both hate pictures so instead of bringing them out of the shadows with the digitial photo software later, I immerse them in a blur.

I invite Curtis back to the house. I talk to him about many things while we try to find FFP's missing e-mail. It's very strange. We never find it. It's funny with bits and bytes disappear, isn't it? It's such a sense of loss even if we are pretty sure we don't care about the stuff.

It's always good to reconnect with a friend you've had for a decade. To talk about how you met, talk about other people you both know, new ones you've met, all that. See how much things have changed. And how they are the same.

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When Curtis is gone, I try to catch up on things that I want to do. What is it that I want to do? Is it just to have time to think? Or do I really want to learn more about some new things and actually follow through on a few projects? Do I actually have enough time and is my job an excuse to never do the things that I want to do? I've become very selfish with my time. Do I have to become even more so to do what I really want to do? Do I have a single clue what I really want to do or am I kidding myself? Am I actually already doing exactly what I feel like doing?

We all know what a hard time I have concentrating and that living in these confusing times means never being bored but also never being sure I'm doing the right thing.

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Maybe, I decide, what I need to do is clean out something, simplify my life a little. What about that? I get caught up watching The Thomas Crown Affair. Not the 1999 one with Pierce Brosnan. But the 1968 one with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. I don't think I'd ever seen it. And it was a cool flick in a kind of nostalgic for 1968 kind of way. But when the movie is over....

...I suggest we clean out the bonus room closet. (The bonus room is what we call the spot where the hallway ends into our bedroom, the kitchen and what used to be the back door, before it became an entrance into THE ROOM.)

First, we clear CDs and tapes off the turntable in the media cabinet. Because there are lots of old LPs in that closet. I figure they are warped and scratchy and that if we try to play them, it will give us an excuse to throw them away. Well, we do make a pile to give away. FFP plays selections from a variety of old LPs. The turntable we bought with this system (and have barely used) plays them all flawlessly. Meanwhile my nose fills with dust (I'm allergic) and I discover other things in the closet under the layers of grime. Like old notebooks from my math classes full of theorems I no longer understand written in my immature hand. And these long rolled up photos, pictures of FFP's high school class and various bands and orchestras. I discover an old worn out bathrobe with my initials on it that I hardly remember owning. It's not good to live too long in one place, perhaps.

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I'm a little sad and nostalgic today, I think. Sometimes when you do a little household archaeology, it makes you sad, thinking 'Is that all I am?' Or maybe it's just looking at all the dead recording artists on those albums. Or all that dust. I finally had to take a shower to get the grime off and out of my lungs. Note to self: don't leave any one closet so long without cleaning!

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