My Kitchen is Across the Hall

So I have never been very good about keeping a journal, a diary, what have you. My edit button is so strong that I can't even be honest with myself when presumably when nobody else is there to bear witness.  My mind races from here to there like what? Sometimes it's like a dog. If you're like my dogs, one moment you're lying comfortably on the couch and the next, BAM! A sound, an unknown occurrence and before you can figure out what happened you're barking and your head is flying up in a start. But sometimes my brain seems to fold in on itself like batter in a bowl. The beaters are in the middle, moving everything around this central point and one moment it's gone and the next it's back right where it started. 

I bring this up because today, despite having company, I spent a lot of time by myself. The day started out productive. I did a solo podcast. I got some shit of my chest and then my sister calls. She says "How about me and Mike come up for lunch and we can play?". I said "Sure, Eric is busy but I can do something." And it was nice, you know pleasant enough. My sister has never understood my sense of humor so there were a couple of times when she thought I was making fun of her which mostly, I wasn't. But my brother-in-law said the nicest thing to me. He says "It's so nice to see you." And that simple sentence, that small gesture absolutely disarmed me. I returned the sentiment and he says "How long have we known each other?" My sister pipes up "28 years because we have been together 30 years and we moved back from New York two years after we got together." If you listen to our podcast, Life on the Shit List, this is brother-in-law I spoke of having always encouraging me and made me feel like an artist. He even said those words "a natural artist". What a thrill to hear those words. But as we sat at Cold Stone Creamery we reminisced a bit. You see back in my even poorer days, we actually managed to live right across the street from each other.

So my sister and Mike had just moved back from New York City. My sister had graduated with a Film/Broadcasting Degree and had always dreamed of living in New York. Being trained in secretarial field she had skills enough to make a living until she could make her way into the film world. Living in Brooklyn with no car and only the subway for transportation took it's toll. Not surprisingly the lifestyle of an city dweller with no money is much less convenient than the lifestyle of that same person in a small town. Carrying your dirty clothes to a laundromat and groceries by foot loses it's romance pretty quickly not to mention the two sided tape strung along the bottom of the bed positioned to catch or slow down the roaches. I was working at Wendy's at the time and saving my pennies to come visit her in New York but after her friend got mugged right outside her apartment, she uninvited me. She was not about to responsible for anything happening to her baby sister. So two years after this experiment started, it ended and my sister came back home to Iowa. But she brought something back with her that she didn't have when she left, Mike.

Things were incredibly tight when they first moved back. No jobs, just a small amount of savings, so they rented what they could afford. The first place was a room with a bathroom and then across the hall was the tiniest kitchen I have ever seen. When I say it was across the hall, I mean there was the door to their room and the hallway leading to the other places and then a locked kitchen. It was so weird. Did I mention this building originally was an asylum for mental patients. Yep. So this place was too small and the layout was too kooky so they moved down the street to an efficiency. Same amount of space but at least it was all contained behind the one door. During this time I was breaking up with what turned out to be one of my "gay" boyfriends. This boyfriend and I had been living together so I needed a place and I just happen to find this room in a house across the street from them. I did this a lot back then, lived in houses that had once been single family dwellings and then some greedy mother broke the place up into this misshapen monstrosities and called them rent able spaces. The place I got had so much character, so I thought. It was quite ridiculous actually. It was the front room of the house. There was a giant picture window and a fireplace, complete with a mantle and peeling, floral wallpaper. Technically this room was supposed to be divided into two rooms separated only by a curtain. There was a complete stranger living on the other side of this curtain. Not a wall, a mere tapestry. Lucky for me the girl that was living there moved out when I moved in and nobody else moved into the other side until I moved out. The setup was that I shared the kitchen with the rest of the house and then I had my own bathroom but that was separated from my main living space much like my sister "estranged" kitchen.

During this time my sister didn't have a phone so she would use mine when she needed. She was reduced to driving my old first car, a 19 sixty something Wrambler, camoflage green. Our main entertainment was watching network television on our black and white portables and hanging around the kithcen table and talking. We would sit on their roof/porch in the evening and talk and complain and listen to records. One time their cat Katie singed her whiskers from jumping on the stove which had a pot of boiling water going just for some extra heat. We would draw portaits of each other at the kitchen table and swim at the city pool just around the corner for a dollar a visit. I have a lot of affection for this time. It was the beginning of 28 years of knowing each other and I miss those times.