Memories

What have they done to my house?!

My parents sold the house I grew up in and moved several years ago. My mom was heartbroken — this was the house she’d raised her children in. I was sad to see my parents leave, of course, but I’d said goodbye to the house long before that. Seeing it turned over to another family wasn’t an overly emotional event for me at the time. However… it has been brought to my attention that this house is once again on the market, and through the magic of the Internets (a.k.a. a series of tubes), I found the realty company’s photos. Now, I fully realize it’s not my house anymore, I haven’t lived there since 1990 (well, and that brief period in 1994 after college). And I fully realize that all homeowners do things to houses to suit their own tastes, to make them uniquely theirs. But this is just making me sad. Look what they’ve done! The Disturbingly Ornate Antique Jampacked Christmas Fairy threw up all over the house!! And aren’t you supposed to, you know, put away most of your decor and things, and go kind of minimalist, if you’re trying to sell your house? I guess these people never heard that little tidbit of advice. Oh yes… this one was MY room. Now it’s junky floral — and it is a pretty damn small room for all the crap that’s apparently in it. Under that yellow paint are layers of pink (the original, when I was very small), light blue, black with Jackson Pollock white drops (when my parents went out of town for a week; boy did I get in trouble for that), and also paintings that both I and my youngest brother painted directly on the walls. My parents’ bedroom. Boy, that bed almost doesn’t fit, […]

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Every Tape Tells A Story

When I was in middle and high school, during the dark ages of the 1980s, it was a common occurrence to see a long string of cassette tape fluttering on the side of the road, trailing away from a broken and discarded mix tape. Mix tapes, for teenagers in love, were not given lightly. A tape full of songs with pointed and poignant lyrics was a gift to be analyzed for hours; what did the selection of THOSE particular songs mean? Why were they in THAT order? And creating a mix tape for your objet d’amour was an hours-long exercise in subtleties. So to spot one of these fragile magnetic love-poem-collages in a ruined state, littering the roadside, tossed out of a car window in a fit of pique, always made me a little sad: this was concrete evidence of love gone wrong.

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