Tag Archives: memories

Paying It Forward: Retro Dinette Edition

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When a Craig’s List sale isn’t exactly a “sale.”

Years ago, when I lived in Arizona and was nearing the peak of my writing career, I had a lot of disposable income. Before I began dumping it into aviation and what would become my third career as a helicopter pilot, I invested that extra cash in real estate. One year, I bought a condo in town to use as a rental. The following year I got more ambitious and bought a property with a two bedroom, two bath house and a four unit apartment building on it.

The apartments, which were studios, were functional and cute. They were all furnished; the previous owner had lived in the house with her grown son and rented the apartments out to an assortment of low income folks and winter visitors. The furniture was the kind of stuff you’d find at a garage sale. In fact, that’s where most of it ended up since I wound up refurnishing every unit with southwest style lodgepole furniture made on order by a small company in Phoenix. I was trying to make the place a little more upscale, hoping to attract a different sort of tenant. (For the record, I count that as one of my failures.)

Retro Dinette
The table and chairs pose for a Craig’s List photo against my garage door. One chair was in perfect condition while the other had some upholstery issues. And yes, they are kind of ugly.

I did keep a few items, including a drop-leaf formica table and two vinyl-covered chairs. I don’t know why I kept them; maybe they reminded me of my childhood? They were certainly from that era — the 1960s or maybe even earlier — and well-made. They eventually wound up in my Wickenburg hangar where the table became a stand for my small hangar fridge and the microwave I kept on top of it. The chairs didn’t get much use.

When I moved out of my Wickenburg hangar in September 2013, the table and chairs were packed into the moving truck along with boxes of household items and other better furniture. They were unpacked into a hangar in East Wenatchee, where they sat with my other furniture until June 2014. That’s when they moved again, this time into my new home in Malaga. And it might come as no surprise that my little fridge wound up on top of the table again in my big garage.

As anyone who has been in my garage can tell you, I have a lot of stuff. Too much stuff, in fact. I’m one of those people who holds onto things if I think they might have any use at all in the future. (This also explains why I still own the Jeep Wrangler I bought new in 1999, the Honda S2000 I bought new in 2003, and the Yamaha Seca II I bought new in 1993; heck, I do use them all. It also explains why I have such a big garage.) Little by little, I’ve been selling off the stuff I no longer need/use/want. When I bought a nice rolling media cart at a school sale last year and the little fridge went on top of that, I no longer had any use at all for the table. So I listed it on Craig’s List.

I should mention that I tried to sell it last year, too. The table is probably considered an “antique” and it likely has some real value. I think I listed it for $80 last year but didn’t get a single call.

This year, I listed it for $40. It’s not as if I needed the money. It’s just that when you list something with any value for free on Craig’s List, you get all kinds of weird characters competing to claim it. I didn’t want to deal with all that.

I got a call from a girl who was interested but unable to come see it. She said she’d call back but I didn’t hear from her again.

Then I got a call from a guy in Seattle — a 3+ hour drive from here — who was very eager to come. He called at 3 PM on a Sunday and asked if he could come that night. I suspect he realized that the table had some value; maybe he even knew where he could sell it to turn a quick buck on the west side. I said, “You want to drive all the way out here for a $40 table?” He hesitated and then said, “I like retro furniture.” But I guess I’d planted a seed in his head. Was it really worth six to eight hours of a day to scoop up this bargain? What would gas cost? And what if the condition of the table wasn’t as good as he expected? He told me he’d call back. I never heard from him again.

I renewed the listing on Craig’s list. Another girl called. In all honesty, it could be the first girl. She lived in Chelan and could come Monday after work. She got out at 5 PM and would be here by 6. I didn’t tell her that it would take more than an hour to get here from Chelan.

She showed up at 6:45, still dressed for work, full of apologies. By that time, I had the garage door open for her. As we walked to where I’d stowed it in the back of the garage, a small pickup truck with a cap pulled up. She told me her parents had come in case she couldn’t get it in her car. That meant two vehicles had made the hour+ drive from Chelan. Soon we were all in the garage looking at the table.

I struggled to figure out how the supports for the drop leafs worked and finally succeeded in raising one side. It was a cool mechanism that I had completely forgotten about — the legs of the table actually slid out on a wooden track. (Seriously: they don’t make stuff like this anymore.) Her mom sat in one of the chairs. We chatted. I asked her if it was for her first apartment and she said it was.

I thought back to my first apartment. I was 20 years old and right out of college. It was a big studio with a separate kitchen in a not-too-savory part of Hempstead, NY. From my 6th floor window, I could see my old college dorm just a few miles away. I’d struggled a bit to furnish it with a combination of used and cheap new furniture, none of which I still own. I remembered the excitement of those days, of starting a new life away from home and school, of earning a living for myself. Every day was an adventure or challenge. I seldom had more than $20 in my pocket and liked to hold onto it as long as I could.

So when she handed me the $40, I told her to keep it.

She was surprised and asked if I was sure. I told her I was and that it was my housewarming gift to her. I told her that when she was ready to replace it, maybe she could sell it for $100 and put that towards the new set.

Her dad loaded the table into the truck and I carried over one of the chairs while she took the other one. They slipped it inside and closed the cap on the truck. We chatted for a while about the winery down the street and I urged them to come back there for a tasting one weekend. And then I shook her hand and wished her good luck.

Gotta pay it forward.

The funniest thing to me about the whole exchange? None of them so much as mentioned the elephant in the room: the helicopter parked in my garage.

Throwback Thursday, Birthday Edition

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An old photo and some memories to go with it.

I don’t have many photos of myself, mostly because I don’t see any need to. I know what I look like: I see that face in the mirror every morning. But I do have a few older photos to look back on and this is one of them.

Old Photo
These two photos of me stood on the ledge beside my wasband’s desk in our Arizona home. I took the helicopter frame when I packed, but left the rest.

I vaguely remember the day the larger photo was shot. It was at my car in a parking lot at the beach. It was just after sunset. My future wasband was the photographer.

Nissan Pulsar
Here I am with my old car and my dog Spot in front of the first house I owned with my future wasband. I figure this was shot in 1985.

My car in those days was a 1983 Nissan Pulsar. It was metallic blue and a definite upgrade from the 1970 VW Beetle it replaced. I loved that car until I realized how much it lacked in terms of performance and agility. I replaced it in 1986 with a 1987 Toyota MR-2 that I owned until just a few years ago.

The beach was likely Jones Beach on the west end of Long Island in New York. My future wasband and I met there back on July 10, 1983, an event I documented in a blog post I wrote after my marriage to him fell apart 29 years later. The parking lot was called West End 2.

The photo was shot at sunset. We went to Jones Beach West End 2 occasionally to watch the sun set — that’s how we’d met. Back in those days, I lived in Hempstead on Long Island and he lived in Flushing in Queens. Although I doubt this photo was shot the day we met, it was probably shot sometime that same summer.

I like this photo a lot. It’s quite a nice composition; my wasband could be a good photographer when he tried. This is one of the instances when he managed to nail composition and light; he usually focuses (no pun intended) on subject matter and neglects one or both of the other vital components of fine art photography. (I can’t tell you how tough it was to get him to go on photo outings during golden hour light.) But in this case, he took a great portrait of a much younger version of me.

Younger, yes. I was probably 22 in this photo. My birthday had been just 10 days before we met and this had to be within three months of that. It’s one of my favorite photos of myself.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much I’d like to create a modern version of this photo. My face with the same expression — if I can pull it off after so many years of life experiences that resulted in the cynicism I work hard to overcome nearly daily. The position of my head in the lower corner of the driver’s side window of my current little car, a 2003 Honda S2000. The reflection of the horizon, red from the light of a recently set sun.

Or maybe it would have to be in my truck, since my car doesn’t have a back window for the reflection.

I just need a friend with a good eye and a camera to meet with me and make it happen. Another project for another day.

I don’t actually have this photo in my possession. I found it face down near my wasband’s desk when I returned home from my summer job in September 2012. The locks had been changed on the house I’d shared with him for 15 years, but an $8 lock — yes, I found the receipt dated just the week before on the kitchen table — isn’t going to keep me out of my home. (Neither was his lie-studded attempt to use the court to keep me out. No, I didn’t “abandon” him. I went to my summer job, as I had the previous four summers in a row.)

I found it interesting that he’d kept the photo at all. Or the one of the two of us all dressed up, shot only a few years later at a friend’s wedding, which I mailed to his mother as a birthday gift. I was surprised that the desperate old whore he’d hooked up with, who was obviously calling the shots for his life and divorce battle, hadn’t destroyed them when she was in my home, sizing up my possessions for her own future use. (That didn’t work out the way they intended, either.)

I righted the two photos and snapped the picture you see above. Later, I packed the little helicopter frame — I honestly can’t remember if I took the Papillon picture with it; it’s still packed somewhere. But I know I left the car window portrait behind. I think I was hoping that it would jog his memory of the better days together so long ago, before greed and jealousy and anger and frustration had split us apart. Maybe it would snap him out of his delusional state of mind and make him think twice about what he was throwing away. And how much it was costing him to make an enemy of the only woman who truly cared about him.

Of course, none of that happened. I stayed in the house until May 2013, packing my things while I waited in vain for him to see reason and settle out of court. In the end, it went in front of a judge and he wound up paying me and his lawyers at least four times what he would have if he’d agreed to my generous settlement offer. And he could have kept the house! Stupidity? Greed? Bad advice? I think they were all part of his problem. Amazing how a person can change.

But by then I was started on my new life without him, moving forward for the first time in years without a sad sack old man holding me back. Building the home I wanted — without the endless delays and compromises and excuses I’d been dealing with for years — in a beautiful place among good friends. A place where I could build my business and have an active life with the variety and challenges I thrive on.

When I look back on this picture, I remember the good old days when we were young and idealistic and deeply in love. And then I remind myself that the man who took the photo is long gone — and I’m so much better off without the man he became.

The Joy of Journaling

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The older I get, the more important it becomes.

Journaling Image
A blank book with lined pages makes an excellent journal.

I’ve been keeping a personal journal off and on for most of my life. In most cases, it was well-intentioned attempts to write daily — or at least regularly — in a blank book. These journals never lasted long and usually were misplaced. I found one of them when I was packing for my 2013 move and was somewhat shocked by entries that foreshadowed the end of my relationship years later.

Blogging as a Form of journaling

I kicked my journaling efforts up a notch when I began blogging in 2003; my blog — which you’re reading now — documents a lot of what was going on in my life as I wrote the entries.

It’s an excellent chronicle, for example, of what was going on during the various stages of my long, drawn out divorce (which is still dragging on but finally close to an end) and will form the basis of my book about it. It’s also a great resource for my evolution as a pilot, my work flying at the Grand Canyon, and the way I’ve tackled new hobbies and interests such as beekeeping and glass work.

Along the way, I wrote lots of opinion pieces about politics, religion, current events, and social issues. My blog’s 2300+ entries are a really good look at my past and what was going on in my mind over the past (so far) 13 years.

Back to Paper

Back in January 2014, I embraced a real paper-based journal again. I was house-sitting for a friend in Malaga, taking a break from the RV I’d been calling my home since I left my house in Arizona in May 2013. My journal, kept in the same kind of blank books I’d used years ago, contained daily entries of what I was doing and thinking. Every entry was limited to just one double-sided page, so I couldn’t go into much detail.

I soon realized that the only way I’d regularly write those journal entries was to make it part of my personal routine. And the only part of my personal routine that’s pretty much the same every single day is that first cup of coffee. So I’d write the entry for the previous day’s activities while I drank my coffee. In most cases, everything was fresh enough in my mind to get down the important information I wanted to document.

Although I didn’t do nearly as much traveling in 2014 as I’d done in 2012 and 2013, the journal book traveled around with me, going to California for frost season, back to Washington for cherry season, and on vacations with me to Lopez Island, Seattle, and Winthrop. I found that while my home was being built from May through July, I didn’t write a single journal entry — my blog has far more details on those days. But I picked it up again later in the season and started a brand new journal book in January 2015.

Then again, in the spring of 2015, when I made the move out of the RV and into my new home, the journal was left behind in the RV down in my cavernous garage. It wasn’t until the other day that I brought it up into my kitchen and set it down on the breakfast bar where I usually have my morning coffee. I made a feeble attempt to bring it up to date, then got back into the routine. I hope to keep journaling regularly.

Journaling as a Memory Tool

I was secretly thrilled to learn that Kirk, my “boyfriend” (pardon the quotes, but it’s such a silly word at our age), also keeps a journal.

It’s important to me that my significant other be literate. Kirk is not only able to read and write well, but he likes to read and write. You can’t imagine what a thrill it is for me to be able to discuss books and articles with the same person I share so much of my life with.

And having a journal means that he’s just as interested as I am in recording his activities to remember in the future. There’s a lot in common between us there and I’m very pleased about it.

As I get older and my memory starts to get iffy, I find journaling a valuable tool for simply remembering things. The entries, after all, form a good reminder of what was going on in my life each day. I can look back and remember things I’d forgotten, including events, emotions, and opinions.

As my life and relationships evolve, I can see how events from the past contributed to that evolution. I can learn from my own mistakes. I can see how what’s important in my life changes from day to day, week to week, and month to month. I can track my recovery from significant emotional events or financial setbacks and learn better about coping with similar issues in the future. I can see how my opinions evolve with input from others. I can see how my relationships with others grow and change.

In a way, when I skip a day of journaling, I feel as if I’ve lost that day. As time goes by, if nothing significant happened on that day, all memory of it is lost. In a way, that makes journaling so much more important.

It’s the little things that make life interesting — when memory of them is lost, part of your life is lost. Why not spend 20 minutes a day jotting down the things you want to remember? I think it’s worth it.

A Ghost in the Machine

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Traces of a past best forgotten pop up in the most unexpected places.

This morning, I unpacked and installed my HP color laser printer. I’d been using a cheap Brother laser printer — the one I’d bought years ago for home when I moved my office to a condo in Wickenburg for a few years — since moving to Washington state two years ago. The Brother is very fast and reliable with perfectly fine print quality for the limited amount of printing I do. But I needed a color printer to print some satellite images for the pilots who will be working with me this summer and since the HP was packed in its box in my shop storage area, I figured I’d bring it up.

I honestly can’t remember where the printer was when I packed it. I’d had it in my office in Wickenburg for quite a while but in 2011, in a failed attempt to appease my husband (now wasband), I’d moved my office to the condo he was living in during the week in Phoenix. The idea was to spend more time with him, which he led me to believe he wanted.

But that move also came with a lifestyle that had me shuttling back and forth between Phoenix and Wickenburg every week — weekdays in Phoenix, weekends in Wickenburg. After spending the whole summer living in an RV every year, I wanted to be home. In one home. With my office in Phoenix, whenever I had a book project, I needed to be there. And I work weekends when I have to. So instead of spending most of my time in my comfortable Wickenburg home, I wound up spending most of my time in a dark, depressing, noisy, and privacy-free condo in Phoenix that I never even liked. Meanwhile, he kept going home on weekends, making we wonder, at times, why I’d moved at all.

Anyway, I don’t remember if I moved the printer down to that office. I might have. If I did, it was likely one of the possessions I had to beg him to let me have back when he and his mommy/girlfriend began their reign of harassment in the early days of divorce proceedings. In any case, I still had the original box — I kept all boxes in my hangar — and I packed it in its original foam. I’m pretty sure the Brother was in the condo — it was in the cabinet under the TV — and I can’t remember if I got it the day I came to retrieve my possessions or before that.

Honestly, the whole thing is a blur and that’s probably a good thing.

Today, I moved the Brother off my file cabinet — another possession I had to ask for — dusted the cabinet’s top off, and set the HP in its place. It uses the same cables, so I just hooked it up to power and USB. It immediately came to life with a Paper Jam error message.

I opened the printer’s big front door. The sheet of paper was clearly visible and easily removed. As I pulled it out, I wondered why I hadn’t removed it when the jam occurred. Then I looked at it and realized that I hadn’t printed it. My wasband had.

Email Jam
The ghost in my machine was a jammed email message printout.

It was an email message I’d written to him back in 2007. It had two attachments, one of which was a PDF of my flight plan. The message told him that I was flying from Page, AZ up Lake Powell and into Canyonlands National Park. I was apparently on a charter flight — probably a photo flight I did with a photographer trying to get images of certain landforms from the air for an advertising poster. I vaguely remember the early morning flight and the photographer holding a camera sitting on a Kenyon gyro. I could probably track down more details in my log book.

I know I’d used the printer after 2007. Heck, I’m not even sure if I owned the printer in 2007. That meant my wasband had printed a long-saved email message while I was gone, probably in the summer of 2012, when he hooked up with his girlfriend/mommy and his delusions went into full swing.

I have an idea why he might have printed this old email. In his deluded mind, he was convinced that he had helped me build my helicopter charter business. That’s how he justified going after half its assets in the divorce. He was unable to prove his case in court — most likely because it wasn’t true — but I assume that he was collecting email messages related to that business as part of his case.

Of course, the reason I sent him an email message with my flight plan that morning at 3:06 AM was because he was my husband and I thought he’d care about my route. At that point, before his delusions began, I think he really did. He might have even still loved me back then.

But mental illness does funny things to people. Once the love was gone and the greed-fed delusions took over, he saw everything even remotely related to my business as evidence of me using him without compensation. I’m sure his lawyer(s) got a stack of email messages from me to him that he thought could help his case in court.

Printed on my printer.

Finding this message jammed in my printer makes me even sadder for him than I already am. His illness, fed by bad advice by manipulative people he trusts, caused him to throw away so much — not the least of which was a friendship and a ton of money. I doubt anything remains of the good, honest man he once was.

I’ll throw this ghost into my recycle bin. Another reminder of a lost life swept away.

Archiving a Life

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Deleting photos is the first step.

I don’t know why I waited this long. Perhaps it’s because I thought some small part of a 29-year relationship could be salvaged. But the venomous hatred with which my wasband has attacked me emotionally and legally over the past two plus years has made it pretty obvious that he has no intention of salvaging anything from our lives together.

Not that I’m the least bit interested in that anymore either.

I’ve moved forward to the best of my ability. I’ve built a new life in a new place with new friends and a new home. I have new hobbies and interests and the freedom to explore them as I see fit. It feels good to finally have a positive outlook on my life, one without a risk-adverse “partner” who apparently liked living the same dreary existence every day.

While I brought along many of my possessions from that past life, most of them remain packed (so far) and I’m hoping that time cleanses them of memories associated with the man I often shared them with. I think there’s a pretty good chance of that. After all, my wasband occasionally accompanied me on trips in my helicopter and I know he drove my Honda, even as he searched for my replacement while I was away. (Leaving a dated park receipt in the cup holder was the tipoff there.) Yet those two possessions aren’t tainted by memories of his presence. Maybe it’s because I had so many more good times in these two vehicles without him.

A Lost Man
My wasband and our dog Jack on a Jeep outing in 2010 at Lake Pleasant. Despite the numerous back road trips we made in my Jeep, it (fortunately) triggers no memories of him.

But what will never be cleansed are the photos — hundreds of photos — where he appears. They were taken at various times throughout our lives together. Sometimes he’s smiling at the camera, sometimes he’s making a face. Sometimes he doesn’t even know he’s being photographed — a candid image that reveals some of the deep thoughtfulness of the man he was. It’s those older photos that are the hardest to look at. They remind me of the man he once was, the man I fell in love with, the man who no longer exists.

The photos are in my iPhoto gallery, copied there over the years from digital cameras and cell phones. Some were scanned in from prints when I first returned home from Washington in 2012 to pack up my life. Back then, I wanted to remember him, I wanted something to cling to. But things are different now. Now I just want to forget.

Boating
I snapped this during a weekend trip to Big Bear in 2006. He used this photo on Chemistry.com when he started shopping for my replacement just seven days after I left for my summer work in Washington state. How do I know he used this photo? He showed up as a match for me 6 months later. Ah, the irony.

Opening up iPhoto to track down another image has become a nasty, jarring experience for me. Seeing his face, often in places where we shared good times together, is like a cold slap. Memories are triggered, sadness and feelings of loss and betrayal stab hard. For a long time, I avoided opening iPhoto, much as someone might avoid going into the bedroom of a recently deceased loved one. But that’s not a long-term solution for someone who wants to move on.

So every few days, I dive into my iPhoto gallery. I drag the photos of him from the window into a folder on my computer desktop. And then I delete the photo from iPhoto so I never have to accidentally see it again.

I can’t do them all at once. Sometimes, the task is heart breaking. I don’t want to cry anymore.

My few wedding photos were especially painful to see again, not because of the love I lost but because they represented how the man I loved had conned me into a legal connection that he’d later use to try to steal everything I’d worked so hard to build.

I’m trying to think of it as a clean-up task. As if I’ve dropped a tin full of thumbtacks and they’ve worked their way into the cracks and crevices of my living room furniture. I don’t know how many there are, but I don’t want to be surprised by finding one. So every few days, I go hunting and pull them out and put them in their tin. When I think I’ve got them all, I’ll put the tin away in a safe place where I’m not likely to open it by accident.

But I’m not permanently deleting the photos. I’m archiving them. Once they’re all sorted away into that folder, I’ll copy the folder to a CD or DVD and put that in my Divorce box — the box full of court documents and evidentiary files that I’ll have to keep for who knows how long. That’s also where I’ll put the financial records related to the last home we lived in together. And the few loving cards and notes that he sent me over the years that I kept. Then I’ll delete that folder of photos from my hard disk so I won’t even have to think of it.

I don’t know why I waited this long. I suppose I thought I’d do it when the ordeal of our divorce was over. But after 28 months, it’s still not over. He won’t let go.

How long is a person supposed to wait before cleaning up the detritus of a wrong turn in life? I think this is long enough.