You know how sometimes you see something out of the corner of your eye and you think it's something else, and even after you look closely and realize it's not what you imagined, you can see the same thing out of the corner of your eye again and again? Well, that's the way my mind works anyway.This postcard is one of a series of "Readers," photographed by Harvey Finkle, that Steven had a collection of (the whole series in one of those postcard booklets). The postcard got messed up a little in the mail -- it went through a machine roughly or scraped across the mailman's bag or something, and the mark it left made it look to me like the woman is holding an ice cream cone. On closer inspection, it is quite obviously not an ice cream cone, and the woman isn't even holding it, but it still looks like an ice cream cone to me, out of the corner of my mind. Maybe it's just wishful thinking!
Steven sent me this postcard from Utah last year, shortly before I drove cross-country in my old GMC Suburban "Blue" to pick him up and bring him back to Austin to live here. He worked in a restaurant for a couple of seasons in the middle of nowhere while he was living in San Francisco (in a large "closet" in his childhood friend Martha's apartment). Between the two seasons he decided that San Francisco wasn't working out for him and he surprised me by saying he actually wanted to move here.
He wrote:
J-- Two unrelated things popped in to my head today:
1) Is there room at our new place for our trailer?
2) Let's go to Mexico for Christmas, or Key West again, or someplace!
Our 1000 Trails dues is paid up -- that's just another random thought.
I love you. S
1) Our trailer, the "Box" we lived in for two years, the title character in the documentary about the end of Y'all called "Life in a Box" is sitting on a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in Bugtussle, Kentucky. I didn't think that my old Blue would be able to haul the trailer (and I had some doubts that she would even make it to Utah and back), and what's more, I don't want the trailer. I don't really even want to ever see it again. I took it up to Kentucky when I lived in Nashville (I think Steven was visiting me at the time and I think he went with me, but that memory, like all of my memories about Nashville when I lived there post-Y'all, is kind of murky). The young couple who run the CSA farm were delighted to have the Box on their property to use for afternoon naps and/or diaper changings for their baby. We gave it to them on permanent loan because I couldn't afford to stow it anymore, and I didn't have any place for it in Nashville.
And, no, we don't have any room here for the Box.
Steven's parents loaned us the money to buy the Box, and we still owe them $6000. I look forward to the day when I can pay them my half and be out of that debt, out of debt completely. That was my main reason for moving to Austin: to get out of debt. Living on the road in the Box, and the couple of years after we broke up and went our separate ways, me first to Florida and then back to Nashville, are the big reasons I got so bogged down in debt. I'm slowly but surely making my way out, but I'm not quite ready to pay off the Box. That'll probably be the last thing I pay off, and what a happy day that'll be.
2) We didn't go to Mexico or Key West last Christmas, also because of my being in debt and Steven's lack of funds. The year before we were both in Nashville (he lived there briefly before moving out to San Francisco). We drove to Key West, stayed in hostels, smoked a lot of pot, ate key lime pie. It was a good time. We're so close to Mexico here, and we've recently been talking about doing that trip together. That would be nice. But I don't even know if this is the year we'll do it. We travel well together, but he also will probably want to go to Indiana for Christmas -- I'm invited but don't know if I'll want to. He's in school now, too, and I have this cat I adopted, Timmy, and I really don't like leaving him alone for too long. Or maybe it's just Home that I don't like leaving as much anymore.
