I call Celia, my best and most grounded friend. “Two words,” she says. “Yard sale.”
“You mean get rid of all my stuff?”
“What else are you going to do with it?” Celia says.
“It’s everything I have.”
“Everything you had.”
“I could rent a storage unit.”
“Until when?”
“Until I get a bigger place.”
“Honey.” In the first twenty years of our friendship, Celia never used this stern, maternal tone with me. In the past couple of years, she’s used it a lot.
“You’ve been saying for years that you want to live in a small place.” Celia’s voice softens. “Emptying your house is going to be really hard. But hanging on to your stuff isn’t going to make it any easier.”
I take a quick mental inventory of the contents of the ten rooms in my Oakland house. The down couch my wife and I designed together, flipping through swatch books, picking the perfect assemblage of fabrics and then an even more perfect combination. The antique table I found on the street when my husband and I were newly married and broke, then stripped until its purple paint surrendered to gleaming mahogany. The red leather recliner I bought because I thought it would make my writing better and never used. The bed my dad gave us as a wedding gift.
The bed . . .
Looking back on this past year of living thinglessly, I can count on one hand the inanimate objects I’ve reached for and wished I still had. My grease-splattered, tie-dyed Ben & Jerry’s apron. My wooden-handled potato scrubber. A pair of earrings that were a birthday gift from Cori, my best friend since middle school. My beat-up Roget’s Thesaurus, even though for years now, since my grip on words has been loosening, I’ve been finding my synonyms online.
On the list of what I’ve been missing, things just don’t deserve a place at the top. It’s a function of age, in part: instead of imagining all the pleasure each thing will bring me over the years I’ll own it, I imagine my kids sifting through piles of stuff when I die. Like the rest of my ex-attachments and ex-realities, my connection to my things has changed.
“I’ll come up next weekend,” I tell Celia.
“I’ll round up the crew,” she says. “You’re not doing this alone.”
“How did I get so lucky, to have a friend like you?”
“You’d do the same for me.” Celia pauses. “You’ve done it. As we both know.”
Ten years ago, Celia was driving home on her motorcycle when she was broadsided by a Mercedes-Benz. During the nine weeks she spent in the ICU, one or more of our friends was stationed at her bedside most of the time. Although Celia doesn’t remember any of it, she says she made a full recovery, against every doctor’s prognosis, because we were there.
Then, three years ago, Celia was on a beach in Costa Rica with her husband, Brent, when he started struggling for breath. Just to be safe, Celia drove him to the local clinic. Six hours later, Brent was dead, and Celia was in a foreign country alone. She called me, and I called “the girls.” When Celia flew home I picked her up at the airport, drove her to her house, and took Brent’s place in their bed. Over the next weeks and months our crew body-guarded Celia, fed her, monitored her sleeping pill intake, drove her to her therapist’s office, and rejoiced with her the first time she got through a day without breaking down.
This is long-term friendship as I know and need it. This is the difference between walking through life accompanied and walking through life alone. Sleeping next to Celia when her husband dies, being sheltered by Celia when my marriage goes up in flames.
Andrew Sullivan said it well in his 1988 essay collection, Love Undetectable. “Love comes quickly, as the song has it, but friendship ripens with time. If love is at its most perfect in its infancy, friendship is most treasured as the years go by.”
—
MY E-MAIL INBOX starts pinging with proof that my Bay Area friends are running the show. Larissa photographs the contents of the house and posts the photos on craigslist. Laura offers to feed the team. Jasmine will take the money. My brother and his girlfriend lend their pricing expertise. Roland, who used to coach my son’s basketball team, will bring some strapping young players to load the heavy stuff into my customers’ cars. Alison will act as personal shopper, following potential buyers around, making sure they realize how much they need my stuff.
As it happens, that Sunday is the day Patricia’s husband has planned her memorial. I’ll hold my yard sale on Saturday only. Whatever goes, goes. Whatever doesn’t goes to Goodwill.
—
THE SALE’S ADVERTISED START TIME is eight a.m. I find a knot of shoppers, their eyes wild with bargain lust, on the front porch at six.
My friends show up and take over. I feel like a shopper myself, wandering the rooms where my life used to be, picking up one object, setting it down, picking up another.
An old man with a blue Ikea shopping bag taps me on the shoulder. “Will you take ten for this?” he asks. I follow his eyes to the life-sized mirror on the wall. My wife and I called it “Patricia’s mirror” because she swore it made her look taller and thinner. The night she died, I was lying on the down couch when the mirror suddenly fell—or jumped—off its hook and landed on the floor, intact.
“Sorry,” I tell the man. “That mirror isn’t for sale.” And then I look around at the other things in the room. The leaded-glass cabinet my husband and I bought in a junk store as a wedding gift to ourselves. The wrought-iron lamp with the dancing angels that my wife and I found at a yard sale in Vancouver and carefully carried home. The clunky wooden KLH stereo speakers my first boyfriend and I bought in 1969 with the advance for the hippie-back-to-the-land book we wrote together. Am I really going to leave all these things behind?
I could tell my real estate agent that I’m not ready to sell, and spend the next year of weekends saying good-bye to every object in this house, wallowing in grief. Or I could rent a huge storage space and delay the sorting and wallowing. Or I can do what I promised Celia I’d do: let go of all of it and walk away.
“Will you take twenty?” the man with the Ikea bag presses me.
“It’s yours,” I say.
—
NINE HOURS LATER I have a thick wad of bills in my purse and five cardboard boxes—the survivors of the purge—in my car. I tell my crew to meet me at Gather, Celia’s favorite Berkeley bistro. When we’re settled into a booth, Celia proposes a toast. “To moving on.”
We all raise our glasses. “To moving on,” we say.
—
THE NEXT MORNING, Patricia’s husband, Mark; her daughter, Maya; her dog, Blue; and a dozen of the people who cared for all of them convene at a trailhead in the Oakland hills. We walk the East Ridge Trail in silence, shadowed by towering eucalyptus, oaks, and redwoods, the path we used to hike with Patricia and Blue.
We gather at Patricia’s favorite spot, a bench overlooking a canyon of scrub and blackberry bramble and twining poison oak. Daffodils are spring bloomers, but on this July day Patricia’s bench is circled by a ring of nodding yellow trumpets.
Blue remembers. He jumps up onto the bench, barking and whining. “It’s okay, Blue,” Maya says again and again, until the dog relaxes into the girl’s arms.
Mark pulls a cardboard box from his backpack. Tears coursing down his face, he recites the poem that Patricia wrote and spoke as her vows at their wedding. He lifts the lid with one hand, fills the other hand with his wife’s ashes, and passes the box to their daughter, who does the same. Mark and Maya toss the ashes into the canyon, white powder and bone dusting the low-lying branches and gray-green leaves. “Good-bye, my love,” Mark says, and Maya says, “Bye, Mom,” and then Mark upends the box of ashes on Patricia’s favorite patch of earth.
We trek back to the parking lot and huddle for a moment, hugging each other good-bye. As I head for my car, Olivia, Patricia’s hou
secleaner, whom Mark entrusted with disposing of Patricia’s possessions, approaches me with a bulging shopping bag. “Patricia told me to keep these for you,” Olivia says, handing me the bag.
“Thank you.” I take the bag to my car, close my eyes to have a quiet moment with Patricia, and then start pulling clothes out of the bag. My favorite dress of Patricia’s. My favorite pair of her pants. A metallic blue purse I’d admired. I gasp, clutching the olive-green fleece jacket Patricia was wearing the day we met.
Yesterday I let go of everything from my old life. Today Patricia gave me a starter kit for the new.
My route back to L.A. takes me down the hill past Patricia’s house, where we used to hang out in her immaculate chef’s kitchen, drinking her good Manhattans and eating her good food and talking our good talk, and across the flatlands of Oakland, no longer my hometown, and onto the freeway south. Most of the things I owned two days ago when I left L.A., the stuff I accumulated in sixty years of living, aren’t mine anymore. And I’m going home with things I didn’t have two days ago, Patricia’s things, new and precious to me.
—
IT SEEMS A FITTING WAY to spend my second Independence Day in La-La: sitting on my rented living room floor, opening the boxes I brought from my Oakland house, soon, goddess willing, to be someone else’s house; sorting my kids’ decades-old artwork, turning the pages of our family photo albums. The happy scenes seem to have happened more than one lifetime ago: the early years, two tiny boys with mother and father, then little boys with father and stepmother and two mothers, then teenage boys with father, stepmother, stepsister, mother, and mother’s wife. It’s difficult, but I manage to restrain myself from opening the box of love letters from my wife.
With the entirety of my possessions spread before me, what was surreal days ago is suddenly real. Besides the empty house they came from and the few dresses hanging in my rented bedroom closet, this is all I own.
Now that I’ve loosened myself from my belongings, facing the rest of my new life without the net of my familiar things feels like walking a tightrope. Also, it makes me feel unburdened, unencumbered, free.
—
SINCE I LEFT SAN FRANCISCO, the tech boom has driven real estate prices sky-high. This has driven renters and buyers to the east side of the Bay, which has, in turn, driven many of my African American neighbors out. My Oakland neighborhood—which was listed as “ghetto adjacent” when I bought my home in 1989, and which some of my friends were afraid to visit, and which gave me neighbors and experiences and insights I never would have otherwise had—has been reclassified from dangerous to desirable.
My house sells ten days after it goes on the market, for three times what I paid for it twenty-four years ago. Escrow closes quickly. I walk away with almost twice as much money as I expected to clear.
This windfall is a game changer for me, and an identity changer, too. Since I left home as a teenager I’ve been a proud, scrappy member of the 99 percent. I’ve never gone hungry, but I’ve never stopped hustling to pay the mortgage, either. Now, suddenly, I have a job that pays me more than I need to live on, and enough cash to buy a house in another gentrifying neighborhood in another expensive city.
Who and what does that make me? Since high school I’ve been an activist whose worldview, lifestyle, and financial status were more outlier than mainstream. Through my decades as an antiwar radical, a back-to-the-land hippie, a factory worker and union organizer, a wife and mother, a gay rights advocate, an Occupier, a writer, I’ve always identified with the underdog and the marginalized. When a bad war started or a bad law passed, I voted with my feet, with my people, in the streets.
I came of age in a youth movement whose organizing principle was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” and a Dylan anthem that promised we’d be “Forever Young.” As that milestone receded in my rearview mirror, I updated the mantra, rejecting the rumor that aging in itself makes people more conservative. That might have been true of previous generations, but it couldn’t possibly be true of ours.
Taking stock now, I’m stunned to realize that in my year-plus as an Angeleno, I haven’t been to a single demonstration. That’s a first for me since 1966. Is that because I’m no longer young? Or because aging has made me care more about my own fate and care less—do less—about the world’s?
Without kids to set an example for, without the whip of freelance insecurity, with a financial profile that situates me on the privileged side of the social balance sheet, how will I maintain my lifelong principles? Will I surrender to affluenza—stop afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted—in favor of my own comfort? Will this new combo platter of financial ease and sixtysomething hindsight shift my allegiance, narrow my world-view, turn me into the kind of shallow materialist I swore I’d never be?
THIRTEEN
I’ve never been a person who loves routine, and I left behind the few I had in Oakland a year ago. I do have one post-L.A. ritual, though, which helps me understand the appeal. Every Sunday morning, rain or shine (shine), I get out of bed at nine, step into a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and my flip-flops, and walk the hills of Silver Lake to the Al-Anon meeting at the gay recovery center a mile away.
I love everything about this meeting. The greeter for the day, usually a hunky gay man, gives out big hugs at the door. I step inside the rainbow-festooned, window-lined room and make myself a cup of high-quality chai, or Earl Grey, or vanilla tea. The meeting is wildly popular. If I arrive early or on time, I usually find a free chair. If not, I’ll be standing in the kitchen doorway or squatting on the floor. It hardly matters. The meeting is a ride and we’re all rolling in the same direction, trying to “stay in our own lane,” keep the focus on ourselves instead of trying to change others, working at being unapologetically, serenely who we are.
One September Sunday on my walk home, I follow the yard-sale signs, playing “guess the demographic” as I go. Which sign will steer me to the moving sale of a Mexican family being gentrified out of the neighborhood? Which will lead me to the yard sales of gentrifiers like me, whose influx has cut Silver Lake’s Hispanic population in half in the past fifteen years?
A succession of brightly hand-painted ART SALE signs leads me down the long driveway of a funky Craftsman cottage. Its double-lot garden is breathtaking, more Moroccan souk than Silver Lake backyard, divided into mini-galleries delineated by living walls of ficus trees. Canopied daybeds dressed in mirrored Indian fabrics perch on tiled platforms. A two-story-tall papier-mâché Jimi Hendrix plays a papier-mâché guitar. The garden’s back wall is a Mexican-style mural depicting Mexican artists painting a mural. The cement path through the crazy maze is a modern-day mosaic, embedded with bottle caps and pennies and vintage marbles and pottery shards. The roof is a huge silk parachute hung from cactus trees.
A familiar sensation blooms in my throat, my belly, my chest. I remember that feeling. It’s joy.
There’s an upside to being so alone in this town, in this new life. I can take as long as I want, exploring this wonderland. My time is my own. No one is expecting me anywhere. I have nothing else to do, nowhere else to be.
Savoring each eyeful, I make my way through the labyrinth, kneeling to peruse a stack of primitive portraits rendered in hot tropical colors, signed Leticia Martinez. I pull out a tic-tac-toe grid of heart-shaped faces, half of them grinning happily, the others tearfully sad. The message speaks to me, and its pink, red, and teal palette will brighten my office at work. An older man in paint-splattered overalls approaches me.
“I’m Miguel,” he says, giving me a warm grin. “How are you today?”
“Good,” I answer reflexively, realizing to my surprise that it’s true. “I love this painting. Do you know how much the artist wants for it?”
“Twenty?”
“Twenty dollars?”
“Okay, then,” Miguel says. “Fifteen?”
“That’s not enough!�
�� I protest.
Miguel gestures at the stacks of canvases around us. “Leticia is very prolific. She’s always happy when one of her paintings finds a good home.”
I hand Miguel a twenty-dollar bill, tuck my new painting under my arm, and continue on my walk. The next sign I see says HOUSE FOR SALE. And the next thought I have is, This is my house.
It’s tiny, a classic 1920s Spanish-style bungalow, stucco, with a flat terra-cotta tile roof. It’s painted an awful pinkish color that clashes with its Wedgwood-blue trim. It can’t possibly have more than one bedroom, and I need two—one for me, one for a guest room/office. I don’t see a chimney, which means no fireplace. A fireplace is a must-have, too. So this cannot be my house.
But.
But my heart is racing, and I can’t turn my head from this little bungalow with its wild jungle garden, a riot of purple Mexican sage and fuzzy red kangaroo paws and dusty aloe spikes and a white climbing rose. I swear the orange tree is holding out its arms to me. I peek inside the tall front windows. The house is flooded with L.A.’s magical golden light.
I call the number on the FOR SALE sign.
“Max Rosenman,” a man answers.
“Hi. I’m interested in the bungalow on Micheltorena.”
“Are you carrying a painting with hearts on it?” the man asks.
“Yes. How did you know that?”
“I live across the street,” he says. “I can see you from here. I’ll be right over.”
A few seconds later a young guy with a full beard and a man bun, wearing no shirt, tattered gray sweat shorts, and flip-flops, walks across the street and unlocks the bungalow’s door. I step into the living room. The front windows and front door face the downtown L.A. skyline, the vista filtered through a lemon tree’s glossy green leaves.
“That’s what they call a million-dollar view,” Max says.
I nod, forcing myself to hide my excitement and my bargaining hand.
Max gives me a tour. It doesn’t take long. The kitchen is tiny but sweet, with glass-faced cabinets and an old-school linoleum floor. The bathroom is small and ordinary, but the bathtub is long and deep.
The New Old Me Page 13
