Still going through the grief of losing my kitty, Freya. And apparently my “go to” for dealing with grief is cleaning and organizing. So I started going through the closet in my back bedroom which acts as my guest room, library and entertainment area (a 2nd tv, Nintendo 64, DVD and VCR).
The closet had a bunch of large plastic bins. There was a bunch of holiday stuff, which I’d been wanting to go through anyway and just get rid of anything that I didn’t want anymore so that took awhile. Another bin was full of various camping things. There were a couple boxes of frames. There was one large big full of some old toys of mine from when I was a kid.
Then the last big was a ton of stuff from college. A lot of old photos and negatives I’d been hanging on to for basically 33 years at this point. I looked through all of it and just kept asking myself why I was holding on to it all. There were tons of test black and white photo prints that were not good enough to keep. And then all the negatives of just random, mediocre photos. There were some matted prints that I still liked, so I sorted those out into the two archival boxes I had. There were some miscellaneous prints that I couldn’t bear to get rid of because of other memories of hanging out in L.A. before I actually lived there.
And then I came across an isolated strip of 3 negatives. I looked at them and these were from a night, long ago, when Mario and I wyearyearsent to the beach in Pacific Palisades. All at once the memories came flooding back. Of course I didn’t know when my friend was taking those photos that night that decades later and 5 years after Mario died, I’d be looking at those negatives and remembering that night so clearly.
As I sifted through the other stuff in the box, I came across more and more Mario artwork. Each one I picked up brought back the memory of when he made it and what was going on in both our lives at the time. I guess this why people hang on to stuff like this. But this stuff has just been sitting in the box for years and years. I haven’t been “enjoying” it. No one is looking at it. I still have the memories of it, regardless.
Mario was someone who always gave away his music and his art. So as I sat there on the floor, surrounded by the mess of boxes and their contents, I emptied my mind as I looked through the artwork a second time. The reason for this was to focus on what popped into my mind as I went through the stuff. It was names. Names of friends from the past and even one more recent friend who never got to meet Mario in person.
I’ve had this happen before and I still believe it’s Mario finding a way to send me who he wants to have this stuff.
