Recognition
Sandy learned to desire being called by her real name.
She introduced herself but only after we were 45 minutes deep in a reminiscent space of fragmented memories. I listened sitting on the floor while she sat propped above me in a plaid and wooden chair; the proper emblem of a blend of queen and teacher, an embodiment of the artistic stories she overjoyingly shared with me. My eyes never left hers, not even in the moments she’d look up and away catching the memory taunting to escape her. She remembered so well, where well is just enough to make a stranger smile and disregard their obsession with the truth.
What was true for her in that moment, and in the moment when this memory was first conceived, was that she fell in love with that art installation in Chicago of 1984. Or was it ‘85? Sometime in the early 80’s. Anyways… Yoko Ono - you know, the one accused of breaking up The Beatles? The very-end-of-aquarius-born lover of John Lennon? The wild one known for more of her negatives than positives?
Anyways - She had an art installation of a ladder sitting under a cloud. People would walk by and by, uttering what many of us react to conceptualism: I don’t get it. Those who climbed the ladder, like Sandy, were rewarded with three powerful letters of recognition: YES!
I smiled so big as the memory became molded with my own memories; the blur between what is theirs and what is mine. Ono also had an exhibit where she sat in a chair, silently, with news paper clippings attached to her for hours until someone finally came up and cut a clip. Or maybe that was the art installation in Chicago of ‘84? I don’t remember. But I remember getting it even though I wasn’t there.
Sandra was walking into the laundromat hunched over as I was walking out. I gave her a soft smile and she responded with a look of shock. Uncertain if I startled her or simply noticed someone who too often goes unnoticed, I helped prop that plaid chair right in front of the dryer so she could rest her back. The way she relaxed into stories about traveling by train across the country made me sit my sweaty ass right next to the dryer, atop lent and spilled detergent. Her longest trek, I found out, was the South train from Chicago to New Mexico to Washington to South Dakota and back home. She inserted colors and smells into my visualizations in a way that made me wonder what else we are missing from our elders.
We visited the same places at different times. Did we not merge our longings? Our awes? Our appreciations for mobility as immobility was the anchor for which we met? I think back to the elders I met in that jazz club in San Francisco in the summer of ‘25; the loners well-adapted in their loneliness until I broke their unrecognition.
“Did you used to play?” I asked each of them.
“YES!”
