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Why so tiny!? Come on. There's not much to be seen, is there? Another apartment with white walls. A sofa with a pillow on it. Two chairs. A footlocker (which was under the TV in the picture of the flowered sofa but it couldn't be seen). A deco end table (from an antique store at which I was working) and an old lamp found in a storage closet under the stairs of the third apartment we'd ever lived in, the one we moved into after living above Mr. Baines. I see here it had a lamp shade. I wonder where that went to because for years afterward the lamp sat on my desk without a shade. Now it has another shade. You can see it back in the picture of BigSofa.
I'd completely forgotten about that clock on the end table. I wonder what happened to that? Must have stopped working at some point. It was a pretty clock. We are the kind of people who have only one real clock-clock that is in the bedroom and the only reason we have it is for its alarm otherwise we would depend on the clock in the computer and the clock in the microwave. And we don't wear watches. But we're almost always on time. We don't like to keep people waiting.
This apartment was an old one in a great old building. So old that the original ice box was still in the kitchen. It had wood floors that were in excellent condition. It had nice steam heat until the owner handed over the running of the apartments to a company that also installed heaters and air conditioners. They began to "upgrade" all the apartments so they would each have a furnace (taking away a nice alcove in which had been my office, and in a small apartment such as this was, taking away the alcove meant taking away a room). They began in the summer. Sometime in November we finally had a furnace. The vents were up above the doors which made a lot of sense since heat rises. But we were lucky because some people didn't get heat until January or February and that was a cold winter.
We no longer have the footlocker. I was stupid and gave it away. This was during a phase when I pretty much emptied the apartment, which was after we threw out this sofa. Some kind of psychic-spiritual thing was going on because I turned out to be very ill and almost died that summer (1985), ending up in the hospital just after my 28th birthday. A lot of bad things happened in 1985-1986. When I got out of the hospital I was supposed to stay in bed but I felt so lucky to be alive I painted the walls these shades of pink and blue I'd seen in a poster of a door on a Greek Island. The morning sun on those walls was beautiful.
It took us thirteen years to get another real sofa. What did we sit on during that time? We sat on a few canvas beach chairs that I painted.
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