Three People-Reminders

Sometime around 2020, I started keeping things (time coincidence? hmm...). I think of them as "people-reminders", because they remind me of people I care about, or remind me that I, too, am a person. Many of them are letters and hand-written notes that I've been given over the years, but a lot of them are just seemingly random objects, junk to the naked eye. I keep them all in a little box in my room, the box itself also a keepsake. Every once in a while I open my little box and shuffle through it, and I am always surprised at how many feelings come up when I touch random objects that would be meaningless to other people. The three people-reminders I have here all remind me of love.

To start, this necklace was a gift from an ex. The coin is from a Ferris wheel we rode on our third date, and he kept it, drilled a hole in it, and turned it into a necklace to give to me for our 1-year anniversary. It's been over two years since we split (even longer since the necklace broke), and I've long since moved on, but that was my first really healthy loving relationship. I grew and learned a lot about myself in that time, about my needs and wants and how to communicate them. And so this broken, useless piece of rusting jewelry reminds me of my capacity to love and be loved.   

This half-finished crossword puzzle reminds me of my mother. After I left for college, one of the ways my mother and I would connect with each other when I came home for summer and winter breaks was to work on crosswords together. She makes coffee at like 5am, and around 6:30 or 7 I roll out of bed to the smell of something delicious she's making like bacon or cinnamon rolls from the farmer's market, and then we sit at the counter and sip coffee, eat, and do the crossword until she has to go to work. It sometimes takes us weeks to finish one because we only work for like 15 minutes each morning and I spend half my time at my dad's, so we must not have finished this one, and it somehow ended up with me. When I pick up this yellowing page torn from a magazine, I think of my mother, and our mutual love of learning new things, and of college, and leaving home, and the pandemic, and isolation, and the love that crosses time and space. 

Lastly, this ticket stub is for a train ride from the Newark, NJ airport into Manhattan. In 2021, my dad moved to Manhattan to live with his then-girlfriend in her condo. I won't go into too much detail here, but suffice it to say my relationship with my father is complicated, and this period was one of the most tenuous for us. I visited him three times while he lived there, flying into EWR and taking the train into the city, and those cumulative 11 days were the majority of time I spent with him that year. While I was there during one of the trips, though, I visited with a friend from high school, and we had a conversation that entirely changed how I saw my father and gave me a lot more empathy for him. So while this ticket stub reminds me of the worst of times with my father, it also reminds me of the turning point, when things started to get better. Again, all of this from a tiny piece of paper from New Jersey with holes in it. 

I really loved going through my people-reminders, and I'm already having ideas about creating some installation final project full of and/or inspired by them. Or maybe just something about love in minutia. Something about the way that something small like a ticket stub or a madeleine cookie can set off a chain of memories and emotions (Proust, anyone?).