Freedom

Alex Shapiro has dropped herself into some profound purple & green sense memory imagery this morning over there on NOTES FROM THE KELP:

Freedom.

Certain color combinations
carry with them
specific associations emblazoned
from an event
or a moment
from the past.
For me,
the most powerful
and happy duet
are purple and green. .

It started
sometime around 1980.
I lived in Manhattan,
and back in the days
when you could get across the country
and back for $99,
I visited a friend in San Francisco.
She was a few years older than I,
and lived in what was,
upon reflection,
an unremarkable apartment
in the Sunset area.

At the time however,
coated from the grittiness
of New York City,
I was convinced that
I had landed in some sort
of urban nirvana,
enveloped by a strange new hipness
shrouded in fog
and incense and carrot cake
and a rolling ocean
slamming against one side of the town
and a million other things
that were utterly different
from the mundane familiarity
of the east coast.

Most striking to me
was that my friend
would set her table
with forks, knives and spoons
sporting alternately
purple and green plastic handles.
Why I thought this daring
at the time
I’ll never know,
but there you have it.

It was different
and it was beautiful
and it was beautiful because
it seemed exotic
and it seemed exotic because
so much of the west coast
seemed that way to this NYC kid.

My friend,
and her foggy apartment
with the colored flatware,
represented freedom to me,
and offered a tantalizing view
to what my budding life
might become.

Adding to the color theme mystique,
she even had a set of Taylor and Ng coffee mugs
that matched,
painted with a pastoral scene
of rolling purple and green hilltops.

Soon after I returned
to Manhattan
after that trip,
I found the same mug
and bought it.
This morning,
28 years later,
I drank my coffee from it,
as I have so many times before.
My life,
from east to west,
from purple to green,
and with an ever growing
sense of freedom,
had come full circle.

Alex Shapiro September 2008