I like to be organized, and I try to follow the rules. Like saving my tax-deductible receipts for seven years.  I cover my butt there by decades. If I ever am audited for 1996, I am safe.

     Until now, as I sit on the floor, cushioned by my cats’ curiosity and the purr of the paper shredder. Not a cross-shredder (I no longer live in New York City, with identity thieves lurking with scotch tape in my building’s compactor room), but a $20 Staples model ribbons my modest financial history into long, thin strips, not worth the nominal effort of pasting together and assuming my credit history. Ever-shrinking in largesse.

     The American Express statements in particular reveal just what a precipice I was balanced on that year. My intense, and ultimately doomed, engagement to be married for the second time would soon crash and burn, but not before a trip to London in June. He was gallant and generous in so many ways that I still recall wistfully. So I smile as I see that I picked up the dinner tab at Pasta Prego, Ltd., an adequate yet nondescript restaurant within walking distance of our B’n’B in Chelsea. We ate there several times, as Pat, true to form, established a bastion of routine, even on a two-week vacation. He ran around Hyde Park every day, and encouraged me to join him. I tried. I was a new kind of traveler with Pat--not a single-girl shopper, adventuress, and photo-snapper, but part of a couple. An engaged couple. I had someone else’s habits and desires to take into account which both challenged and thrilled me. Yet I was already walking on eggshells, sweeping them up each day before the maid cleaned the room.

     The first night we arrived we found ourselves plopped into a rare heat wave in a country that still refused to acknowledge the occasional need for air conditioning. Pat and I were not complaining, spoiled American tourists. He slept on the cooler floor that first night, near the window, his night sweats from dreams of Vietnam merging in pools with the humidity hovering over London, condensing on a body that was always on alert. For enemy snipers, for children caught in bedrooms ablaze with flames. Even, maybe especially, for love that he wanted yet pushed away.  I brought him water and worried. The next day I purchased a portable fan.

     Another credit card statement enters the teeth. Near Piccadilly, I bought my authentic Clarks desert boots, the same style I wore in 1965 with burgundy or navy knee socks, topped off by a toggle coat of the same hue.  The cost: $54.94.  A good buy, because I still have them. Very few trends in the 1960s were farsighted enough to be classics that I can still wear, all these decades later. Desert boots survived, my Mod fake fur mini-skirt didn’t. 

     The most glaring revelation in this purge, however, is the leap in technology between then and now. How on earth did I span it? (And in those clunky desert boots? And without Pat?)

In 1996, I Xeroxed my artwork at ComZone and Kinko’s. I had chromes made at Jellybean Photo, and photostats were still the best way to reproduce original art. Slides and contact sheets were processed at NY Filmworks on Broadway and 12th Street, and digital cameras were nowhere on my horizon. I replaced my stolen Olympus 35 mm with another, an exact replica. All manual--I couldn’t conceive of a machine dictating an f-stop to me, taking over any smidge of creative choice.  I send these receipts through, shaking my head.

     Applying the loupe of hindsight, I find myself with one foot firmly in the past while the other seeks grounding in the here and now. Even as I vividly recall these details of the everyday existence I am shredding, I can barely conjure up life before the internet. Yet that life included Pat.  And Pat, I will always remember.

       So, one foot in a desert boot has hopped from 1965 to 1996. I now toss the stone so that I can leap to a white-chalked square that allows my two feet to plant firmly and adjust. 2010. Hopscotch in a new decade in the no-longer-new millennium.

Copyright 2010 Sharon Watts