November 9

Yesterday was a major packing, sorting and throwing away day. Things were strewn all over the driveway, pouring out of the garage onto the lawn, the porch, boxes half filled, suitcases, packing tape, old CD’s, clothes and photo albums, things I hadn’t seen in years and of course the inevitable mementos long forgotten that surface like floaters in the East River when the air warms each spring … long forgotten but never really that far away, waiting to reappear and haunt. I even found the photo album my mother started for me when I was born. I had forgotten it existed, but there it was with my birth announcement and newspaper clippings from my illustrious high school years. Then there was nothing, just fields of empty paper where the events of my life left the pages of the photo album when I left home. I have never been one to keep organized recollections – not until laptops that is. I started a diary in 1981 and wrote in it fairly regularly until the LA earthquake in 1992, when it was set aside and only rediscovered in the late 90’s by an old friend who was rummaging through the basement of the Hollywood apartment building in which we had both lived. She came across it years later amidst the rubble of the much larger 1993 earthquake that nearly rattled our old building, once owned by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, to the ground. Yesterday I separated those things I wanted to keep, but would leave here in New York, from those things I felt I had to have with me in Germany. I will go through the piles again today because there are far too many “take to DE” boxes. I will review it all once more and decide what amidst this clutter of things serves my life and what serves only to tie me to my past. I am leaving after all; carrying my history with me only weighs me down.