Music Memories & My First Apartment

Listening to Happy Rhodes tonight, I am instantly thinking about moving to Buffalo to live with the man who would become my ex-husband. I moved out of my parents to move in with him. I was 22. I was born and raised in a small rural town outside of Buffalo, and was excited about the idea of living in the city. We found a one room apartment in a rather nice neighborhood. It was a garage converted into living space. One wall was covered with mirrors from ceiling to floor. The bathroom was tiny and there was an out of tune piano in the “hall” area near the door. We didn’t have a tv, we got “online” by checking mail with Pine, and using his college account to get on IRC. I have a lot of little memories, rather than stories, about the place.

I remember our weekly trips to the library downtown, taking the subway down and coming back with piles of books. I remember buying canvases and paint, putting on Susanne Vega, Dead Can Dance and Happy Rhodes and painting late into the night. I remember being broke, really broke. Living on cheetos and coffee broke. I think of all the times I walked to the convenience store near by to get Little Debbie snack cakes, and cheap soda as a treat when we had money. There was the winters, when we would walk to the zoo and pay $1 to walk around because it was so cold. The time that my car got buried in the snow because they didn’t plow our side streets. We lived on rice and ramen, and lots of tea.

We wrote, painted, made paper mache sculptures, celebrated the solstices and lived. We lived hard, we struggled to live hard, but that made it even sweeter.