I am doing a different kinda wandering now, and it basically involves getting lost and finding myself.
The rush of life and the frenetic city pace is behind me, I can now coast along at speed and take in the scenery, and it is beautiful. I have no destination in mind and it is just endless rolling hills with sweeping turns and vistas ahead.
This is a kinda reawakening, but it is a position of power I will not squander. I surprisingly gained some excess weight, my fitness routine keeps getting disrupted, but the big tasks on the house have already been performed.
At this point we are trying to complete the first floor to have house guests and travelers visit. We have made so many friends, and many of them are not in New York.
These are people who are building communities, activists, accomplished writers and artists, advocates and people that are putting themselves out into the world. Meanwhile I selfishly have been on the sidelines.
In “Maggie’s” book is mentioned that I was in Foster Care, and now it is public knowledge. For the UK edition I had to sign releases for this disclosure.
Not in the book is that I was in long term foster care which is defined as more than 7 years. I was in foster care for a decade, and was “removed” at a tender age. Know that long-term foster care has 5 highly probable outcomes: homelessness; mental illness; drug or alcohol addiction; criminality; and lastly suicide.
I am acquainted with all of the above, and somehow I am an exception that became now an old man.
All my art degrees define an arc where I painted abstractions to try to organize jumbled thinking and all the confusion created by deep traumas; then I got a Masters in TV Broadcast Journalism and Screenwriting to be able to write stories with a beginning, middle and end in the third person; then finally after September 11th in 2005 I got my MFA in creative non fiction to be able to write in first person.
Along the way I have had many breakdowns, but I also had resilience.
So here I am in a safe place that I kinda created, and I’m putting myself out there. I’m at a point where pretty much my creative life can begin. I am so terrified of being misunderstood, and I saw what Maggie experienced publishing her work.
BTW not many people know my history…
I wrote a screenplay about a man who looses his mother twice: once through mental illness; then her death. This leads to an epiphany of sorts, where out of 5 children the artist had projected upon him by his older siblings that he was the one that would continue the legacy of mental illness because he was the most like his mother and embodied her.
The real tragic circumstance was the mother suffered what we now call Post Pardon Depression and was destroyed by the diagnosis of schizophrenia, Thorazine and Electric Shock Therapy.
In the end the artist realizes that of all the children that he was most like her, he embodied her, he had her temperament, and that he was a painful reminder of the mother that they too had lost.
Know that when I finished writing this screenplay I had a breakdown. Also know that this screenplay got some attention, but like I said those times 30 years ago were different. I feel I was marginalized and excluded.
Then again today is different and a good story is timeless. I think I could do a rewrite and have a very different more successful response.
There is a lot going on here. Foster Care is a different form of homelessness. Now there is an understanding and context for my street photography and urban landscape of NYC because I needed to have some form of permanence and a sense of “home.” This was my response to the housing crisis.
It is almost 20 years ago when I wrote a memoir, but those were different times, and I was a different man then. I wonder if I should go back there again, but what is the point? I don’t want to dwell on sadness, I want to move forward.
So at least here I have a safe place, but here is not the real world. Perhaps the biggest difference though is now I have a home.
Cal
