Where Space took me…
The final frontier.
The original Star Trek series ran 3 seasons, from 1966 - 1969. The 79 episodes follow the adventures of the Starship U.S.S. Enterprise and its crew through space a decade before George Lucas launched Luke Skywalker into Star Wars.
Meanwhile, Stanley Kubrick was concurrently working on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Andrei Tarkovsky followed soon after with his mesmerizing 1972 film, Solaris.
When I think of the Cinema of Space, these films were the ones that left lasting impressions.
There is no CGI version of space travel that can replace the simplicity of an inventive set, creative cinematography & sound effects, an epic score, and great characters.
My best friend, Rane Ivory, and I were adventurous kids and spent most of our time cavorting outdoors on the grounds of Cranbrook Academy of Art (whose promo video is titled This is the Space).
With space came freedom to imagine worlds & invent roles.
The only TV show I recall us watching with any dedication was Star Trek, already in reruns by the late 1970s when we were kids.
We would build a pillow castle on her parents’ bed for the proper height to comfortably view their small, color TV.
Time suspended while we watched Kirk, Spock, and the gang navigate costume changes, in camera special effects, and prosthetics to impart stories that were larger than our imagination of space.
Which brings me to the space of missing pages.
The need for storage space predated me.
My mom has always had storage units. It comes with the territory of being an artist, especially a painter (although sculptors have the same needs for space).
For as long as I can remember, we have had spaces outside of our primary residence to house large works on canvas by her first husband and then later her own.
Over the years & moves, these units grew with pieces of furniture, boxes of documents, old phones, my stereo & speakers, Oriental rugs, bed frames, sheets & bedding, little trashcans for bathrooms, portfolios of my large format series of color photographs, boxes of albums, CDs, cassette & VHS tapes, my grandmother’s full set of dishes & crystal, and so on.
We could be classified as nomadic hoarders.
By the time my partner & I moved to Spain, about 12 years after my mother, there were 3 storage units in a Northern Liberties facility in Philadelphia (my mother’s last US residence).
When we did the math, the annual expense of storage was difficult to ignore or justify. I knew my belongings were partly to blame, but my mom had kept enough furniture for a one-bedroom apartment - perhaps thinking she might need it one day.
We could have bought new furniture for the cost of storing the old.
The project to eliminate the storage units began gently. My mom was going to Philadelphia. We asked her to start by shredding old documents and tossing anything that could go to the dump.
She agreed it needed to happen, but was not excited about the process.
I called her on the second day to see how it was going.
“Were you able to free up some space in there, Mom?”
“I got rid of some things,” she said. “I donated grandmom’s crystal glass wear.”
“What? Why? What if I wanted it?”
“And I went through my journals. There were so many pages I wouldn’t want anyone to read, so I tore them out,” she admitted.
“Journal pages don’t reduce the storage space size!”
Clearly, she was not up for the task on her own, so my partner & I went in to help.
My partner loves organizing space, throwing things away to create more space, and saving money.
This was his project to manage.
In the end, we reduced the three spaces to one and packed everything else to ship overseas. Three months later it arrived.
When we unrolled & unpacked the work, it breathed new life.
Now, all of my mother’s artwork lives here where she’s had three retrospective exhibitions, and we can hang it on the wall.
Stories, like art, have to get out into the world.
Otherwise, our minds are like storage units, holding onto ideas that take up mental space while waiting to be unpacked & appreciated.
YOUR TURN: Space is an awesome word.
It’s literal & metaphorical. Tangible & suggestive.
Where does SPACE take you?
Share your story in 150 - 200 words.
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One pre-dawn morning a few years ago, I dreamed about hosting an Open House in our DC-area townhouse. My husband and I had renovated and sold that home before moving to the mountains. In the dream, I combed through the townhouse, adjusting pictures and lampshades, and hummed to myself. Warm ginger cookies and fresh-brewed coffee masked the odors of Windex and furniture polish. “Welcome!” I said as visitors arrived. “Shall we start the tour upstairs?” New plush carpet muted our steps. “The room at the top is my favorite,” I said, “with space for a futon, bookcases, and a writing desk, a quiet moonlight-blue place to read surrounded by family pictures.” I pivoted at the landing, my hands showcasing door number one like a Price is Right hostess. The room was empty—no furniture, no books, no pictures. Speechless, I turned to my guests. They, too, had vanished. My mind stirred, and I realized I was dreaming. I crossed the dream room’s threshold. The walls were no longer moonlight-blue but corn silk yellow, giving the room a soft glow. To my left, in lieu of a closet, the wall opened into a previously hidden, unfinished room. The drywall appeared ready for sanding and painting, but a few strips of seam tape hung loose and ruffled in the breeze from the now-open window. I stared at this strange new space, my body shifting with uncertainty. Oh, never mind, you can fix this, I said to myself. DIY, do-it-yourself. Everything under control. I picked up a bucket of drywall joint compound and a taping knife, sitting in a corner of the room. Scooping a dollop, I spread a layer of “mud” along each seam, ceiling to floor, and secured the loose strips of tape. Then I returned the bucket to the corner, pounded the cover on, wiped the taping knife clean with an old cloth rag, and placed both knife and rag on top of the bucket. Back in the main room, I inspected the carpet and walls for signs of furniture, books, or pictures. No indentations, nail heads, nothing. Empty except for my shadow. I might have ended the dream at this point—or continue shadowboxing—but this newly-conceived space felt both familiar and intriguing. Let go, a voice inside me said. And so, I did. Dazzling light immediately flooded the room. I became a shadow without a shadow. Standing in emptiness, I felt powerless yet unafraid. I scanned the light-filled room. To my right, on the wall shared with our neighbor’s townhouse, I saw an access panel. I turned the panel clips, lifted the cover, and peered down a long, dark tunnel with no perceptible walls, ceiling, or floor. Deep space. A voice called in the distance. I sensed the passageway led to something deeply authentic. If I rejected the invitation, I’d miss a chance to experience the opposite of the predictable, controllable, manipulated life I’d DIY fabricated. Oh, never mind, I am who I am. On my hands and knees, I crawled into the tunnel and woke in spaciousness of our mountain house.
For 18 years I've filled the empty space in my journals, but not in the way you might think. "Filling" isn't about covering a page with ink or (in my case) a screen with words; it's my self filling every byte and pixel, unsparing in its drive to splash every last thing about me into a laptop. That presents a problem. The longer I do this, the more I include secrets that no one else should read, ever. The older I get, the closer those secrets draw me toward a decision point: should the journal survive me, or not? Deleting it would only take a few keystrokes. I'm not famous, so no one will clamor for my post-mortem secrets. And my loved ones might think less of me once they read the darkest ones. Yet I wonder what I owe them: the flawed, blech but also beloved self they knew so well? Or the more flawed, more blech "real" self? And is the "real" self actually more real, or is it just more details?