Click Pad

 

My second apartment after moving to the Washington, D.C., area seemed like a dream. I'd spent only six months in my previous home, which was a group house situation with a range of women, from entitled Paris Hilton-types to a bitter alcoholic. I spent all my time in my room, which was a closet. The place itself wasn't even nice.

Then I answered an ad that sounded ideal for a struggling grad who valued privacy above everything: A photographer was renting out a room in his old bachelor pad, a gorgeous city condo he had started using as a studio after he got married. He'd be there most working hours. Hey, I slept during most working hours! Nights would be my own. The place was huge, modern, walled with windows that overlooked a busy street and beautiful buildings – all for not much more than I'd been paying before. Ahh.

Unfortunately, the dude was not only a little weird – "pervy" would be a good word – he was there more often than I'd thought, often with his harpy of a wife. The very first morning I moved in, I napped while they screamed at each other. Next weekend, same thing. Ack.

I spent about a year there anyway in relative happiness and had recently started listening to a lot of Paul Simon. (I blame – or thank – a CD club that encouraged me to scarf best-of collections.) "Kodachrome," so joyful and singable, instantly made me think of my shutterbug landlord, and still does. But when I hear it, I don't remember his marital misery or the way he looked me in the t-shirt and not the eyes. It's this line that takes me back to that studio: I got my Nikon camera/I love to take a photograph/so Mama don't take my Kodachrome away! I had an English degree and not an inkling of how I was going to turn that into a career. And here was someone artistic making a living at what he was best at, and presumably loved.

Even now, even though I've officially been able to consider myself a professional writer for years, I get a vicarious thrill when other creative people succeed. It's why I cry over the Grammys or get excited when I see the name of a newly hot screenwriter during the opening credits of her first movie.

Mamas, don't take your kids' Kodachrome away.