Five Years & Six Beginnings... Part Two

New Year's Day 2005, found me once again alone in the house on Dana Street, but this time I was most truly alone.

My aforementioned partner had moved to Mississippi late in the summer of 2004 with the plan of taking care of her father and getting a PhD in education at the same time. There was a lot of talk about our still being together, but as I look at the situation from this side of the great divide, I can see that we were both either lying, or trading on false hopes, or pretending for various reasons, or all of the above. The clear reality of our life together is that it ended back in the summer of 2004. It took another year to finally break down completely, but it was really over when she stepped on that plane headed east.

2004 had also seen my daughter graduate from college and subsequently move to London. My partners and friends in the house were three cats. Two (Hobbes and Angelica) had been in residence with me/us for a long time. George, who I was taking care of for Jen while she was in London - and who definitely did not get along with the other carts - was my only real company and friend. I was turning into a "crazy cat person."

A week earlier, coincidentally (or perhaps not) on the same day as the earthquake and tsunami in Asia, I had a small seizure while working in my office at the back of the house. I awakened from the seizure confused and disoriented with no sense of the day or date, where I was, or what had just happened. The disorientation didn't last that long, but the depth of the feeling remained. I was by myself and on my own. If something happened to me, no one would find out for days, or even weeks.

I was also finding it very difficult to get work and to keep up the mortgage for the house and the car payment for partner. My months had turned into a mad financial scramble that I couldn't sustain and that I would never have made it through without considerable help from my family. I had plans to meet partner in New Orleans over Mardi Gras, a month away, and that less than stellar reunion (ugly interactions in our lovely hotel room and arguments over brunch at The Court of Two Sisters) would clearly signal the true beginning of the end of our relationship. It was after that trip that I would decide that my place was in New Orleans. I had been working on a film about Mardi Gras Indians for quite some time and the work I put into it during Mardi Gras of 2005 convinced me that I needed a greater comittment to the task and a new way of viewing things in my life. I spent several months trying to get things in order and make plans to move. With each passing day, I found it more and more difficult to remain in California in general, and Petaluma in particular.

I missed JazzFest in April for the first time since I had begun attending, and I spent long hours listening to the music on WWOZ and watching my friends on Liuzza's web cam. When that was followed by the death of Tootie Montana in June I sat in a closet on Dana Street and sobbed for most of the day.

I was totally in the wrong place at the wrong time. My nearly 30 years in California had been reduced to an 800 square foot house, a bar stool at Dempsey's, and a few friends scattered about the world. I was as alone as I had ever been in my life.

It was time to get the hell outta Dodge.