One Thing Among Many I Remember
Among obviously a lot, here is something I remember from 2001:
I was working at a tiny design firm called Hega Bojo and our office was just a largish, first floor room in what was otherwise a building of fine artist studios. There were only two offices on the first floor, and the upstairs - where all the artists studios were - was a roughly put together maze of sheetrock walls and salvaged doors. Before we moved downstairs, Hega Bojo’s office had been up here, and because none of the walls reached the ceiling often in the morning I could hear the sound of NPR coming from the studio across the hall from us. His name was Thomas Jefferson Kitts, but we mostly just called him Thomas Jefferson, for obvious reasons.
For other, maybe obvious, reasons - proximity, because I was still fresh from art school where I had studied painting, because he was nice - Thomas Jefferson and I became friendly and every once in while one of us would stop in the others studio to chat. I remember he seemed always very calm and quiet and that this, in addition to a short well kept beard, small round glasses, and because he was the only “adult” in the building who didn’t have mystical and/or hippy and/or Grateful Dead material covering the interior and exterior of his studio he seemed to me to have air of wise authority.
By that afternoon in 2001 I had totally given up pretending to do any work and just sat on a sofa we had in the office watching the tiny T.V. someone had brought in when we first moved downstairs.
I remember being the only person in the office, but that can’t be right.
I remember Thomas Jefferson walking in and the both of us exchanging the same I’m-not-sure-what-to-say-about-this look that a lot of people used that day and for a while after. I said
“I think, after this, I hope any way, that after this we at least get better. If nothing else. Like as a country. I think we will. I think people will realize that everything we do effects everyone else and that we’ll be more thoughtful.”
Thomas Jefferson said “No. Now everything gets worse. Now people will go insane.”
He stood and watched the T.V. for a little while and then left without really saying anything else.
