$50 Joy and the Pandemic

or how to turn $50 into $500

There used to be a set designer sleeping in my living room.

When the apartment was very small, he could only stand at the very center of the room where the roof reached its full height. He was too long for the futon, so we moved it aside and installed an inflatable mattress on the floor. When I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night I would hear the Game of Thrones audio book in his headphones as he slept.

When the apartment was very large, he had a whole room with a bed, a flat table and a drafting table. The sun lit the room up as soon as it rose through tall curtain-free windows in the front room of a Victorian house at the top of a hill in Boston. The landlord’s kid had left the bathtub faucet on in the second floor bathroom and the ceiling of that room had fallen. Our neighborhood, Mission Hill/Roxbury, had a third generation plasterer whose family had come up to Boston from Charleston during the Great Migration. I loved the way the raw plaster and water stains looked so…