Issue 01 - Relaunch - Object Time Machine
Hello, subscribers to "Hi Love," this very newsletter, started many years by me, Charlie Grosso, sent erratically for years, and now rebooted as an experiment. Thank you for being here. I love having you.
If you are new here or learning about me for the first time, I am a writer, photographer, and founder of an educational nonprofit working with refugee teens.
Once upon a time, I photographed fashion models for fancy labels, creatively directed this and that before hitting the road for years of nomadic living. Somewhere in between, I ran a contemporary art gallery in NYC and created a photo documentary project about food markets across the world, spanning 42 countries and 120 cities.
If you are curious about the name of this newsletter, you can read the origin story in the previous post. I'll write more about the thinking behind this format in the next issue. Now, on with the letter…
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Hi Love,
His name was Danny. We meet at a mutual friend's house. I was a junior at USC and he was a senior. All of us gathered at Paul's house that night were Theater majors. It was a damp and raining night, unusual for Los Angeles. The moment I walked into the apartment and saw Danny, I had the strongest feeling --- I knew I knew him. He had the same feeling about me. We couldn't put our finger on it but we both could swear that we've met before.
A meandering courtship followed.
I was trying to figure out how to extricate myself from my first boyfriend James. That relationship was abusive in many ways, but I need to be loved to survive my home life and James loved me. So I endured a lot more than what was reasonable, more than anyone should. When Danny entered my life, James and I were in that awkward on and off phase of the break-up. He had moved out but still had access to my apartment, the tethers were being cut, painfully, one by one.
One night Danny and I stayed up late talking on the phone and I had a craving for cake. Nothing fancy, just the good o' Entenmann or Sara Lee kind. I was a college student with a matching budget and tastes. I wanted cake SO badly. Despite how much I craved cake, my resistance to going out and getting it was stronger. So it goes. There was no cake and Danny and I eventually said goodnight.
The next morning there was a cassette tape stuck to my front door.
Danny wrote a poem called "Let Them Eat Cake." He scribbled the poem down on a piece of notebook paper and recorded himself reading the poem. He drove across town in the middle of the night and left it for me to find.
I loved the gesture and the poem.
I tucked the poem inside the cassette and hide it somewhere. I didn't want James to find it. I didn't want the fight.
I never saw that tape again. I hid it so well, I hid it from myself.
When Danny graduated, he took off with the posture of a man looking to disappear and outrun himself. Many of us didn't know his new phone number or how to get a hold of him.
Twenty-plus years later, I still think about Danny and that tape he made me. Not because there is anything to rekindle but because he was a kindred and how many of those do we meet in a lifetime? As we speed along into this digital reality of instantly everything all the time, there is something so beautiful about an object that anchors us in a particular time and space. And maybe even more so now that I have nothing that would allow me to play this tape even if I still had it.
A few years later, I woke up in the middle of the night with the outline of a children's book perfectly plotted. A story of losing things that held so much meaning for us through each phase of our lives.
Will you tell me about something that you lost and what the object symbolized for you?
I'm shifting a lot of different things in my mind space, freeing myself up to follow ideas and experiments that I've thought about for eons, such as this story and Hi Love. I'd love to know about some of the precious objects you've lost and maybe work that into the book if you don't mind being my inspiration and muse.
With Love,
Charlie