If I look back at 1982, I see myself living three lives at once, unaware they were slowly braiding themselves into one identity.

There was the work-for-money life, the practical one. I was fixing houses with Fred Appell, building a kitchen nooks, using skills I had quietly gathered over the years. Once, I installed a heavy mirror above wainscoting. Somehow, vibration or gravity betrayed me — it crashed to the floor in a spray of glass. I believed in omens then, and I was devastated. Fred didn’t scold me. He comforted me, told me accidents were part of the work. In that moment, he felt like a father figure — and I learned that failure handled kindly could change someone.

And there was the artist life — speculative, unpaid, urgent. While working on Life Support Systems, I had two revelations: first, the idea — human organs mirrored as ecosystems — and second, that I couldn’t fabricate it alone. I walked drawings over to the Technical Glass department at the U. They didn’t understand the meaning, but they trusted the plans and made the components exactly as imagined. Watching those forms arrive — objects born from my mind through someone else’s hands — taught me that collaboration wasn’t dilution, it was amplification. That experience seeded Fish Breeder, a more powerful installation in Santa Barbara.

But there was another kind of collaboration that shaped me even more — the intellectual kind.

Many evenings we ended up at the New French Bar — though we simply called it the bar. One night a cab driver wandered in: John Kremer. Aldo and I welcomed him, and he stayed — not for one night, but for decades. He wasn’t just a driver; he carried philosophy and curiosity in equal measure. He asked about our work, listened, and then — always — offered something that deepened the idea.

He became one of us. Later he bought buildings in Northeast, gathered artists as tenants, protected them, nurtured them. We called him the Prince, after Renaissance patrons who gathered thinkers not for profit, but for meaning. That was the fourth revelation of 1982: ideas grow richer when shared. Whether through a glass department technician, a printer at dawn, or a cab driver turned patron — creation was never solitary.

So when I say 1982 was the year of becoming, I don’t mean fame or breakthrough — that came later, with exhibitions in 1983 and the Jerome Fellowship in 1984. I mean this: It was the year when a handyman learned grace, a publisher learned devotion, an artist learned collaboration, and a bar table became a salon where future history quietly gathered.

Without knowing it, that was the year I began to become the artist I would grow into — one conversation, one shattered mirror, one sunrise, and one unexpected prince at a bar at a time.