Every Picture Tells a Story
I am sitting here in my dining room of Homeward Bound, waiting for Kim to finish showering and dressing, after which we will leave for our 3,000 trek to California. It is one of those weird waiting moments that I hate to waste and choose to find something to write about. This morning I am looking nostalgically at the artwork that I have on these walls. Every picture tells a story (don’t it?), as Rod Stewart liked to say in his 1971 album….strangely enough, the year I came to Cornell to start school. I want to go through the house and talk to the artwork on the walls because every piece indeed has a story. I will start by explaining that there are some stories that will stay with me since they are too personal to tell, especially since I have learned that my family tends to be far less forthcoming about their lives and stories than I am. That alone is a story unto itself for another time.
I will start with the kitchen, because there is nothing controversial to my thinking about the kitchen. It is adorned in the cathedral ceiling by the seventeen flags of the contrade or neighborhoods of Sienna, Italy. Having lived for a formative three years of high school in Rome, Italy holds a special place in my heart and that has mostly landed in the artwork of the kitchen. Those colorful flags look as fresh and new as the day they were bought on the streets (going from cart vendor to cart vendor of the various contrade ) and hung on those custom-made cherry flagpoles. There are two framed posters that explain the contrade flags and name the neighborhoods. At the far end of the kitchen on the two beveled corner walls are framed postered titles Frutta and Formaggio, which also came from somewhere in Italy. There are other miscellaneous pieces including lovely pottery tiles from Derutta, the town in the Apennines most noted for its ceramics and the place where much of our dishware came from during a mid-1990’s trip through Italy and a massive purchase order that got shipped here eighteen months later. Over the door out to the deck there is a long framed poster of the original perspective concept for the Expozitione Universale de Roma (EUR). So, the kitchen is all about Italy and the love I developed over three years of living in Rome.
The dining room art is a bit of a mish-mosh with a painting of rural Maine from my days living in Poland Spring, a map of an Upstate town and a Meatloaf Bat Out of Hell concert poster. In addition there are miscellaneous commemorative plaques like one for the Uris Belltower chimes donation, one for my term as Chair of the Johnson Advisory Council, Hall or Honor induction, and others. They are mostly about Cornell and my work for the school, with a touch of Naibe thrown in.
The living room has only a few pieces, but they symbolize the important venues of my life. In addition to a large photograph of the Palio race in thr main square of Sienna, there is an autumn leaves painting signifying New England, a Native American painting by Bev Doolittle (a favorite of Utah) and a rams head mirror over the Ithaca Stone fireplace. It is noteworthy that the living room also has five black & white framed prints of NYC photographs that I took twenty years ago. We also have two heavy wooden Prairie School armchairs that came to Ithaca via Utah, much like a number of pieces on our walls.
The study walls are covered by six Time/Life famous moments photogrsphs I bought twenty-five years ago as a set. The show the first computer at MIT, Margaret Meade with a young African girl. Einstein amongst a group of his Princeton pals, the Wright Brothers st Kitty Hawk, Jonas Salk giving a young boy a polio vaccination, and Sir Edmund Hilary submitting on Mt. Everest. These are the great accomplishments of the Twentieth Century and they are well placed in my study and remind me to strive to leave a positive impact on the world. There are three other pieces in the study. Theresa picture of the Hale-Bopp comet over the horizon of Ithaca (the home of Carl Sagan years ago). There is a commemorative for me from CARE for work I led in Momostenango, Guatemala. And then there is a watercolor by Birdsey of a simple scene in Bermuda, a favorite spot from years gone by.
The upstairs has an array of family, country and Utah works that are at best random and represent extra pieces otherwise without a home. The Carriage House, for some reason became a repository of all my Canadian Pacific posters from my two years living in Canada. In addition, there are several framed memorabilia collections from our family trip to the 2002 XIX Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, which we all attended from our home in Park City. My favorite piece among those is the front page picture from USA Today of daughter Carolyn with her face painted like an American Flag for the USA/Russia ice hockey game. The picture appeared on the front page ofthe newspaper.
There is no corner of this house, this Homeward Bound family treasure,which does not evoke an overflow of family life memories. I would hate to have to figure out where to put all this artwork if we no longer had Homeward Bound. Our friend Candice, who was with us this weekend tells us about the concept of a Death Cleanse, which comes from the concept of “döstädning”, which is the Swedish concept of a purge of material possessions before one dies. The idea is to remove the burden of that exercise from the shoulders of one’s loved ones. It is sensible and pragmatic like most Swedish things. It’s the Volvo of personal stuff management. The idea is that no one knows what matters to you better than you do. Going through the exercise also insures that you reprise your life as well as possible, the concept that the examined life if the only one worth living.
I expect to be extending my lease on Homeward Bound, which means I don’t have to do my death purge just yet. I think I will ask my kids what pieces matter most to them each, and then I will figure out how the rest Will be disposed of so that once the bus foes run me down, no one will be forced to do the triage of my life that only I should have responsibility for. Since every picture tells a story, I am writing this story about those pictures so that the story will be well-understood when the moment of truth comes around.