Memorabilia Wall
When I was a kid growing up in Maine, my friend next door, Jimmy, had a step-father that had been an acclaimed Boston journalist. I remember wandering into his study one day and marveling at a wall that was covered in photographs of him with famous people, some of who I recognized and some who I probably should have better recognized. He told me that this was his memorabilia wall and that it reminded him of all the things he had done in his career. Since it ws his private study, I thought it seemed like a good thing that he cherish his accomplishments in this way. I have also seen offices of people where the display of memorabilia is intended to specifically aggrandize themselves. These are often offices where they bring others to marvel at their accomplishments and heap praise and kudos on them for all the people that they know. Likewise, the Wall Street equivalent of the “who you know” is often captured in lucite deal trophies that tell the tale of deals done over the years. While I have never accumulated photos of me with great people (perhaps because that is simply not something that distinguished my life), I did go through a phase of collecting deal lucites, which numbered in the hundreds. When I closed down my Ithaca house, which was convenient place to store and display them is a quasi-private, quasi-public way, I shed most of them and kept a few that were either specifically important and special to me as reminders of big milestones in my life.
Here on my hilltop, I have used my office (truth be told, Kim and I share the office and we each have a wall or two like this) where on one long wall that has a credenza against it, to put up my own memorabilia wall of the things that mean something to me. Today, a nice sunny Tuesday morning, I have a little time to write before heading off to my training session at 10am. I have no pressing work, either for my expert witness gigs or in the garden (there is always gardening that can be done, just nothing that is urgent this morning). So, for some reason, I sat down at my big glass curio table filled with black sand and neatly cluttered with antiquities I have collected over the years. I sit here to write on mornings like this when I do not want to sit at my desk or one of the many other spots I have carved out around the house and grounds to read, write and think. Reading, writing and thinking are my most valuable pursuits these days, so there is nothing special in doing this today, but it has given me a new perspective on my memorabilia wall, which I am staring directly at.
I may be attributing meaning to something that was done randomly over the last four years, but sometimes randomness leads to great insights. This wall more or less tells the story of my adult life. If I turn around and look at the walls that surround my desk, they more or less tell the history of my younger or pre-adult life. I’m not sure that I realized this before this moment, so I am inclined to describe my memorabilia wall and delineate what I think it all means to me. At the top of the wall are my two Cornell diplomas and in between them sits a printed and framed program for when I was inducted to the Cornell Johnson School’s hall of Honor. That is the only hanging picture on the wall that has my image. I guess I think of that as the foundation on which I built my life in many ways. The biggest portion of the wall’s acreage is taken up by four large New Yorker cover prints that seem to define my forty-five years of living there. There is the one with the briefcase-toting guy in a suit looking up at the skyscrapers, the East River view of the Brooklyn Bridge (which I could see from my Seaport apartment), the one with the skyline of rooftop water tanks, denoting the downtown environment I so preferred, and, finally, the nighttime skyline across the river with the shadows of the World Trade Center reflected in the river, but missing from the skyline. Those towers were built right before I arrived in New York and came down during my later years of tenure with their image crumbling in the first grade room window of my young son Thomas.
The sideline pictures provide the highlights of my adult life in more or less proper proportions. There are two Fortune covers that depict my quest for the wealth and riches that are buried in the streets of Manhattan. There is a clipping of a New York Observer article (the Observer at the time was owned by Jerrod Kushner) profiling me in a cartoon with Mayor Bloomberg as we rode a Ferris wheel into the heavens. Obviously that was about my foray into immortality by building the New York Wheel. There is a small piece with the outline of New York State done with chrome mini nails on a board, connected via silver thread to a small heart set into the spot where Ithaca would be. Bone it is a lone Cyprus tree hanging out over the Pacific Ocean with its crashing waves and rugged coastline.
There are also two vertical bookshelves that I like that stack books on their sides and rise to five or six feet from the floor. These are stacked with books I have written and books that grab my interest. I can see books like Bear Trap, The Atlas of Beauty, The Soul of America, America’s Bank, Shit My Dad Says and Hitchcock. They represent a fair sampling of the randomness of my interests. There is also a signed Meatloaf print from his Bat Out of Hell concert series. Meatloaf and his lyrics always spoke loudly to me. And then on the credenza are all manner of trivia. There is a paper golfer under a glass dome, a series of miniature observation wheels from around the world, a tugboat reminiscent of my days looking at New York Harbor and a whole series of model Empire State Buildings that remind me of where Kim and I were married. There is also a picture taken of me with my three wives, which I take as a testament to my good nature since they were all willing to pose together for it on the occasion of my daughter’s engagement party. And there in the middle of it all on the credenza are two or three of the desk name plates from my career, mostly from Bankers Trust. It’s noteworthy that the grandest of the name plates is a forged brass one that would be a good heavy weapon during a home invasion. It looks like the first one I got in the bad old stuffy banking days. But it is the much more modern and less grand looking one that was actually my first name plate. It’s teak with a laminated name sign glued to its front. When I got it in 1976, it had a piece chipped off on one corner of the back side. It always annoyed me, but I think it helped me muscle through with the thought that life is rarely perfect and that one must just muscle through, which is what I did for 47 years, 23 of them at Bankers Trust.
We all have many ways to remind ourselves of the past. Most of us have learned that putting too much focus on the past, even if they are past glories, is less than productive. But spending a moment staring at your memorabilia wall like I have this morning is always a pleasure wandering down memory lane.