My oldest son Roger shares my initials. I am Richard Albert and he is Roger Andrew. We have always figured that there was some benefit in sharing the same initials since monogrammed things like satchels and miscellaneous leather goods always look good wearing some intergenerational aging. We also both like the toughness and rugged image of the curled horned beast that protects the heard and roams the mountainside. I have to take responsibility for carrying the RAM theme to extremes, and Roger willingly followed in those footsteps. When I owned a house in Ithaca, I had wooden, gilded RAM plaques made to hang on the peaks of the house under the eaves and sporting both a Rams head and the initials. When I returned the house to the University four years ago, I took them down and the two best preserved ones (they had hung there for 26 years) went to me (it now hangs on my hilltop garage) and Roger (his hangs over his home office door). That’s just one of many many things that both Roger and I have in our homes with a RAM theme.
I’ve visited Roger and his wife Valene here in Delaware a few times, but now they are completely settled into their house and the decorating is a trip down memory lane for me on many levels. There is all the RAM paraphernalia. But there is also a lot of the Furniture and artwork from my various previous homes ranging from Utah to Quiogue to Ithaca. There is not a room in this 7 room home that does not have evidence of my past decorating or artistic whimsy. It’s actually kinda cool to see all the reminders of pieces that I used to favor over the years. In fact, the guest room is nicknamed the Rich Marin Memorial Suite because every wall is adorned with my old artwork. The guest bathroom has three pieces of art which are all old Rich Marin relics.
Recently, my youngest son, Tom, was visiting here and asked Roger how to turn on the bedside lamp in the guest room. Roger explained that it turns on by lowering the pump handle on the carved wooden pump, which pulls a metal bead pull out of the light socket (the old fashioned way) and voila! Tom thought that was quite ingenious and quaint and asked where Roger had gotten the old lamp. Roger explained that it was a wood shop project that I had made in 1962 at summer camp. It was surprising to my 30-year-old son that 64 years ago, his father, at the age of eight, had made something quite so finely crafted and still functional. I hated to tell him that all 12 boys in Cabin F had made the same lamp that summer. The curious question would be how many of those twelve still had the lamp and had it in service?
Roger is our family archivist and the combination of his frugality in taking any and all hand-me-downs offered to him (selling off the inferior or highly marketable ones) and his desire to preserve the family linkages (especially the father/son ones) has made his house a virtual family museum. Fortunately, I wasted lots of good money on good quality furnishings and artwork, and our tastes run in similar directions, so most of it seems to work for his and Valene’s aesthetic in ways that others might struggle to achieve. As I lie here in his guest bed (for all I can recall, it may have been one of my old guest beds because it certainly is one of our old guest bedroom bedspreads on top of it). I am staring at walls adorned by fifteen works of art, fourteen of which were mine.
Six of them are black & white framed photos of various scenes in NYC like the golden Prometheus statue at Rockefeller Center or the Atlas Shrugged statue on Fifth Avenue across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Those were all photographs that I took on early morning excursions in 1998 with a Nikon 35mm single-reflex camera on 400 ASA B&W film, back in the days when you could actually buy that stuff and get it developed. People have forever marveled that I had taken them, and the truth is that they represent my one and only foray into the photographic arts. Then there is my favorite framed Fortune poster, this one of a roller coaster set against blue sky and clouds. I used to keep that in my office at work to remind me that the roller coaster always beats the merry-go-round, but that you also had to hold on tight. There is the aerial photograph of the shoreline of Westhampton Beach and Quogue around Quantuck Bay. That and the pastel watercolor of our house in Quiogue are reminders of the Hamptons house I owned for 15 years and raised Roger and his sister on my weekends with them. There’s a night shot of the proposed New York Wheel, another adventure of mine and some clippings from my reviews from screenwriting when I wrote an HBO movie segment for a show called Subway Stories, produced by Rosie Perez and acted in by Jerry Stiller and Steve Zahn (who played the young me). And then there are several framed 360-degree panorama photos that I commissioned of Wall Street and Park Avenue, the two places I worked the most in NYC. As you can see, lots and lots of interesting memories.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed spending time with my son and his wife on this trip. We’ve caught up on all the news, swapped stories and remembered fondly a wide array of things. The RAM theme engulfs us but does not define us, if that makes sense. Lots of time is spent talking and laughing about my weight loss. I am now only 15 pounds heavier than Roger, who stands a good six inches shorter than me. That’s a big change for us both to swallow. When I lay on the living room floor doing my morning stretches and exercises, Roger observed that my ribcage was showing in ways he had never seen it before. But as I bumbled my way up to my feet from the mat, Roger commented that I may be skinnier, but was decidedly not spry. I’m not sure I’ve ever aspired to be spry, and it was hard to disagree with his assessment, so I accept that definition of my state and wonder how long it will take for RAM #2 to get not spry.