The Stone Menagerie
In the 1944 play, The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams wrote an autobiographical memory story that launched his writing career and put him into the Pantheon of great American writers. It is a subtle story about a middle class American family with a mother living below the standards to which she had become accustomed from her youth, a father that is woefully absent, an underachieving son who yearns for independence and a grown daughter who is so frail and insecure that she lives her life through her collection of little glass figurines. We too have a menagerie on our shelves in the living room. Specifically, we have an etagere in the empire style which I bought when I moved to Toronto on my own in 1990. This is the oldest piece of furniture I own and it symbolizes my ability to persevere and get up from a career face-plant that would have sent less hardy souls scurrying for their resume.
I was sent to Toronto, the Bankers Trust equivalent of Siberia, to pay penance for a lapse of business performance that was deemed by my superiors as an error of omission rather than one of commission. I had let something bad happen on my watch and my puritanical bosses felt that I needed punishment of a somewhat public nature. It was a bit Napoleonic in that I was exiled to a nearby place to a life that was less harsh than symbolic. In fact, being sent to become the Chairman and CEO of our Canadian bank based in Toronto brought with it the normally generous expat package, which at my level, entitled me to a rather handsome apartment in the swankiest part of town. It was a 2-3 year assignment (a.k.a. sentence) and the apartment was unfurnished. The full panoply of furnishings from my one-bedroom recently-divorced-guy apartment in Battery Park barely put a dent in the floorspace. So, I went out and bought a few random pieces to fill in the gaps and the only one of those that has stayed with me all these years is this etagere. Its wooden top hold a secret, which is a felt-lined hidden drawer for storing special valuable items of your choosing. That secret drawer alone makes the piece worth saving as who does not want a secret passage or drawer in life?
Over the years, I have used the etagere to house and display my most interesting curios and antiquities. From my days in Canadian exile, I have three soapstone Inuit statues. From my early childhood in Latin America I have both a pair of brass Conquistadores stirrups that look like little fairy slippers with curled up toes. They fit what must have been a rather petite and regal man with a size six shoe, but they are old (perhaps 16th Century) and very unique. I also have several pieces of pumice stone carvings of the pre-Colombian era. One is a carved head and one is a large concave platter on legs. Both are clearly hand-carved and very old antiquities. One last oddity on the top shelf of the etagere is a woven rectangular basket that houses what looks like old Indian narcotics paraphernalia. The pieces look like a medicine man’s kit bag for snorting cocaine and it comes from the depths of the Orinoco. There are many other pieces on the etagere ranging from carved stone animals (a silverback gorilla, a rhinoceros and a running bear), an Egyptian mini sarcophagus with Anubis (the dog God of the underworld) sitting on top of it, and countless agate stones and resin miniature villages. Its an odd menagerie, but one chock full of memories.
I am especially proud of my life of global wandering, a trip that began on an involuntary basis in my earliest youth, carried into my work life to all the most exotic places on the globe and now trails off to more comfortable leisure travel to places that Kim and I have deemed as falling on our final bucket lists. I think its safe to say that unlike Tennessee William’s character of the sad unfulfilled daughter who lives through her glass menagerie, I keep my stone menagerie as a reminder of all the fulfillment I have had in life. I occasionally use the etagere to tell a story to some visiting friend who is curious about the curios, but mostly I just like looking over the shelves and remembering my good fortune of living a life rich in texture broad in curiosity. I might have a few other items stashed away here or there in the house that hold special meaning to me, but nowhere is the collection of memories as great and concentrated than in this stone menagerie on the etagere.
When I went through the process of shutting down my home in Ithaca a few years ago, I asked my children to call out the items that they wanted for their own keepsakes. It was an interesting process with each of them surprising me as to what they held most dear. It reminded me that you cannot superimpose memories on others, no matter how close those people may be to you. What goes on in my children’s minds is of their own construction and interpretation. When I think about the ultimate disposition of my stone menagerie on this etagere, I suspect that it simply isn’t something that anyone else would look at like I do. The random array is not the least bit random to me and everything on the etagere is there for a reason. Those reasons are private to me and even if I told each story to my children or even wrote the stories down for posterity, it would all end up in the ozone of eternity. In that way, my stone menagerie is the closest analogy I have to my life of colorful and curious oddities. It might mean a little to Kim or my kids, but it is mostly only interesting or valuable to me. The best I can hope for is that my children will find some item on these shelves that resonates with them and perhaps reminds them of me.
Kim is the one who spotted the silverback gorilla is a Sedona gallery, so I imagine that she is reminded of me by that symbol of enduring strength and brutality. The brass Conquistadores stirrups speak to my wanderlust. The pumice statuary should tell the tale of my respect for history and the antiquities that symbolize it. One of my kids might remember me trying to get my rented van out of the tight spots in the hillside streets of Orvieto, characterized in miniature in a resin replica of the Italian hill town. Strangely enough, the piece I think most defines me is a large soapstone Inuit bear that is standing with his fists held in positions that make him look like he is either dancing to a 60s beat or getting ready to do battle. There is something very special about that boogying bear that captures my inner sense of self.
Whatever ultimately happens to my stone menagerie, know that it has given me great pleasure over the years, reminding of what has been, what is, and what I want to be.