--A olive-green Melmac plate rimmed with soft yellow flowers
--An official Uncola glass, wider at the bottom than it is on top
--A faded box of unused Wash 'n Dri marked $1.29
--A pastel sketch of a basket of apples, oranges, and bananas, with grapefruit and knife in the foreground
--A bureau lamp with a bright-green night light resembling...what? A lighthouse? A channel marker?
Remnants of the 60s, remnants of the 70s and 80s: objects my mother bought from Two Guys, Bradlees, Mr. Big, Clover, House and Garden. They were for a summer house, after all, and casual was the point. Could she have known that these offhand pieces would come to stand for her? She loved this house and its view of the lagoon, its nearness to the bay and bridges. It is ghosted with her now, but it is a friendly ghost, a calming, interested ghost. I like getting to spend time with her again, even if the exterior electric-blue she insisted on seven years ago--we didn't yet know that she was losing her mind--still makes me turn my head away.
18 comments:
so fascinating how objects come to hold such meaning, how they can sometimes evoke memories or feelings that won't come to us in any other manner.
And for a second there, I thought Ned's reflection was your mother's ghost.
I was taken with Ned's image in the mirror, too Paul. It seems as if it's out of perspective, too far away. But so memory and space can play tricks on us all.
I love the idea of a museum to your mother.
that photo should be on the cover of a book and/or Vogue magazine.
yes...the offhand objects.
my elegant, late grandma kept empty welch's grape jelly jars to be counted among her drinking glasses. i'm talking about the ones with the flintstones on them. i can still remember opening the cupboard to reach for one.
Thanks, Lakin. The kitschiest things, my mother probably would have thought of them as the kitschiest things. She saved *taste* for the other house.
Ned did look like he was hearing-seeing something other than himself. And he held that pose for a good two minutes.
Thanks, Elisabeth. Yes, the room is tiny, tiny--all of nine by ten. So the trick of depth feels significant. I was just waking up. I caught him looking at the mirror, and I reached for my phone without glasses on. And there he was.
Nancy, we also had the Welch's grape jelly jars--I think they were designed to be reused--and definitely the Flinstones glasses. The Flintstones glasses are pretty popular at midcentury-collecticles stores. I'm sure all ours are broken now.
Might borrow/steal "The Museum of My Mother" for a poem title. :) If I end up writing it, I'll send it to you.
I'd love that, Sophie. It's yours.
Moving, you.
Thanks, you.
People make an impact on everything they touch. It's expected that you see them in the things they touch the most. I love this post.. very moving. sad.
Thanks, SY. So much on that house hasn't been touched in years. Still the same bathroom fixtures, still the same fence, by and large still the same things in the linen-medicine closet. (a bottle of Carbona from 1965, I think.) You're right: sad. But an element of sweetness too.
Dear Paul, have been following your blog by way of Mark Doty's one. I love his writing and I am now approaching yours.
I am writing a difficult memoir about my mother which is entangled with sorrow and pain but also, I hope, suffused with poetry and cultural insights (I am from Naples and my mother lived and died there). I'm not writing this to publicize myself but to share the fact that one of the fragments the memoir is composed of is about all the objects that were lost when I had them hastily removed from the place where she died and disposed of. I just could not face a sorting-through. Yet after four years I still mourn some of those objects. As anthropologists know (but only perhaps on the intellectual level) things are alive with personal and cultural "mana"—spirit, essence.
This is an incredible title. And a moving post.
It's good to hear from you, Amalia. Welcome to this neck of the forest. I love how you're thinking about your mother's things, and I hope your writing is going well. Take care.
Thanks very much, Jamie! Much appereciated, especially from you.
It just occurred to me that that bureau and mirror came from my childhood bedroom in the Cherry Hill house. That gives that photo an extra dimension.
Dear Paul, thank you so much for acknowledging my comment!
If it's not too pretentious of me, I would love for you to take a peek at my blog if you ever had the time. I recently wrote a post about my mother's objects and I referenced "The Museum of My Mother":
http://memoryandmirrors.blogspot.com/2010/10/haunting-of-gloves-things-i-lost.html
I hope to meet you in Iowa, I will be at the conference all days.
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