I have another tenant from India, a fantastically creative photographer here on a fellowship grant from Harvard. He’s the kind of guy whose senses are turned up to 11 all the time, and who experiences every New England leaf, miniature gnome village, and ivy-covered brick as a wonder.
How magical, to be like that.
I’ll admit to being someone more prone to wandering through those same streets lost in thought than appreciating my surroundings. If I look up and see a Little Free Library my first thought is of all the half-read books piling up on my side table, the unopened ones hiding in my Kindle. Guilt.
When Elfland, started by an eight-year-old boy, grew on the site of a demolished gas station a few blocks from me, as neighbors fought to save it and mysterious strangers expanded it with tiny skating rinks, local store mock-ups, and house replicas, I mused at voting humans playing on a superfund site. I worried that eight-year-old would run for office someday. What would all those toxins do to his ability to legislate? Aren’t we seeing enough of that already?
I love the changing leaves of autumn. Now, who the hell is going to rake them? Yes, I know we’re supposed to leave them where they fall now, but then in the spring they’re gucky mulch wads trailing you into the house. This is the city. Mulch wads are not OK.
While Shiva, my tenant, and I might notice the same things, we do not necessarily experience them the same way, so I was surprised when he came into my office bursting with joy the other day.
Marjie, I love your installation!
I have an installation?
Oh yes! Your pocketbooks. The colors. The movement. They’re fantastic! I already sent a picture of it to my friend in Bangalore. He loved your passion.
I walked out into the hall and looked.
I’ve collected handbags for a long time. I rarely get them new - I certainly don’t get the very fancy ones new. Those I get from consignment stores and flea markets. For years I kept them wrapped in felt pouches and boxes in my closet, stacked up on each other, until a few years ago when I realized the problem. Even before the pandemic I wasn’t going out to “pocketbooky” places all that much, and while it doesn’t take an occasion to carry a bag, you really can’t get away with carrying more than one at a time.
I missed my pocketbook friends when they were hidden away in a closet.
So I put up shelves, threw out all the pouches and boxes, and laid the bags out in the open where I could pass by them every day, many times a day, walking from desk to kitchen and back.
Where I could pet them.
Shiva is the kind of guy who can get you excited about a cracker, and as his stay here has gone on he’s made me realize I live in a house full of installations.
A friend came over yesterday and helped me assemble a bookcase I’ve wanted for years. It sits on one side of my chair, and the light-up book tree sits on the table on the other side. On them are the books I’m reading or (I swear) about to read.
Across the living room is Thomas the bead giraffe I got in Africa. He stands in front of my grandmother’s ancient map of Navarra, where my Spanish family is from, and the giant Italian cheese jar I scrounged when I worked managing a cheese shop in Manhattan in the late 70s. In it are flowers I’ve dried from every occasion in my life: The yellow roses my mother sent me on my 21st birthday; my wedding bouquet; an arrangement sent for the arrival of my kids, for my divorce, for celebrations, as apologies, on holidays, from funerals, and more. Forty-five-plus years of dried flowers, the weight of the newer ones turning the older ones to dust at the bottom, keeping time like rings of a tree, of a life lived with regret and remembrance.
There’s the croissant light that the cleaning people have never said a word about. They pick it up to dust under it. The switch is on the bottom, so when they place it back down, it turns on. When they leave I pick it up and place it back down to turn it off, all to be repeated the following week—performance art.
We’ve already discussed the Fuck Shelf in my office. Across from that are some fans I’ve collected when visiting my family across the Atlantic.
My guitars, which my hands won’t play anymore, still hang on the walls keeping watch over me. My companions, whose hollow bodies echo the sounds of my past, patiently wait to sing to me one more time if I want to give it a try.
Money doesn’t make an installation. Corks and bottle caps, poems, and pebbles, snapshots, and keyrings—anything and everything of meaning to us is an installation showcasing and surrounding us in the passions and memories we hold dear.
Not everyone’s lucky enough to have a visiting artist from across the globe point that out.
But you’re still not going to find me playing Barbie in toxic waste.
Morning Teaistisms
And we haven’t even talked about tea. If tea isn’t an installation, I don’t know what is. What you drink, what you make it in, what you sip it from. And it doesn’t matter if it’s paper or porcelain (bullshit—it must be glass!) as long as it’s the way you like it and it’s yours.
It’s buckwheat tea time again on this rainy, raw day.
I’ve always loved bookshelves as semi-curated gallery space, sharing insights into what interests a person. My current bookshelf situation is too poor to hold all my books, by half, but the stuff you can see still makes me happy when my eyes wander across the spines. The shapes, colors, fonts, and the actual words of the titles bring me a lot of joy.
How clever to put your purses out like that! Might I point out that there appears to be room for more on the bottom right? Just sayin'
Love the lighted book tree!
Thomas is absolutely wonderful.
The picture of your beloved dog is beautiful.
Thanks for the tour:)