Culture Crash

Nora and I are both educated in a field that studies the ways that objects carry meaning.  Small objects, the size of a robin’s nest; large objects, the size of a neighborhood.  We invest those things with meanings based on their associations — what we were doing when we found them, the relationships we had when we lived there.  We invest those things with meanings because of the cultures they’re associated with — the menorah, the Coke bottle, the Goth trenchcoat.  And because we invest things with meanings, they talk back to us in powerful ways.  “If this is what I have, or what I want, this must say something about who I am.”

No surprise that Nora and I have books and magazines everywhere.  They say something about who we are.  But also no surprise that Nora has a dozen or more containers of fleece waiting to be spun, and that I’ve spent a lot of time planning the coming pool room in our home.  We don’t yet have time or space to spin yarn or play pool, but we believe that we are people who do.  Even inert, the spinning wheel and the sample scrap of Simonis billiard cloth speak reassuringly to us.

We’ve been in our home for almost exactly two months, and have spent much of that time deciding which of our things go where, what is prominent and what is background.  I think it means a lot that we’ve privileged things that allow us to have friends over.  The guest bedrooms, the nice dishes, the table on the patio and the chairs on the porch, all of those things have come before building out the office or arranging the garage.

So the past couple of days have been deeply disconcerting.

Late on Saturday, the movers drove away into the night with the turkey sandwiches and Gatorade that we’d sent them off with, and Nora and I sat down in our house and reviewed the suddenly revised layout.

The china hutch doesn’t have anything to do with anything else in the living room.  The marble dining table and the chairs don’t feel at all right in the kitchen.  The sideboard is the wrong color, the wrong shape and size, the wrong historical period.  The coffee table dominates the conversation in the living room, not letting anything else get a word in edgewise.  The end tables, pressed into service as nightstands in the two upstairs bedrooms, are as comfortable as a princess at a potluck.  And the hundred or so boxes in the garage weigh (literally, about three tons worth) on our future plans.

On Saturday and Sunday, we both, at different moments, talked about our engagement with these objects in terms of violence.  I referred to being invaded; Nora talked about being held hostage.  In both cases, the metaphor is one of meaning.  When a nation is invaded, it’s not merely that one’s land is being held; more important is that one’s values are subservient to alien values.  When someone is held hostage, it’s not merely that their mobility is restricted; it’s that their freedom is subject to demands that may not be met.

Mom’s things, each taken on their own, are lovely.  The quality is high, the utility intact,  the design done with care and craft.  The problems we face are not material; they are cultural.  The farmhouse has been overrun by a high-rise apartment; self and community shadowed by family duty.

But Nora and I both recognize the fact, and the meaning, of the invasion, and I feel the stirrings of an insurrection.  We are not helpless bystanders.  We can respect the life without devotion to each object of the life.  (And as I was driving back to Medford on Sunday afternoon, I was thinking seriously about what aspects of my own past I can jettison without disrespect to my past itself.  Do your children a favor and throw some things away today!)

In New York, part of the response to material overabundance was that we should call fine auction houses.  In Middletown Springs, the response has been that we should have a big tag sale.  Again, similar logistical and material practices described through different kinds of associations, different cultural color. 

We’ll face this again when we take in some things from Mom’s vacation house, and when we take in other things from my apartment in Medford.  In each case, things of value and use -- even affection -- will be found alien, not absorbed into our lifestreams.  We'll work to help someone else make use of them, someone who may find them to be reliable narrators of their own lives’ goals.  These were all things that have effectively provided reassuring and nurturing stories for decades, and for someone, they will again.

New York, New York

When I was growing up in Muskegon Heights, Michigan, pretty much everybody on my block was a Detroit Tigers fan.  Most of us had never been to Detroit — most of us had never been north of Ludington, south of Kalamazoo or east of Grand Rapids.  (And of course, being right on Lake Michigan, we couldn't travel west.)

Oh, hell, I can't resist.  The starting lineup for the 1968 World Champion Detroit Tigers:

• First Base:  Norm Cash
• Second Base: Dick McAuliffe
• Shortstop: Ray Oyler (except during the World Series, when he was benched in favor of center fielder Mickey Stanley for better hitting)
• Third Base: Don Wert
• Left Field: Willie Horton
• Center Field and Right Field: a combination through the season of Stanley, Jim Northrup, and ultimate Hall-of-Famer Al Kaline (injured for some of the year)
• Left-hand pitcher: Mickey Lolich
• Right-hand pitcher: Denny McLain, the last pitcher to win 30 games in a season
• Catcher: Bill Freehan
• Pinch Hitter: Gates Brown, whom the Tigers recruited while he was in prison in Ohio.  (They did that again six years later with Ron LeFlore, another great ex-con ballplayer.) 
• Manager: Mayo Smith

You think I had to look any of that up?  Please.  Sunoco gave away fake Tigers' uniform t-shirts to Michigan kids that summer, and I defaced mine almost immediately with a big black felt pen, putting Kaline's heroic number 6 onto my own jersey.  The lineup of the '68 Tigers will be the very last thing I lose to dementia.

There were certainly other cities in the world.  Chicago, most notably, where we went for our 8th grade class trip.  Rome.  Beverly Hills, where the Clampetts lived.  Moscow, which we were sure had nuclear missiles aimed at Muskegon because of the strategic centrality of our foundries.  But really, Detroit was my childhood image of "city," because I imagined the definition of "city" to be a great big version of Muskegon — lots of houses adjacent to lots of factories.

I'm still not an especially urban person, even though I've lived in Oakland/San Francisco and in Milwaukee and in Boston.  I'm intimidated by city people, all of whom I imagine are sharper and quicker and savvier than I.  (They're certainly all more beautiful... major cities seem to have a magnetic pull for physical attractiveness, which dwindles rapidly once you get out to the immediate ring of suburbs.)  Garrison Keillor once said that when he moved to New York, everybody thought he was stupid because he spoke slowly.  Reticence is NOT an urban trait.

When I've traveled in my life, it's almost always been to rural places or small cities.  I've spent some time in Seattle and DC and Vancouver and Calgary, but not much.  Nora wants to take me to Paris, and I get that, but I'd just as soon go to Limoges.

So it's only been in the past four years that I've set foot in New York City.  I never had any reason to go there before Nora and Estelle.  I can watch David Letterman and Seinfeld and Saturday Night Live on TV and get all the New York I could ever stand (which, based on those three examples, is a city based on cruelty, mockery and backstabbing).  But now I've been there probably 20 times.  I know how to navigate Amsterdam Billiards and Blatt Billiards and Oren's Coffee, where you wait on the sidewalk if there are more than three people in the store.  I know how to get to my bank's ATM, know where to stand to place an order at Grey Dog, know who understands how to make iced tea and who doesn't.  I've had dinner at Blue Hill and Cafe Loup and Pommes Frites, which may be the only restaurant in America that makes nothing but French fries.  (Belgian fries, actually, with 26 different dipping sauces.)  I've had a beer at McSorley's, know not to turn right on a red light, walked the High Line, and seen half of the street names mentioned in Steely Dan songs.  I've gotten a haircut, bought books and toothpaste.  I'm competent in about a fifteen-minute walking radius of Mom's apartment, and can rely on logic to help with the rest as needs be.

But as of August 31st, I won't be visiting NYC as often as I had used to.  We have good friends there, and we will get down to see them, but not as often as we saw Mom.  And Nora's not teaching in New York now, and I didn't get that job...

I'm finding that I'm prematurely nostalgic for a place I don't especially like.

Part of that nostalgia is due to a very specific framing of New York provided by that apartment.  On the 18th floor of a pre-war highrise, it has big western views to the Hudson River and smaller but especially powerful northern views that give a straight-on vista of both the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.  You can look nearly straight down onto the public life in Washington Square Park, or onto a wilderness of rooftop equipment — air intakes and exhausts, chillers, ducts, water towers, service sheds — on buildings which actually seem pretty tall from the sidewalk.  You can look across at an infinity of similarly elevated apartments, imagining William Powell and Myrna Loy and Asta living the luxe life behind each illuminated window.

And the building itself is located in one of the most desirable neighborhoods (Greenwich Village) in the most desirable borough (Manhattan) in the city, surrounded by an ocean of beautiful, brilliant children attending NYU or Cooper Union.  It's the distillation of how New York presents itself.  If Mom had lived at 90th and Liberty in Ozone Park, my New York experience would have been pretty different.  More like Medford.

It's like I've been on a cruise for a few years.  High luxury, every detail of every need attended to, food of all descriptions available at a moment's notice 24 hours a day, whether we go to the dining room or have room service bring it up.  Uniformed staff in the building, services immediately at hand.

Here's a description of the cruise experience that feels like my experience of New York.

...there are about 73 varieties of entree alone, and incredibly good coffee; and if you're carrying a bunch of notebooks or even just have too many things on your tray, a waiter will materialize as you peel away from the buffet and will carry your tray... even though it's a cafeteria there're all these waiters standing around, all with Nehruesque jackets and white towels draped over left arms that are always held in the position of broken or withered arms, watching you, the waiters, not quite making eye-contact but scanning for any little way to be of service...

There's a reason that the late David Foster Wallace entitled this essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."  I know that it's possible to live a more normal existence in New York, but the circumstances surrounding my visits meant that I rarely did.  My time in the city was always disorienting, in that sort of pleasant way that the cruise or the amusement park can be disorienting; it was a lot to take in, for someone who never thought of looking past Detroit.

We'll be finishing the move-out this week, and having an evening with some of Mom's friends, and sitting by ourselves in the empty apartment, with prosecco in paper cups.  Then, in the immortal words of Don Meredith, "Turn out the lights, the party's over..."  The cruise will end, and when we visit that port again, it'll be under our own power and into a different pier.

White gloves

What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). It's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything.”
― Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information 

Author Bill McKibben and film maker Annie Leonard have been front-and-center in my head these days. Both have focused on the environmental crisis and have suggested that we all have too much “stuff”. They say that we need to reuse, recycle and “up-cycle” rather than making and buying new stuff.  It is pretty clear to me these days, that they are right. But they are also very wrong.

H and I closed on our house on June 26, moved on the 28^th and 29^th and that night, I raced to New York as Mom was dying. Back in Vermont, the friends who had helped us move had started the unpacking process in the kitchen, but the bulk of the work was left to our friends G and H, who spent the first week of their vacation unpacking china and silverware, decorative bowls, lamps and rugs, so that we could return from NYC without being shoulder deep in boxes. G said she was startled / intrigued/ interested by the accumulation of things that she was unpacking. I was a bit embarrassed but without a place to call “home” for the past six decades, my ideas of home were much embedded in the things I accumulated – a small orange glass vase, paper wasp nests, handmade baskets, and of course, boooooooookkkkkkkks.  In some way, these accumulations were my way of being grounded amid the flux of a life lived perching on other people's nests. 

The move from one house to another was followed immediately by the need to pack and move the things in my mother’s apartment of 60-plus years and to disseminate what remains.

In the coming months, I will have to  dismantle the place she had at the beach (and no, I am not going to discuss our apartment in Medford!).  

But if my friends were startled by my “collections”, it is something I learned at my mother's knee. Herb has written elsewhere that my mother never used one adjective when she could use three, and she was inordinately fond of superlatives. The same was true of the things she kept, and as I go through her things, I have found that she was a hoarder of office supplies, medical supplies and cosmetics and booookkkkks.  Still, there are things that stand out as I come close to finishing the packing of the New York apartment. These include the three rolls of cotton (not the cotton balls, but the flat rolls), six large tubes of a particular soothing Aloe Vesta anti-itch ointment, three tubes of Neosporin (why buy only one at a time?), a pile of unused gift boxes, dozens of tiny bottles of nail polish from her beauty salon in three colors, and 7 pairs of white cotton gloves, 27 pairs of colored kid gloves from black to brown to dove gray, and TWENTY pairs of white kid gloves. Yes, twenty. All white.

[Photo credit: H. Stern]

I find myself wondering whether she knew that she had these gloves, or whether they lay forgotten in a back corner of a drawer behind other accumulations. I find myself wondering whether she bought the brand new white bath towels still unwrapped, because she wanted to leave them to me for the new house. I find myself wondering how the accumulation of dozens of light bulbs somehow made her feel safe when she had grown up under street lamps because in her childhood poverty, there had never been enough money to pay the light bill, so they sat outside playing canasta with the neighbors until bed time. My mother and I argued constantly about her need to leave all the lights on, in rooms she didn’t use. Perhaps it was some subliminal reminder that she would never again be forced to sit on a street corner or fear the dark. As she sat confined to the apartment in her last months, friends suggested that she take a walk to the park at her door, that she sit outside and enjoy the air. She adamantly refused. I am only now, beginning to understand, that this too may have been a reminder of a childhood spent on the street, poor. 

We use marketing campaigns and technological devices to try to remind people that they need to be more energy conscious, when their actions are driven by fear of the dark—literally and metaphorically. We are afraid of one thing, so we absorb ourselves in its opposite, looking odd to our friends and neighbors. I have been afraid of homelessness, so I have accumulated the markers of someone who has been most fully “homed”.  And when we die, our family and friends are left to make sense of what remains behind. Herb and I have no children. When we die, our beloved things will be distributed by someone who barely knows us. There will be no one who cares to interpret the bird nest that I found on the ground beside the rock circle this morning, and that I placed carefully under the antique glass orb fire extinguisher on the porch. It is a perfect fit.

 We are all the product of things and stories that are unspoken. Our actions are consciously and unconsciously shaped by the memories of fear and pleasure, and desire of course. But increasingly in this country, our children or our executors will be saddled with making sense of the things that we left behind. Or they will merely auction what is left, give the proceeds to some nonprofit, and dispose of the rest in a landfill. I have tried several times to give some of my mother’s beloved “things” to non-profit groups for use or for sale, but they are drowning in such gifts and have turned away everything but the clothes and shoes. No three seat couch, no end tables, no lamps, no bed-side reader. Only clothes. And a leopard ceramic garden table (!) and a glass and chrome shelf unit. We are drowning in the things of desire. We are drowning in the things of impulse. And we are drowning in the things that stave off fear of what could be or once was. 

I began this essay, thinking that what I was going to write about was a book I found among Mom’s things. It is not the first edition Matisse that I flirted with keeping but gave to a book seller. Now that we have a partial appraisal for estate purposes, that one book is worth as much as the whole lot of books that he carted away, but I needed to have some things gone, and I didn’t have the time to research each volume, place it on ebay or Craig’s list, wait for someone who needed it more than I needed to keep it.

The book I intended to write about wasn’t among the conservation books that I gave to the college in New York where it will gather dust on their shelves rather than mine.

The book is a paperback called Bizarre Books and it appears to be a result of a competition between two friends, to find the oddest titles published in a given year: The Biochemist’s Songbook and The Resistance of Piles to Penetration among them. In 1978, someone wrote (and published!) Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (the second!). The book made me laugh. I don’t actually know whether mom ever read it.

But as I go through the old greeting cards, the beloved, now worn clothes, the Kiddush cup that was my grandfather’s, it is a needed moment of levity and I am keeping it. I am also keeping some of her scarves, but none of the leopard ones that she adored. I am also keeping a few of her hats though they are too small for me to wear. I am keeping my grandmother's china and the "wrong" champagne glasses that she bought before she knew that the day's fashion made them unfashionable. I am keeping the cover page of her dictionary, purchased  in 1936 when she was 17. It reads " that I may reach higher and greater things." I am keeping her beloved china cabinet that has no auction value and yes, her wedding ring and those of my grandparents.

I am not sure whether the decisions I made to bring some things to Vermont, and leave others to be dispersed at curbside are wise ones; I nearly gave up the carving set that Nonny (our beloved caregiver and pseudo-second mother) brought from pre-war Germany. They were saved only because I found some ancient notes that my mother wrote about the contents of her china cabinet.

But when H and I die, there will be no one to make sense of our stories through an interpretation of the objects with which we lived. And at a time when I think enviously about people who live in spare Japanese spaces with rooms that can be assembled as sleeping spaces, tea ceremony spaces, and living rooms by rolling and unrolling a single set of tatami mats, I am also grateful for the chance to touch the last 92 years of my mother’s life.  I sort of understood the need to leave the lights on; but it wasn’t until now that I understood her refusal to sit in the park in the last months of her life. And even though she is no longer here to tell me so, I know I am right about why. In short, as I go through the 50 pairs of gloves, she is teaching me something new, even without being here to narrate. It is about how you present yourself. It is about what is covered and what is not. And as I go through the accumulation, I am trying to make sense of the meaning of “stuff” in ways that would make Bill McKibben flush.

Keeping Up

I'm teaching a class tonight on research ethics to our visiting students, so I don't need to be in early this morning.  I took the opportunity to sleep in (7:30!!!), and now a little catching up. 

How've you been?  It's been too long, hasn't it?

School starts in less than two weeks — in fact, my first class is two weeks from tonight, with a second opening for another class the night after.  Year One Seminar was one of those extended-orientation things, teaching new students about how to use the BAC e-mail and where the Learning Resource Center is and how to write a resume.  It was actually run by Advising.  But it was nominally an Arts & Sciences course, which was at the time my bailiwick as the Director of Liberal Studies, so I reclaimed it.  Now it's a course about ideas.  Why bother being an architect?  What are your personal and professional responsibilities, and to whom?  Why does it matter when you turn in your homework on clean, unwrinkled paper?  What does all of that say about you and your values?

It's a fun course.  And one of the reasons it's necessary is because so many of our students are what we call in higher ed "first-generation," with no prior family history of college.  Often, college is thought by those students and their families as a way of ensuring employment prospects; it's equivalent to a truck-drivers' school or barber college, leading (they hope) toward a good job.   

And in this current economy, who can blame anyone for aiming their work primarily toward getting a decent job?  Ironically, though, it's often the skilled blue-collar jobs that can't be outsourced, because they have to be done locally.  If your plumber has to physically be in your basement, then that's a job that Mitt and his pals can't send abroad.  If you're driving a truck between Philadelphia and Charlotte, that's a job that will always be an American job.  It's the architects who have to be afraid, given that they're competing with production firms in India who pay their CAD drafters a quarter of what we do.

College historically has had a different mission than job training.  Given that only the sons of privileged families went to college, the learning was geared toward ideas.  College was where you grappled with the big dilemmas of human history, where you read literature that presented confusing but crucial moral problems, where you started to understand that nature adheres to knowable physical laws that do not respond to mere human desire or hubris.  These are things you must consider if you're going to be a successful mayor or secretary of state or international business leader (which, of course, was the birthright of those sons of privilege).  These are the great problems of citizenship, and well-educated citizens consider them often.

Or did.  Now college is primarily an individual consumer choice, an "investment" that needs to pay off in dollar terms.  And with college debt growing (in parallel with public investment in higher education shrinking), a student graduating with a $60,000 loan balance has to believe that she or he will make that extra $500 a month that will allow repayment before age 40.   Which is $500 a month that doesn't go into a nicer apartment, or into a reliable car, or into a wedding and honeymoon, or into the kid's school clothes.  The average age of marriage in the US is now 28.7 for men and 26.5 for women, at least in part because early-adult economic security is so tenuous.  (Both of those numbers are almost exactly six years older than they were 50 years ago, when the average woman married at 20 and average man at 22.)

And so I wonder what I'm doing sometimes as a college administrator.  My salary is amortized across our students, each of whom in essence pays me $100 a year.  Am I worth that to their future job prospects?  Can I, or they, justify anything that doesn't convert to immediate salary?  Who has time to consider the meanings of art and craft, the pleasures of learning, the nature of dialogue? 

Our new curriculum, geared as it is toward the requirements of professional licensure, is crammed to the hatch with required courses, a high-speed sailing craft without many portholes fitted for looking around at the scenery.  One of the great unspoken opportunities of traditional higher education was the change of major.  A student took a course as a sophomore that changed the way she saw the world, and she recognized that art history or microbiology or mathematics was a more compelling way of thinking than the marketing major she started out in.  Offering a significant amount of elective courses is one of the ways that college accomplishes its larger mission of helping students discover their own values.  Now, we ask young people to predict at age 19 what career they want to join, when they typically have no real experience with what ANY career (other than their parents') has to offer, and to take on remarkable personal indebtedness in order to do that.  It seems both unfair and unwise.

So that's how I'm doing this morning.  Nora's in New York, dealing with the end of life as I consider the beginnings.  Neither is comforting, but we take our responsibilities seriously, as must we all.