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The Temptations Stop

April 4, 2012 7 Comments

So very young. I think I remember this and that. Dad turned the big, silver knob and the Temptations stop. There was a chainlink fence aged to a coppery color, undulating its way down the heaving and spidered sidewalk. A bread truck in the drive.

It was Christmastime. You lifted the yoke on the gate and fumbled to close it. A few steps, a few steps and onto the porch. It was closed in, but left cold. There was a Christmas tree. It wasn’t real. There wasn’t an insinuation of real about it. It was silver. It was Christmas with the Blessed Virgin Mary in a miniskirt. There was a light pointed at it with a revolving lens of four colors slowly grinding around. There was fake white arcs of snow sprayed into the corners of the windowpanes. The patches of real snow outside were brown.

Then the door opened and it was instantly loud and close and hot and wonderful. There were kisses on the forehead with a hand on both cheeks, warm and damp from cooking. There was a comical handshake in a haze of Tiparillos. A big post stood sentry at the foot of the stair, and halfway up there was a colored glass window. Who could think of such a thing in your house instead of in the church where you dared not turn around.

They had a parlor instead of a living room, and a room to eat in and nothing else. Or maybe it was her sister. They were all in the same place at the same time and it blends things together in a small mind. The chairs groaned with even my little weight. The table groaned with the food. Everyone was in the kitchen and it was as bright as a beacon by the shore in there, and the light crept out into the hall like a puddle. The phone rang and rang and sounded different.

There was football of all things on TV, from places I’d never go. The men drank from cans with two perfect triangles punched in them, one slightly larger than the other. After a while they played cards and laughed at one another’s jokes.

When it was over she had a name for me that others didn’t. I was nothing but her brother’s son but that’s enough I guess. She put a whole quarter in my hand and kissed me. I hear that name again, in her voice, though it is no more. I’ll tote it around in the sack of my heart forever.

Griffin Podiatrist/Woodworker Sure Looks Funny On Your Business Card

April 3, 2012 8 Comments

Carving the “Ball and Claw” leg.

Chippendale furniture is as dead as a Pharoah. It had quite a run. Thomas Chippendale was the fellow, 1718-1789, but he had a son named Thomas, too, who went into business with him, and went bankrupt. Welcome to the furniture business.

They were designers. They specified all the stuff in the rooms, and even the paint colors. More Ralph Lauren than Norm Abram. And the ball and claw foot is only a tiny portion of their furniture leitmotif, but it’s the thing most anyone can point to and utter: Chippendale.

I sat on Chippendale chairs, gone to seed, in my grandmother’s old apartment when I was a little kid. When the dirt poor end up with stuff, you’re near the end of the string. Next stop oblivion. Of course, right up to fairly recently, people still bought Chippendalish ensembles of furniture for the rooms they never went in in their big houses. The living room and the dining room in houses that no one ate in or lived in. Furniture museums, I called them back twenty years ago when I was still in the house business. The ladies of the houses were constantly asking what color to paint the rooms to entice anyone, including themselves, to enter them. I never did find that color. The husband wrote the check and went back in the family room where the TV was.

I have a copy of Chippendale’s Gentlemen’s and Cabinet Maker’s Director.  It’s around here somewhere. In a box. In a closet. I think. I guess. Never mind. I’ve got Hepplewhite’s book, and if you take out all the harewood inlay on everything it’s just farm furniture and everyone wants some of that.

Still. Look at how exuberant we used to be. We carved the feet of our chairs to resemble the feet of a mythical beast. Nowadays forty-year-old men and their doughy Slave Leias dress up like mythical creatures and go to conventions, where they sit in plastic chairs.

You can read the Gentlemen’s and Cabinet Maker’s Director here, if you  think you’re going to live to be a thousand and have time to spare.

What’s The Difference Between A Violin And A Viola?

April 2, 2012 17 Comments

Carleen Hutchins made it through 98 years. Passed away in 2009. We should all be so lucky. To find work that is gratifying enough to do up until the end is difficult. Mostly we tote that bale until we don’t have to anymore, and then retire to the bottom six inches of Satan’s shower curtain, otherwise known as Florida.

She had enough cred to get an obituary in the NYT, so I guess other people thought she was somebody.  I would have anyway.  One happens upon people like Carleen from time to time. I never knew she was alive until after she was gone. Your life overlaps with so many other lives, but you don’t often know it, or have the wherewithal to do anything about it when it matters. I began reading P.G. Wodehouse stories a while back. There was an other-worldly vibe to them, of course, and it was kind of jarring to think that I could have driven to Long Island when I was younger and waited on Basket Neck lane (I wrote that address from memory, I wonder if it’s correct; I can’t remember the town) and seen Pelham Grenville walking to the Post Office to mail his stories to the publisher. It’s like being told that Napoleon or George Washington or Shakespeare was at the pub just now, and you could go play darts with them if you hurry. But of course your interest in such people is of the rear-view mirror kind — Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

I would have liked to talk to Carleen, but I only found out about her today. I may run out of time, but I’ll keep trying to make you all wish you had talked to me.

Month: April 2012

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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