The Bewildered

While we’re on the subject of my grandma, I remember going to visit her with my younger brother later on in her life, after she’d moved to the retirement home, which she inwardly hated and outwardly tolerated. My brother hadn’t seen her in perhaps a year or so and was visiting while in the area before a big walk he was going to do, either his walk across Newfoundland, or the one up the coast of California. I can’t remember which. He was explaining the philosophy of the walks (and there is a philosophy—there has to be to walk all that distance), that he liked to get out and meet people, talk to them, that part of the point was to show what’s lost when people race around in cars all the time. I’m not sure how he expected her to react to this kind of idealism, but, she was completely exasperated and asked when he was going to settle down and get a real job. He said he liked the walking and that he thought about it as a kind of work. She responded by telling him that people shouldn’t like their jobs, that liking your work really wasn’t the point. She might as well have added, “that’s why they call it work.” He countered with probably the best and worst response he could have made at that point; he told her that Jesus’ job was essentially to walk around and talk to people, and so, in a way, he was really just following in his footsteps.

That pretty much ended the conversation, but not in a way that suggested he had won. You couldn’t just compare yourself to Jesus in front of my grandma and come away unscathed in her mind. I’m sure she never forgot the conversation or the discomfort that followed it; the collision of worldviews was obvious, stark, the impasse palpable.

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My grandma owned just one refrigerator in her life. She didn’t get it until the mid-1960s, just in time to chill her last daughter’s final few baby bottles. The fridge moved with them from the country to the city, to the modest bungalow that would be the only home I ever knew them in, and finally, it was left behind when my grandparents sold their house to move into a retirement home. Along with the house, the loss of that fridge felt symbolic. I’m sure it was on the new owner’s list of items to be replaced, and maybe it needed replacing, but then again, it’s just as likely that it didn’t look the part, didn’t fit in with their plans to gut the kitchen and install new granite counter tops.

This is not my grandma's fridge. She loved hams, but maraschino cherries would have been far too decadent. She also would not have purchased a product called "Tiny Taters." And I don't remember her ever making or consuming a stuffed pepper.

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Did you notice in the last post that Elsie de Wolfe included a picture of “a corner of [her] own boudoir” in her book The House in Good Taste? Moreover, did you notice how bland the picture is? A writing desk, a few bookshelves, some papers strewn around… a far cry from the sets of “boudoir” photographers with their soft-focus lighting and satin pillows. The difference between what I imagined a boudoir to be and that very ordinary space was striking enough to make me dust off my dictionary and figure out where my imagination and Elsie’s reality had diverged.

The OED says the word boudoir originated in late 18^th century France and literally means “sulking-place.” (It comes from bouder, which means to “pout” or “sulk.”) Ah history, always so offensive.

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Candace Wheeler was one of the originators of the notion that women should construct “homes” for their husbands and families through attention to decorating and design. Not to be dismissed for spawning the likes of Martha Stewart, Wheeler actually helped to institute interior decorating as a viable career path for women at a time when women largely didn’t work outside the home. She published Household Art in in 1893 and Principles of Home Decoration in 1903, which gave specific  instruction, both to emerging decorators, but also to women, now encouraged to think of themselves as makers of their homes. These are just some of the patterns she created for her female-run design firm, Associated Artists. Nice work that somehow doesn’t betray its age.

“It is all very well to plan our ideal house or apartment, our individual castle in Spain, but it isn’t necessary to live among intolerable furnishing just because we cannot realize our castle.”

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I’ve been thinking about the idea of home a lot lately. Like many people my age who moved out early, I’ve spent the last decade shifting between people, places, education and jobs. In the past 12 years, I’ve lived in 10 different apartments, been in 8 or so serious or semi-serious relationships, completed 8 years and counting of higher education at two different institutions, worked at 5 different and unrelated jobs (and a host of other casual or contract jobs). Though with each change I felt I knew what I was doing and where I was going, the thing that began to feel lost was my sense of “home.” In all the flux that characterizes a life being shaped, how do we find “home”? When no place ever feels permanent, when the next opportunity is always being anticipated, how do we build a sense of home? Home can’t help but feel far away, stuck in some past childhood moment when we lived in some unquestioned place called “home.” But, where is home when your parents have sold the family house and moved into a condo? When you’ve lived in dozens of different places with a host of different people, from roommates to cats to ex-lovers? Will we ever feel at home again?

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