Mark 'n Me

If you have a naked lady, lead with her; if I learned nothing else from 30 years in the news business I learned that ha ha.I was saying here yesterday that my house was like the Mark Twain House in Hartford Connecticut but then the only photo I showed by way of proof was of a couch that’s like another couch in my childhood home! Stupid girl straying from the point! So anyway here are the similarities:Both the Mark Twain House and this house have statues of a naked lady nude by the window. This is theirs below here, and this is ours on the left.My wonderful artist-cousin Tebby George sculpted our Blue Lady as we call her and I have to say we all love her. Whenever a baby is in the house getting carried around the place like a tiny God the way babies manage to do, it always reaches out a little starfish of a hand and pats one of her breasts. Very sweet.Both houses also have a big billiard room on the third floor. His is super-fancy with pictures of pool cues painted onto the wall. Ours is less fancy but that’s what they called it all the same, I guess since the place was built in the 1890s. They always  called the big room at the top of the third floor stairs the 'billiard room', anyway that’s the term I’ve heard all my life, though I myself didn’t come into contact with billiards ‘til that night at the Twist 'n Shout when I was 21 and everyone in the place was drunk including the bartender.So this is the Mark Twain's billiard room… ….and this is ours. The dress-up closet is also in this room, which though it gets heavy use when little ones are around we mostly use it for guests. And for the treadmill. And for hanging articles of clothing on the treadmill before lying disown on the bed for a nice nap ha ha.Oh and for keeping the ghost from the attic up in the attic (but that another story. This small person got used to the ghost in the attic crawl space when he was only three. (As you can see, it turned his hair white.)  Finally both houses have a boatload of potted palms and I am here to tell you that our palms get better care from me then David does. I should say that this is Abraham among the palm fronds just two years before he went to Heaven in search of his sister Charlotte. (How we miss them!)So there it is: how my place is like Mark Twain’s place. Now I'd LIKE to tell you that I’M actually like the great man himself but it wouldn’t be true  - except when it comes to our two mustaches of course, and I have to say mine is really starting to come in good now . :-)     

Hoarder Here?

The last time my mom came to my house, she placed her cane in the umbrella stand where she could reach for it when it was time to leave again. Only she  never did leave, as I know I have said here before. She died that afternoon in the wing chair by our fireplace. But this quarter-of-century after her death that cane still rests where she set it.I've often wondered if I was crazy, holding on to things this way. Then one day I walked into the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut (seen here on the left) and it was all I could do not to throw my arms in the air and yell, “I’m home!”The big old steamboat of a place that Sam Clemens built for his family just knocked me out so much did it remind me of the house where David and I have lived all these years, raising our children and mourning our old folks. We don't have Persian rugs draped over everything the way they did but still: Here were the same potted palms! The same ceiling-high bookcases! Even a similar sculpture of a standing nude! But really it was the feeling emanating  from every object that did it for me. You simply can’t find anything there that didn’t have great meaning for Mark Twain and his wife Livy, as the docents there will eagerly tell you.I loved their house because it said so much about their journey, just as I guess this house must say about ours.Even now I am thinking of  that closet in the back bedroom containing two baby dresses stitched in the 1860s. Of that wall in our dining room holding a framed sampler made by one of David’s Yankee ancestors in the 1840s. Of our living room, which has as its focus a sofa my grandfather bought second-hand in 1890. 1890 and we're still sitting on it! This old horsehair sofa  slept for decades in the basement of one family home after another, until, in the early 1980s, I taught myself how to upholster and did it over in a dark red satin. When I touch it now I can almost see the past.I have no idea what makes me look back and hold on in this way. But imagine my surprise when, 20 years after redecorating the living room in this house, I came upon a crinkled snapshot of that first childhood home, whose interior I can barely picture because we moved when I was eight: It's almost exactly like my present living room: Same pale-pink wallpaper, same white paint on the bookcases and the trim, and the exact same soft blue on both couches, the one from my childhood home and the old 1890s one now done over again, thank God by a professional upholsterer this time.  So did I remember that room  on some level? Did I see it in a dream?  I have no idea.Much of the time we humans are living forward and looking forward, I realize. But lots of times I think we are also looking back, as if perhaps to see if those absent others aren't following after us, hurrying even now to catch up and tell us all their news.