Over my desk (at home) hangs a collage of cards (I have another at work). I made it when I moved into this apartment and didn't have a paneled wall to hide and to ruin. The frame is perhaps 2x1.5 feet, so I had to select its inhabitants ruthlessly; in the tenement, I put as many square feet of cards as there were square feet of paneling. So: the inhabitants: The cover of Tea for the Tillerman is in the upper left corner. When I bought Tea for the Tillerman on disk, CDs were still being sold in long cardboard boxes with the jewel case inside. The length of the box was meant to deter shoplifters, I guess. Not only is Tillerman a great album, with one of my favorite songs on it ("Sad Lisa," natch), it also reminds me of befriending SEB. Going through her albums in her dorm room, I spotted Tillerman, not because I had ever heard of Cat Stevens but because I recognized the cover: "This album cover is on my middle school wall!" And indeed students had painted it on the cafeteria wall, years ago when the building contained the senior high school grades as well the junior and when the album was first released. I always wondered what it meant. Now I knew. Tea for the Tillerman has always been special not only for its music, not only for "Sad Lisa," but also because it gave me a happier association to make with middle school. I needed one. Next is a postcard CLH sent me from France with an analysis of a French version of my name, Lise. I prefer to think this is rhymes with "please" rather than "lease," since I do not respond to anyone calling me "Lis." My animal is the hedgehog and my flower the valerian.
I guess St. Lise was born or martyred or canonized on 17 November. Who knows. Then a card from PSA that I think marks his departure from the Impressionist and Georgia O'Keefe reproductions he sent me for years. They're lyrics (I think) by Joan Baez; I don't know the song:
Then a card CLH gave me when I got married: If there was alrady a path it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way. --Joseph Campbell Another card from CLH begins the second row: If you asked me what I came in this world to, I will tell you: I came to live out loud. --Emile Zola Then a bookmark I nabbed from a beautiful library my friend MRC built for his parents:
And a Georgia O'Keefe from PSA, Light Iris, and a card from RDC of a duckling lying at the end of a plank, contemplating a basin of water below Next row begins with a Van Gogh Sunflowers that was RRP's farewell card, a card that therefore never hung in the Connecticut tenement but that I wanted close by in Colorado. Then an image of a tattooed Peter Gabriel from his Explora 1. Then a card with a complex history. In late elementary school I gave a birthday card to a classmate, which I regretted letting pass out of my hands because I thought it so charming and lovely. That I remembered the card for ten years, not just the incident of my reluctant gift-giving, indicates the chord its image struck in me. It features a small mouse in a blue cloak and clutching a wrapped present, looking rather like Mrs. Frisby, in the basket of a balloon. The balloon, however, is not just a regular balloon but a multitude of small white balloons, each painted with a different flower. A flock of robins hold ribbons in their beaks to direct her travel over patchwork country. Ten years later, a junior in college, browsing in a funky little gift shop, I saw that card. Now I was shopping for NCS, whom I continued not to break up with. Whom I didn't love, but whom I stayed with. Who was a skilled manipulator and who held me in a clenched gauntlet of guilt. Whom I now bought this card to go with his gift. The gift I forget, but the occasion of its giving I do not. We were in my single and I gave him the present. Unlike anyone else over the age of 12 I have ever known, NCS ignored the card and ripped into the present first.
The next card recalls another ex-boyfriend, with happier associations. SSP's family owned a cottage in northwestern Connecticut that had always been his sacred place, like NSF for me. He found a card with an impressionist image of a woman in Edwardian garb sitting on a porch overlooking a lake surrounded by foothills and this he gave to me. Of course he was pleased that the picture evoked his sanctuary for me also. After we broke up, I once wondered if he regretted giving that card to me as I had giving my special one to NCS. I didn't worry about it though. I never denied being selfish myself. I keep the card I gave NCS because it has earned its place through its artwork and because it's a token of an emotional milestone. I rescued the card, as I did myself, from NCS's selfishness and neglect. I keep the card SSP gave me because its image of his sanctuary reminds me of my own. The last row begins with a treasure. I treasure any correspondence from my grandmother, but seldom do I find it aesthetically appealing. She favors kitties and kitsch. One year's Christmas card stands out though and this I display. A realisticly rendered mother cougar in profile, eyes closed, head bowed, her two cubs looking over her shoulder, with a simple caption: "Peace." Next, a card PSA sent me from Kyoto, a lovely rice paper fold with a minimally rendered image of two cranes wading among reeds. Then a card from DEDB of a woman dancing. She is skirted in flowers and strewing other blossoms. She looks rather like a goddess. The last card is another from RDC. On our second wedding anniversary, I had just finished listening to Moby-Dick. RDC gave me a card with a photograph of the tail of a sounding whale, in honor of its being two years since we turned flukes together, legally speaking. |
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