The office, part two, and thoughts on what makes a house a home.
Last night I was having some pain problems, really not comfortable enough to drive to and then sit still for rune study. When the medication finally kicked in, I was restless and wanted to accomplish something. So I tackled two lower bookcase cabinets in Patrick's office that haven't seen the light of day in quite some time. One was nearly empty. The other just needed dusting and reorganizing. We have also been putting some of Patrick's movie ephemera together on the open shelves on either side of his desk. So far we have a Star War's shelf with a little R2D2 and a coffee table book about Star Wars, an Indiana Jones Shelf with the trilogy, a making-of book and a battered hat, a Lord of the Rings shelf with the movies, the book, the Peter Jackson biography Patrick picked up in NZ, along with some NZ money. We will add the picture of Patrick that they took on his LoTR Wellington tour.
There will be a travel shelf for all of Patrick's travel books, backed by a colorful world map, maybe mounted on a cork backing so we can put pins in the places where we have been, a Master and Commander shelf with the books, and the DVD and Patrick's sextant. There will also be a Honor Harrington shelf, and maybe a Sherlock Holmes shelf for the original novels and stories and Laurie R. King's Mary Russel novels, which we have accepted as an extension of Doyle's canon. We have a violin as a prop, all we need is a pipe and a pair of wire frame glasses to round out the display. Oh, and the Jeremy Brett DVD's. Duh.
As I sift through my husband's books and ephemera, I have been fascinated anew by the broad range of interests he has, his varied enthusiasms, and how they all combine to make up the personality of the man I fell in love with. Patrick really is most at home in the distant past or the distant future. I see him struggling with everyday life in the here and now, and then watch how he relaxes into Renfair garb or slips into his dealer's table at a science fiction convention. I watch in awe at how articulate and confident he becomes as he brainstorms with his customers over the precise wording of a custom calligraphy project, or strolls the streets of Fairhaven with his mandolin, chatting up guests and guiding them to their show of choice or maybe just the nearest privy.
And some ramblings on what makes a house a home...
What I envisioned when Patrick and I decided to live together was a place where we could invite our friends, entertain, hang out, watch a movie, prepare and eat a good meal, and do it all in comfort and maybe just a bit of timeless luxury. Our house isn't a typical science fiction household, but science fiction fandom is only a part of who we are, so that is just fine. When I think of homes that have inspired me I think of Marcus Didius Falco's places in ancient Rome, from the ratty high-rise over the laundry to the luxurious town house he bought from his father, Geminus, the wheeling and dealing antique dealer. I think of the many places that Amelia Peabody Emerson called home over a series of many novels, from abandoned tombs and houseboats, to the family compound she had built to house her ever-expanding family. I think of the March's home in "Little Women, The Jeremy Brett series 222B Baker Street, The living spaces in Joss Whedon's Firefly, and Cornnia Chapman's beloved Insula in contemporary Australia.
Literary and media inspirations aside, my personal inspiration has always been the sprawling craftsman duplex built by my maternal Grandmother's uncle in 1918. 2103 and 2105 East Cummings Street in Williamsport Pennsylvania. By the time I arrived on the scene in 1959 it had been in the family for a couple generations and it is where everyone came together to eat, visit, play cards and just hang out. My grandparents lived on one side of the duplex and my great-aunt and great-grandmother lived on the other side. My grandmother was a domestic goddess, an amazing cook, and she knew how to fill her home with family and friends, and keep them entertained and well fed. The winter holidays were a blur of comings and goings, a busy kitchen, a dining room table laden with the bounty of the season, a train to run through the decorated train yard beneath the tree, and a a trio of little electric candles at each window.
In the summer I played under the grape harbor and the cherry tree, hid in the lilac bushes and picked day lilies for the dining room table. The radio or TV were always playing a baseball game in the evenings, a Mets game if possible, cause Granddaddy was a big Met fan. So the drone of a baseball announcer's voice, the chain that held up the swing on the front porch, which always creaked just a bit, and the sound of the evening wind ruffling the cottonwood leaves are the sounds of my childhood summer evenings. The neighborhood kids used to play hide-n-seek using the mailbox on the corner as home base, counting to 100 while the rest of the kids scattered to hide. We played late into the long summer nights, until our mothers, one by one, called us home for much needed baths and bed. It was a quiet neighborhood, multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and in the days before cable TV and air-conditioning, everyone was on their front porches in the evening, the kids playing in the quiet streets. At night I could lay in the back bedroom and listen to the sound of Granddaddy's coo-coo clock striking the hour and the half hour and hear the trains running past behind the garage at the back of the lot.
One thing I have learned in nearly half of a century of life is that home isn't a building or possessions so much as the spirit of home that we carry with us wherever we go. I have been in three homes where the Bohnhoffs have lived over the course of our friendship. Each house very different from the other, but because they take the essence of their family with them, like a turtle takes its shell, home is always where they live. I have seen it with my friends as we up-size or downsize from house to apartment to house and back again, and as we struggle with our accumulation "crap." I have been storm tossed from apartment to house, to house myself, and I know this to be true. The walls that surround us are just walls. They will absorb our joys and sorrows, our decorating triumphs and disasters, but what makes a house a home is us. Who we are, what we love and cherish, the things that are important to us. And like it or not, our homes reflect us more deeply than we realize. My home is a barometer of my moods, my health, and my dreams and aspirations. It is a work in progress. It will always be a work in progress.
So tell me, what do you need to do at your place to make it a better place to live?
There will be a travel shelf for all of Patrick's travel books, backed by a colorful world map, maybe mounted on a cork backing so we can put pins in the places where we have been, a Master and Commander shelf with the books, and the DVD and Patrick's sextant. There will also be a Honor Harrington shelf, and maybe a Sherlock Holmes shelf for the original novels and stories and Laurie R. King's Mary Russel novels, which we have accepted as an extension of Doyle's canon. We have a violin as a prop, all we need is a pipe and a pair of wire frame glasses to round out the display. Oh, and the Jeremy Brett DVD's. Duh.
As I sift through my husband's books and ephemera, I have been fascinated anew by the broad range of interests he has, his varied enthusiasms, and how they all combine to make up the personality of the man I fell in love with. Patrick really is most at home in the distant past or the distant future. I see him struggling with everyday life in the here and now, and then watch how he relaxes into Renfair garb or slips into his dealer's table at a science fiction convention. I watch in awe at how articulate and confident he becomes as he brainstorms with his customers over the precise wording of a custom calligraphy project, or strolls the streets of Fairhaven with his mandolin, chatting up guests and guiding them to their show of choice or maybe just the nearest privy.
And some ramblings on what makes a house a home...
What I envisioned when Patrick and I decided to live together was a place where we could invite our friends, entertain, hang out, watch a movie, prepare and eat a good meal, and do it all in comfort and maybe just a bit of timeless luxury. Our house isn't a typical science fiction household, but science fiction fandom is only a part of who we are, so that is just fine. When I think of homes that have inspired me I think of Marcus Didius Falco's places in ancient Rome, from the ratty high-rise over the laundry to the luxurious town house he bought from his father, Geminus, the wheeling and dealing antique dealer. I think of the many places that Amelia Peabody Emerson called home over a series of many novels, from abandoned tombs and houseboats, to the family compound she had built to house her ever-expanding family. I think of the March's home in "Little Women, The Jeremy Brett series 222B Baker Street, The living spaces in Joss Whedon's Firefly, and Cornnia Chapman's beloved Insula in contemporary Australia.
Literary and media inspirations aside, my personal inspiration has always been the sprawling craftsman duplex built by my maternal Grandmother's uncle in 1918. 2103 and 2105 East Cummings Street in Williamsport Pennsylvania. By the time I arrived on the scene in 1959 it had been in the family for a couple generations and it is where everyone came together to eat, visit, play cards and just hang out. My grandparents lived on one side of the duplex and my great-aunt and great-grandmother lived on the other side. My grandmother was a domestic goddess, an amazing cook, and she knew how to fill her home with family and friends, and keep them entertained and well fed. The winter holidays were a blur of comings and goings, a busy kitchen, a dining room table laden with the bounty of the season, a train to run through the decorated train yard beneath the tree, and a a trio of little electric candles at each window.
In the summer I played under the grape harbor and the cherry tree, hid in the lilac bushes and picked day lilies for the dining room table. The radio or TV were always playing a baseball game in the evenings, a Mets game if possible, cause Granddaddy was a big Met fan. So the drone of a baseball announcer's voice, the chain that held up the swing on the front porch, which always creaked just a bit, and the sound of the evening wind ruffling the cottonwood leaves are the sounds of my childhood summer evenings. The neighborhood kids used to play hide-n-seek using the mailbox on the corner as home base, counting to 100 while the rest of the kids scattered to hide. We played late into the long summer nights, until our mothers, one by one, called us home for much needed baths and bed. It was a quiet neighborhood, multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and in the days before cable TV and air-conditioning, everyone was on their front porches in the evening, the kids playing in the quiet streets. At night I could lay in the back bedroom and listen to the sound of Granddaddy's coo-coo clock striking the hour and the half hour and hear the trains running past behind the garage at the back of the lot.
One thing I have learned in nearly half of a century of life is that home isn't a building or possessions so much as the spirit of home that we carry with us wherever we go. I have been in three homes where the Bohnhoffs have lived over the course of our friendship. Each house very different from the other, but because they take the essence of their family with them, like a turtle takes its shell, home is always where they live. I have seen it with my friends as we up-size or downsize from house to apartment to house and back again, and as we struggle with our accumulation "crap." I have been storm tossed from apartment to house, to house myself, and I know this to be true. The walls that surround us are just walls. They will absorb our joys and sorrows, our decorating triumphs and disasters, but what makes a house a home is us. Who we are, what we love and cherish, the things that are important to us. And like it or not, our homes reflect us more deeply than we realize. My home is a barometer of my moods, my health, and my dreams and aspirations. It is a work in progress. It will always be a work in progress.
So tell me, what do you need to do at your place to make it a better place to live?