In every place I live I tend to build altars and apses, little displays in snug recesses. These womblike rooms are my favorite places. Surrounded by books, framed art and knickknacks, I am truly at ease. My current retreat has a baseball altar and one for Shakespeare; there are civil war cannon replicas and a carving of a baseball manager screaming at an umpire…my stuff.
I do not know where this need to build bunkers comes from but I suspect the Catholic Church and reading too many books has something to do with it. My favorite address in the world is 221-B Baker Street . I can smell the stale pipe tobacco and see the rack of Meerschaums over by the mess of test tubes and pipettes, dusty tomes are strewn about and the fire is a blazing comfort. Every table top is an altar of sorts with sacred objects in thoughtful arrangement.
As I visit the homes of The Gang of Eight, I see the escape rooms of my friends. For one, the room is a shared study that sports a signed baseball-or two- and a collection of Nesbitt soda memorabilia. There is even a bobblehead of the man himself on display. Another friend’s expression takes a garage -clean as an operating room- and makes it a display of motorcycle art and objects wrapped around a meticulously clean work bench. Another space is a sewing room, a space full of potential creativity.
There is irony all about. In a real sense, the denizens of 92128 are a living museum full of grey haired artifacts. We are representations of the years gone by. Our lifestyles past and present are memorialized in our halting walks and our wrinkled faces. We could charge admission to kids so they can view a real Vietnam veteran and an aging hippie. We could help them remember.
Author William Gibson says it well , ” We are the strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.” Indeed.
So I feel no guilt about building my altars in comfortable places. If you have a collection of rare Nesbitt’s bottles, signed baseballs or motorcycle art you are doing us all a service.
Lest we forget.
Olio Folio 