That Picture of JFK

Whatever happened to that picture of JFK?

Whatever happened to the Jesus on the wall?

That Picture of JFK

Tim Pfaff

Objects have power, some intrinsically so due to their use or appearance, others through their associations with people, places, and events. Growing up Irish Catholic in a small town in South Jersey, I recall framed images of JFK and Jesus hanging on the walls of our home. Pope Paul VI was probably around somewhere as well, but those are the two that stick in my memory. Thinking about it now, I probably saw the same images in the homes of my friends, at St. Mary's Elementary School, and at church on Sunday. JFK was, of course, the first Irish Catholic to be elected President of the United States. He was a rock star in our house, bigger than Elvis. And Jesus, well, Jesus was all around us, or so we were taught.

Those images were a part of the landscape of my childhood. My parents carefully packed and carried them from one residence to another over the years. Other objects drifted away silently without notice. Only years later would someone ask, "Whatever happened to the two felt Christmas elves that mom use to perch atop the living room drapes—Santa's little spies?" Or "whatever happened to the console stereo?" Before 8-tracks, cassettes, compact discs, or digital players, we listened to music on a beautiful, polished cherry hardwood cabinet with a turntable embedded in its center and speakers at either end. Some of my earliest childhood memories involve listening to Peter and the Wolf, William Tell, Mary Poppins, and Peter, Paul & Mary (the same album that covered Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind). I learned to operate that turntable before I could read or write. My older sisters complained bitterly to my mother when they came home to find a broken needle, scratched Supreme's LP's, and/or album covers with crayon-colored Beatles' teeth. Years later, I was thrilled when my brother-in-law gave me a  number of vintage records from that era. It was only when I tried to play them that I realized my childhood sins had come full circle.

In my profession as an exhibit developer, we use objects to tell stories visually. Objects and images, displayed in evocative fashion, encourage visitors to find entry into those stories and discover truths about our collective past. Exhibitions of objects can be displayed to shine a light on particular individuals at particular moments, or they can be used to tell a larger story,  illuminating how much all human beings have in common, even when separated by great distances, divergent cultures, or eons of time. During my early career at the Chippewa Valley Museum in Eau Claire, I recall our collections curator going on about a red, plaid woolen coat. It had been worn by a young girl from one of the city's working class neighborhoods. The coat's patched inner lining, frayed sleeves, and stained elbow and chest pocket offered evidence of its use over many Wisconsin winters. It didn't take much to imagine a young girl sledding on a neighborhood hill or skating at a local park. You could picture that same coat hung along with others on a line of hooks at school, or at home in the mud room with wet boots and shoes on newspapers below, and wet stocking caps and mittens slung over a nearby radiator.

At the museum, I used to enjoy wondering through the collections stacks searching for inspiration for our exhibits. I found the domestic artifacts especially evocative because they were simultaneously familiar and foreign. It was easy to imagine the purpose of any number of kitchen utensils or sewing room tools, and yet so many of them had either been replaced by new technologies or abandoned by evolving circumstance. We had any number of spinning wheels, brought by immigrants moving to what they thought was the frontier in the late 19th century. Most survived still very much in tact because they were hardly used. The availability of inexpensive ready-made cloth made them superfluous in the New World. Their sentimental value enabled them to remain in the family, passed from one generation to the next, until they eventually found their way to the museum. In truth, much of our collection was built by donors on their way to the dump who thought to stop and ask if we were interested. We would sometimes find objects abandoned like orphans on our doorstep with explanatory notes pinned to them.

I had the experience of going through the belonging of my parents after they passed, just as my wife has more recently done with her mother. Going through the belongings of someone who has resided in a home for decades feels like a geologist pealing back layers of time. Just below the loose, superficial veneer of recent correspondence, bills, magazines and medications, you reach the still-in-play level of clothing. Below that, a much deeper level of "retired" items contains any number of hardly worn sweaters and other gifts, mostly from well intended children trying to think of something nice to give Grandma for Christmas. Below that, there are the evening dresses, furs, jewelry, and maybe a hat box or two, evidence of a much earlier time when a fuller range of activities, family and friends was still in the mix. Stored randomly within these drawers, like glacial erratics, you'll find vacation figurines, souvenirs from the trip to Yosemite, seashells from the beach near Panama City, or artwork from children and even grand-children carefully wrapped and put away for safekeeping.

Diane seems determined that she will not leave such sedimentary layers behind for our children to unearth. Every six months or so, she goes on a throwing out binge and I end up making a Good Will run. Her latest effort is inspired by a book she read recently, which suggests that you pitch things not in chronological order, oldest out first, but in a prescribed order of topical categories (start with clothing). I feel like I've heard this sermon before, and yet each spring I find our basement ping pong table cluttered with any number of boxes, random blender parts, leaky irons, old curtains, TV remotes, defunct Christmas decorations, and of course, the ubiquitous phone cords.

I'm not a hoarder by any stretch, but I do admit to the enjoyment of seeing objects around me that reflect my life and the people with whom I have shared it. Every room in our home has photographs of our family, mostly our kids. Looking around my office as I write this, I can see the two-headed Lewis and Clark mug filled with pens and markers, and an Indiana limestone coaster under my coffee cup, both tokens from design projects early in my career. On the bookshelf, I see the Native American hand drum that my son wanted for his second Christmas and the flask that we found in his room after he moved out. On my desk, a themed alien lighter from the UFO Museum in Roswell reminds me of a research trip with my daughter and our unexpected close encounter at the grave of Billy the Kid. Diane thinks I need to clean my office, but I'm keeping my trinkets, along with last summer's solar eclipse glasses and the plastic figurine of the Pope standing in his white Pope mobile that we bought for my brother in Italy, but which I just could not part with. Papa Francesca baby!

Bird Years

My mother-in-law, Pat Hoffmann, passed away a few weeks ago. She was the most good-natured and optimistically practical person I ever met. I was lucky in the "in-law" department. Pat and Larry were both alternately helpful advisors, unswerving cheerleaders, jovial storytellers, able role models, willing babysitters, and amiable companions. Pat was 95 when she decided she'd had enough. While I was, of course, sad to say goodbye, I was happy for her to be able to depart on her own terms, peacefully at home in bed surrounded by children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren.

I had known Pat for more than thirty years, and yet I'm still well short of her age when we met. That age disparity has danced in and out of my thoughts these past weeks. It has been a very significant period for me. So many monumental experiences and people have transformed my life. I completed my collegiate education and pursued a more or less successful career as a museum curator and then exhibit developer, traveling across the country to learn about aspects of our natural and cultural history that have continually stretched my mind and reshaped how I think about the world. Much to my ongoing delight, I have learned to write and play music, first on the piano, but over the last decade, more and more on guitar and other assorted instruments. Most significantly, I have enjoyed the sweetest relationship with Diane, my wife and dearest friend. Together we have raised Lara and Collin and watched them grow up and leave the nest to continue their own journeys.

That all feels like a lot. Like I should be tired now and ready for a nap. And yet I still have nearly a decade before I even reach the Pat Era. I know from my studies that we humans have assigned many names to the various stages of our psycho-social development. We go through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, old age. We progress through various fixations, physical and mental challenges, emotional and hormonal peaks and valleys. I was expecting or at least half-expecting most of them, even the mid-life hoohah that I went through about ten years ago. But it feels to me like this current stage may have gotten short shrift in the literature. I had started referring to it as "the long grey" but now that feels too large, like there are some definite increments of time within that period yet to be fully cataloged—the name that name phase, the sleep interruptus phase, the over that or done with them phase, the days-of-the-week pill bottle phase.

Currently, we're in the Bird Years. Both our cats passed last summer. We loved them, and they both led mostly happy, comfortable lives sleeping on our furniture, eating premium cat food, shedding on our furniture, yakking up premium hair balls, scratching our furniture, and peeing on our premium carpets. We were glad to have them, but we won't be accepting any more applicants. Now we're watching the birds. I can't say when it began. We've always kept gardens, and for years we've noticed various cardinals, robins, bluejays, chickadees, wrens, goldfinches and other songbirds frequenting the yard. Summertime blooms attract astonishing hummingbirds and the tap-tap of pileated woodpeckers echoes along the ridge.

Not too long after the last cat departed, the first bird feeders went up. Hung from a pear tree within view of the living room windows, we watched squirrel after squirrel climb, dangle, and pillage. They did not mourn the cats and hailed the onset of the Bird Years with great affection. Last summer, a new squirrel-proof bird feeder—a Mother's Day present—hit the yard. The squirrels were unable to breach its defenses, but it hardly matters, as the birds that feed above them are surprisingly sloppy eaters. I estimate that they drop as much as they eat. Easily half of every 50-lb. bag of bird seed I lug home from the garden center still goes to the squirrels. Every sunflower seed extracted from the little feeder holes from someone standing on the perch sends a little shower of lesser seeds down below. The morning doves and starlings, too big for the perches, spend most of their time grazing on the lawn (along with the quite healthy squirrels).

Instead of taking photos of the napping cats, we now have photos and videos of the birds. The cardinals, especially, are quite striking in the winter when their brilliant red feathers stand out against the stark white snow. But the birding doesn't stop with the yard. On car trips, we're spotting red-tailed hawks along the highway. Along the bike trail, we keep a lookout for red-winged blackbirds in the tall grass, bluebirds in their little bluebird houses, great blue heron fishing along the sandbars, and the occasional osprey dive-bombing the river for dinner. A few weeks ago, a mother bob-white tried to con us into believing she was injured to draw us away from her nest. She doesn't know who she's dealing with. We watch David Attenborough, sister!

Last year we also discovered the bird cams. OMG! If you're looking for a way to lower your professional productivity... A pair of bald eagles raised a pair of awkward, gangly youths in a nest in the Washington, D.C. area last year, and they're back at it again this year. At Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, they maintain links to birdcams all over North America, sending back live footage of barn owls, barred owls, ospreys, red-tailed hawks, petrels, albatrosses, manakins, and any number of pond-frequenting winged creatures. Many of these birdcams show parents raising little ones. A warning alerts viewers that these are live, unscripted birdcams where anything can happen. Diane grew a little too attached to the Texas barn owls last summer. When a drought in the region triggered a food shortage, the older/larger siblings took to eating their nestmates. It was a last man standing situation. Diane was appalled.

I can't really remember when we started paying attention to the birds. Is it just a symptom of being settled in this home now all these many years? We don't go out as much. We don't have kids to run around. We're up with the sun, awake when the birds are going about there morning routines. Is it the cumulative impact of oh so many nature documentaries illustrating with increasing technological precision the behaviors of the wild and not-so-wild creatures with whom we inhabit this planet? Or is it a sign that we're calmer now, more mature, more mindful and attuned to our environment. Sure. Let's go with that.

Our children, as children are prone to do, make fun of this recent bird fixation. They act like we're one step closer to the old bird watcher's home, which, maybe we are, but hey, back to the Tim/Pat age disparity, that frail walker-assisted trip might still be decades from now. How much will we have learned about our winged neighbors by then? How much will we remember? And are there other mini-stages between here and there that I've still not guessed at? Misadventures in woodworking? Arrowhead collecting? Genealogy? The Chemo Two-step? The Colon Years?

We arrived home from Pat's funeral last week to discover that a robin had become the first to build a nest in the young Japanese maple in our front yard. A Wisconsin farm girl, Pat had always been on the lookout for robins as a harbinger of spring. My sister says that it's a message from beyond. I don't know about that, but it feels like a good sign.

What's a dandelion gotta do?

For nearly all the thirty+ years of our marriage, Diane and I have maintained some sort of garden. I admit up front that she's mostly been the brains of the operation and I've mostly supplied what little braun I can muster. Over the decades, there have been any number of gardening magazines and catalogs littering the furniture (and bathrooms). I can see her paging through them, committing the latin genus and species to memory while I struggle to remember even the pop-culture pseudonyms. And in said gardens, whether in Wisconsin at our first home or at our current "slipping down the hill" Athens location, we have always played this musical chairs game of planting and replanting said flowers, shrubs, and miscellaneous flora. We plant this purple thing here. The next year it needs to move because it's crowding out the small, leafy red things. We put in a row of these floppy silver lambs ear things there and before you know it they're crawling over the brick barrier and they're out of here. On and on, year after year, we play the role of community planner, trying to bring together a group of plants that share common sun and soil requirements while being able to peacefully live and let live.

Of course, a fundamental component of plant musical chairs is weeding. And here, I readily admit that Diane has done the brunt of the yanking. The reasons are three-fold. First and foremost, I hate to weed. Hate it! Hate it! Hate it! There's nothing more I can really say to hammer that point home. As Jack Nicholson pointedly explained to Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets, "I'm using the word hate here to describe how I feel..." Hate it!

Diane doesn't seem to hate weeding. Sometimes, in fact, in seems as though she almost enjoys it, especially after a soaking rain when the weeds just give themselves over to her dirty little fingers. She says that weeding appeals to her anal side, which is funny because I've not really noticed that fastidious side in the house. It's almost like our brains are wired to notice different things inside versus outside. Inside, I am irked by crumbs and stains on the kitchen counters, crumpled tissues on the coffee table, shoes and random items of clothing strewn about. Those things have never phased Diane. But outside, get thy weedy asses outta here! Where I, if I even knew the difference between what's a weed and what's not, could care less about yanking it.

Which brings me to the third reason for Diane taking the lead in the weeding department—she knows what she's yanking. She knows the difference between poppies and poison ivy (which I have contracted in some crevice nearly every summer of my gardening career). I've improved over the years. While I've still yet to crack one of her gardening magazines, I've hung around long enough to at least add up one plus one. But in doing so, there's one question that continues to perplex me: What exactly constitutes a weed? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with whether the plant is native or invasive because we have plenty of each. Similarly, plants that flower versus those with interesting leaves doesn't seem to be the criteria. It doesn't matter whether they grow tall or short, produce thorns or sticky sap, or grow in a tight spiral versus wandering and climbing hither and yon.

What I've concluded after many not so careful years of observation is that the weed is in the eye of the planter. One gardener's weed is another's ground cover. Consider the common dandelion. Taraxacum officinale has been around for some 30 million years. Paleontologists find their fossilized remains in the fossilized teeth of fossilized mammoths. Archaeologists find dandelion bits stuck in the split wood handles of Paleolithic hoes. Dandelions have many positive attributes and yet they've been dogged by gardeners, lawn tenders, golfers, and dogs for centuries. Why are dandelions weeds? First of all, they're sunny. Who doesn't like the look of a tall, bright, puffy, yellow dandelion flower? What's not to like? They bloom early in the spring, bringing color and joy to those rainy days. Although they certainly spread, they don't climb over their neighbors. They don't have nasty thorns. You won't get an itchy, "kill me now" rash from accidentally brushing your skin against them.

They're edible. You can eat everything—flower, stem, leaves, roots. A quick Google search reveals that they're rich in vitamins A and C, calcium, and iron. They also contain detoxifiers which make them a useful ingredient in various medicines. Among their many medicinal qualities, they aid the liver, promote healthy digestion, and stimulate the pancreas to produce insulin. And teenagers, they can be used to treat acne. Baby! Why didn't I know that when I was 15? 

They can also be used to enchant a toddler. Remember tickling a child's chin with the yellow flower and pretending that it proves he or she likes butter? And when said flower turns into a whispy puffball, said toddler can amuse themselves by blowing or otherwise twirling said puffball around, scattering it's seeds to the winds and chasing them with glee. It's every bit as good as blowing bubbles without the soapy mess.

Finally, you can also make wine with them. I mean, common on, people! What's a dandelion gotta do to get some love? I have no idea why Ray Bradbury named his book, Dandelion Wine. I didn't have to read that one in high school. But a plant with it's own publicist, that's gotta be worth something. Still, year after growing year, it's "Off with their heads!" [That's starting to feel like a recurring motif in this blog. Hmmmm? I should probably look at that.]

Over the fence

So, we have some slippage going on behind the house. What used to be a gently sloping hill is now, in places, a crack, and in places, a cliff. There's not much that can be done about it that is financially feasible. The few options—planting trees and prairie grasses—we have done. Now it's just a roll of the dice to see how much longer we can maintain our view.

It's not the worst problem in the world. We're not Ebola victims or political refugees. There are so many families that would be happy to have a house, even one so precariously perched. Still, I must admit that it's kept me up nights. It's been the longest spring that I can recall, waiting for our little seedlings to take root, wondering whether the next rainfall will bring the cliff closer to our back door.

As I lie in bed thinking about it, I fantasize about the various objects we might push "over the fence" to bolster the cliff face. I say "over the fence" because there used to be a fence there, and so many of our rotten foods and other biodegradable waste have over the years been assigned that fate. Old Christmas wreaths, poinsettias, floral bouquets, mushy avocados, pineapple stems—"Over the fence!" It's felt like "Off with their heads!"

So how to fill in the hill? The first thing that comes to mind are old cars. They're big. It wouldn't take all that many. People already have that stereotype about Appalachia. We could pick up some old polluting junkers, drain the fluids, put them in neutral and ... over the fence. Of course, we'd have to make sure the first few landed just right. Call them the anchor vehicles. You wouldn't want each car to just go rolling down willy-nilly; they might end up on the neighbor's patio. A few well-placed station wagons, maybe a Pontiac mini-van or an old Caddy or two (It's been done before!)—they would establish a foundation, and then upon them we could roll any number of Corvairs, Yugos, Pacers, Escorts, Challengers... It could be a kind of lemon grove. We could advertise and create an online application process. Hummers and other obnoxious gas guzzlers, of course, would get preferential treatment. Take those babies out of circulation. Carbon sequestration!

Out of date textbooks left behind in our children's bedrooms might also do the trick. Intro's to economics, sociology, philosophy, accounting ... they were way over-priced and written to be outdated, so that each year's student body would need to fork over their parents' dough for the latest edition. I could add to them a number of dated encyclopedias, dictionaries and style manuals, and not an insignificant number of project reports—master plans, design schematics, conceptual studies. I always imagine that I might dig them out to find some gem of an idea for some future project, but that project has been long since eclipsed by the dust mites breeding on those faded pages. Ashes to ashes.

Part of me can't help feeling bad about throwing away books, however, even for this most practical of purposes. In a college town like Athens, the tactic might catch on a little too readily. Like padlocks on the bridge, before long I'd have carloads of students dropping by to deposit their used textbooks. The mound would soon block out my morning sunrise with the spines of Principles of Geology or Understanding the Dynamics of Political Discourse in the Age of Social Media and Fake News.

What about used, outdated technology? We're still holding warped vinyl, brittle cassettes, tangled VHS tapes and various no-longer-operational devices used to play them. They're all collecting mold on the pingpong table in my basement. Is that stuff biodegradable? How many chargers and phone cords do we have in that box on the shelf? Do we still use anything that they can support? Oh, and we still have a few miscellaneous parts for blenders, food processors, and coffee-makers, not to mention one or two computers. Most of the latter came with instruction manuals, too. That's at least another scoop or two.

Speaking of instruction manuals, there are any number crinkled, food-stained game boxes cluttering up my office closet. We never officially read the instructions, but they were sometimes referred to during heated late-night arguments, usually when someone new (not a relative) came to play. If we got rid of the board games, I would have more closet space and I wouldn't get dragged into those games anymore. Over the fence!

Onto the metaphoric land fillers—the petty grievances, the disappointments, the heavy self-loathing baggage, the unrealistic or just unrealized hopes and dreams, the overly optimistic to-do lists, the new diets (and associated workout accessories), the New Year's resolutions (and associated empty liquor bottles), the Lenten sacrifices (and associated guilt), the Christmas wish lists (and assorted twinkle lights that no longer twinkle), the self-help books and videos. Or maybe just start with all the despicable political blather, the annoying headlines that daily accompany my morning coffee. How many times are they going to lead with something awful Twumpy the President did or said? God! How many years of my life do he and the Bush/Cheney clan owe me? They've been dragging me and a good many of my fellow homo sapiens down for years. Surely all that negativity must have some weight that could support a crumbling clay hillside. All that methane gas emitted by those belching windbags. Over the fence!

Notes from the End of the World

 

The Spring of Our Discontent

Last night Diane and I attended "The Sixth Extinction," a lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert about the impending apocalypse that may or may not include homo sapiens. It was a cheery night. To set the stage, it came at the end of a day in which it had rained on and off for hours—this after a month of ongoing rain and snow that has long ago worn out its welcome in Southeast Ohio. About mid-afternoon the alarm on my cell phone let me know that the national weather service had issued a flash flood warning for our area. From our dining room window, I watched sheets of precipitation cleanse the steep hillside across the street of the seed and straw that city workers had blown onto it only a day earlier. Workers were attempting to stem the ongoing erosion that a month earlier had collapsed a chain link fence while pushing not an inconsiderable mound of mud and stone into the middle of Fort Street. This, coming on the five-year anniversary of the 200-ton boulder that fell from said hill onto our house, was not a welcome sight.

At the same time, the hill behind our house has begun to slide. The maple tree at the edge of our backyard that we have been admiring as it grows to maturity is now about eight feet lower than it used to be. Where there was a slope, now there is a cliff. Diane and I spend a good portion of last weekend planting little hardwood saplings amongst the grape vines, forsythia, and other thorny brambles that continue to cling for dear life. Thank god for them! If not for them, it would be us at the bottom of the hill.

So things are going well. I had stopped downtown at Little Professor to pick up a copy of Ms. Kolbert's book before the lecture. As I sat in OU's Memorial Auditorium waiting for the hall to fill and my wife to join me, I read about the extinction of frogs around the world, caused by a common fungus that had unwittingly been transported around the world by, you guessed it, homo sapiens. As I read, drum beats of rain intermittently pounded on the roof far above me, so much so that I occasionally paused to look up and ponder what the what was going on out there. Diane arrived soon enough to inform me that pea-sized hail had pelted her as she fled from the street corner to the hall entrance. She had run about fifty yards with an umbrella. Her pants were soaked from her shins to her shoes.

Onto the lecture, Ms. Kolbert informed her audience that homo sapiens are contributing to the mass extinction of numerous of our fellow Earthlings in three main ways—by emitting greenhouse gases that are raising global air temperatures; by increasing the acidity of the world's oceans as a result of that same excessive CO2, thereby precipitating the collapse of coral reefs, so critical to oceanic biodiversity; and of course, by transporting invasive species, intentionally or unintentionally, to places where they should not be, thereby upsetting the proverbial biodiversity apple cart. It was not a pretty picture, nor one that suggested ready remedies. Judging from ice core samples taken from the world's oldest ice in Antarctica, we're soon to have more CO2 in the atmosphere than the Earth has experienced in millions of years. That's MILLIONS (with an S)! We've essentially turned the atmospheric clock backwards, taking all the CO2 that it took the Earth millions of years to put into the ground, and releasing it back into the air in just a few centuries. Good news!

Ms. Kolbert admitted from the outset that she had no remedies to offer. She was merely functioning as canary, informing us that we'd better do something dramatic soon, or else. She did admit that it wasn't happening because people didn't care. There are loads of people who care. She offered as evidence the story of scientists in Hawaii that have apparently resorted to giving certain bird species hand-jobs in an effort to get them to reproduce via artificial insemination. Hmm? I wondered if there were OU students in the audience considering such a major.

After the lecture, Diane and I sought solace in beer and pizza as we contemplated the end of the world. It was not our finest hour. Both of us are lactose intolerant. But hey, in the face of such calamity, the usual rules must be suspended. I awoke a little after 3 A.M., bloated, dehydrated, and wondering how to feel. It occurred to me that I was glad that my children do not yet have children of their own. "That's a horrible thing to ... think," I said to myself while I waited for the coffee. I could imagine my sisters scolding me. But even now, I can't help admitting that there's some truth in it. We're headed for a global Easter Islandesque collapse and, rather than mobilizing all of our brightest minds and best resources toward addressing it, we're distracting ourselves with ... Tweets. Really?

As a historian, I'm reminded of earlier generations of Americans who predicted the end of the world. Somewhere in my memory, I can see an earnest man with a sandwich board on New York's Fifth Avenue warning of the world's impending demise. Over the generations, there have been no shortage of cultists and utopians trying to separate themselves from the slipstream in order to prepare themselves for the big day. But this doesn't feel like that? These are not mentally unbalanced, deranged harbingers of doom shouting from street corners. These are scientists, independently in branch after branch, in universities and scientific institutes around the world, reaching data-driven conclusions in peer reviewed journals that are worrisome at best, and to be closer to the truth, down right terrifying.

The end of the world is upon us. Can I really be writing that? In a blog? And I'm not kidding? Really? And I'm completely sober, if still a little bloated from the pizza. Stay tuned.