Life On Snob Hill: A Messy Slate

I will forget these things, but I’d like to forget them more slowly, more surely.

—Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy’s

There is a piece of slate now hanging by the front door here on Snob Hill. Upon the slate is a statement of love, written and decorated with hearts by Father, who carved a frame to hold the slate. The slate is a piece of a rescued blackboard from the Cape Girardeau High School where two grandmothers, on paternal, one maternal, attended — both must surely have sat at attention and viewed this very same blackboard — this black board.

The blackboard came to us this weekend, complete with the message of love, now somewhat degraded. Years ago, when Father gave this framed piece of slate to Mother, he decorated it with his message of love. They hung it over a fireplace in the kitchen and never erased the message, as it were a painting. So we have inherited both a physical object and something far less tangible and more precarious. We wanted this to hang by the front door, with a piece of chalk tethered by a thin cotton braid, so visitors, if so inspired, could leave us a message. But with the handmade message of love to a departed Mother, isn’t something we can bear to replace.

Sometimes what we remember and what we feel is painful, and it’s difficult to express, and so we have to find ways to put language on impossible feelings that we never anticipated we’d go through.

— Venita Blackburn

“According to Wikipedia, “Marshak, Stephen in his Essentials of Geology, slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic rock. The etymology of slate also tells us that it was traditionally a small, smooth piece of the rock, often framed in wood, used with chalk as a notepad or notice board, and especially for recording charges in pubs and inns. The phrases "clean slate" and "blank slate" come from this usage.

So, one of us writes: Yet our slate — as well as our own, more metaphorical slates — are neither clean nor blank. I hung the framed slate by the front door, but now I cannot bear to wipe it in preparation for another message. Just as chalk has touched the slate, I see — I know — that my parents touched. They marked each other. That touching created me and I still feel the contours of their marking upon me. I’ve lately become a bit obsessed with collecting examples of actual writing by my grand- and great-grandparents, and especially from my Mother.

Dad recently gave me thick folder of recipes that included a precious few written by her hand. I may never make the old casserole (she was not an inspired cook, much less a foody), but I could stare at her handwriting for a long time, trying to imagine her concentrating on transferring the directions onto a notecard. She wanted so desperately to be a good wife, mother, housekeeper and hostess.

There are many ways to divide, to demarcate one’s life. I’ve lately realized that I went for a long time wrestling with my daddy issues. Then transitioned to my mommy issues. I see now that really, all along, these have been merely me issues.

I’m obsessed with that part of life — these confined spaces where there’s no acceptance, there’s no big healing. You’re just right there in the crack of a catastrophe.

— Venita Blackburn

I grew up in the days of schoolroom chalkboards. Sometimes I was tasked by a teacher to wipe the board. There was a long tray beneath each large slate for holding chalk — white and pale green, blue and yellow. I don’t recall red, pale or otherwise. I remember the boxes of chalk, usually at the far ends of tray, with the word “dustless.” There’s really no such thing as dustless chalk because chalk is dust laid upon slate, just waiting to wiped away to make black space for another message.

So what to do? Should I allow Dad’s chalk dust to remain, still proclaiming the mark he and Mom made, but knowing the message will slowly fall from the slate. Do I shellac it in a sad attempt at preserving it, if just for a bit longer? I worry that would be like looking at the same sentiment carved into the trunk of tree, wondering who the hell the people behind the initials were. Or do I, let others do the dirty work for me, waiting for some visitors to drop by, wipe it clean and leaving the message: Sorry we missed you!

To which, I would be compelled to add: You have no idea.

Quoting Wenderoth again:

Yes, our homes are dust. Don’t pretend you are surprised.

Life On Snob Hill: A Christmas Elegy

By CB Adams

The season is turning to Christmas

I'm longing to be by my dear mother's side

So…

I'm coming home for Christmas

To be with my family

And loved ones so dear

—Manny, Cabral, Mathus

We have always loved the song “I’m Coming Home for Christmas” on the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ Christmas Caravan album. Years ago, it felt depressing. Now it seems nostalgically prescient.

2023 has been a year of elegies of Proustian proportions, remembering things past. Seeing that phrase — Proustian proportions — suddenly seems hyperbolic, but isn’t that what profound emotions often feel like — outsized, hyperbolic, compared to the the situation that evokes them?

It’s in the feeling that’s Proustian, the recognition that memories are all that’s left us. The time is gone, and so, too, should be the expectations that things like the holidays are repeatable, immutable. We are not good at change, and learning to embrace change — the reality of it — is a painful process.

This is about the notion of home and Christmas — of an internal Christmas compass that has always pointed true-north homeward. But that cardinal direction points to somewhere else now. Growing up, home and holiday were a given, just part of the unexamined family life. As we grew and matured, the holidays had their touchstones — Granny’s angel food cake, Grandpa’s cigarette smoke, Mee Ma’s divinity and bourbon balls, Mom’s pressed cookies. They all are sense memories, including a sense of being safe and happy and intensely loved.

Even after we moved out, first to college, then to marriage, early careers and then our own children — our Christmas compass still pointed to that “other” home, the one in which our memory mothers still shuffle through our memory houses, preparing the usual Christmas memory-cheer.

Our mothers are gone now, and with them, those times and that version of our family. We struggle this year to put into words how or why we felt this small, but profound, shift in our compasses. Our mothers worked hard to create those special holiday memories, and we have always turned — internally — to the comfort that they represented. Thus, Christmas was always “back there.” It was a time and place, though we didn’t acknowledge it at the time.

Now we are reminded of the song “Bookends” by Paul Simon: “…Preserve your memories; They're all that's left you.” Our mothers exist only in memories now. The phrase “yehi zichra baruch” that our Jewish friends have shared, resonates with use because those memories are a blessing. And with their passing is a waning magnetic energy. Our compass has swung to a new true north — here on Snob Hill. Or maybe it swung years ago and we’re just now noticing it. We worry about becoming the middle-aged version of what we call the younger generation’s obsessive navel gazing. We may notice the wrinkles around our navels, but it’s the gazing that’s the issue.

As Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová wrote in “Falling Slowly,”:

…Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice, you have a choice
You'll make it now…

This shift is perhaps small yet certainly profound. We think of the place — now memory bound — of where we point when we point to home. We now think of that home as being our own home. And we certainly hope that we created — sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently — that sense of home and holiday for our sons. We hope they have a Christmas compass that points to Snob Hill.

Yes, it’s about the changing of generations. It’s about the passage of time and worrying that we weren’t present enough in the past. We hope that past is now prologue for the family now. True north may have shifted, but we know it is still true. And yes, it’s about loss. You can’t have an elegy about the future, that honor goes to the past…and memory.

We end, thinking of “Homeward Bound,” another song by Paul Simon:

…I wish I was

Homeward bound

Home, where my thought's escaping

Home, where my music's playing

Home, where my love lies waiting

Silently for me…

Bedding Down on Snob Hill

The irony did not escape us recently when Parents phoned to inquire whether we had any interest in accepting the offer of their king-sized, extra-long (Dad has long legs), four-poster bed. We said we needed to think about it, which is to say, with more than a little artistic license, that we needed to “sleep on it,” which is often a euphemism for something along the lines of, “No, but we don’t want to hurt your feelings.” We should be clear also – by bed they meant bed frame, not the bedding, mattress, and box springs.

While we were sleeping on it that night, we realized something: So much history from one little fact. We have never purchased a bed – either had to, wanted to, or otherwise. Not for ourselves individually. Not for ourselves as a couple. Not for either son (cribs not included). And neither new nor used. We have bought mattresses, box springs, sheets fitted and flat, and egg crate and memory foam toppers, but never the bed. How’s that for intelligent design?

Childhood beds do not count because our wonder years were featured like apartments with furniture included, so starting in college, we slept in the dorm bunk, imported a bed from home, or slept on a life raft mattress on the floor (aka the faux-futon). Our first apartment as a couple was furnished with her childhood bed because it was a double, compared to his frameless single life raft, but the name-brand solid cherry bed did not survive more than a few years of service, no doubt because it was neither purchased or designed for the vaults, tumbles, and hard athleticism of early married life.

Fortuitously, yet sadly, around the time that we could no longer tighten the bolts and screws of the old cherry bed, a cherished grandmother died and left to Her the antique that was – and still is – known as The Lincoln Bed. It’s the kind of bed that inspired us to imagine donning bed clothes, night caps, and curly toed slippers (shades not of grey but, “And Ma in her kerchief. And I in my cap”).

This was, to borrow a phrase from tea time, a proppa bedda, befitting our then new-found status of first time homeowners. It anchored the euphemistically referenced Master Suite in our new ranch-style starter home, described by an inebriated father on his first visit as “Nice and new and all, though it does resemble a double-wide from the front and the butt (he said ‘rear’). In retrospect, we wish we could take back our needlessly apologetic reply, “Well, we had to start somewhere. But home alone, to be as honest as Abe, we had fun referring to it as The Lincoln Bedroom – Missouri Annex.

Eight years on, and we were planning on taking The Lincoln Bed here to Snob Hill. We were trying to negotiate that rare occurrence, the door-to-door move, and we were being batted about by the mortgage company like a shuttlecock during a game of drunken badminton. Before the closing, we secured an additional private visit. We measured and diagrammed (oh, the joys of graph paper) the placement of our bedroom furniture, including The Lincoln Bed.

We still appreciated the walnut behemoth, Boyone was five and Boytwo was due in a few months, and this patch of double bed real estate was beginning to experience, not quite border wars, but certainly lines of scrimmage. Into this moving mix, a Mother unexpectedly offered to give us her nearly new, recently acquired king-sized four-poster bed with what seemed to us to be fancy, almost high-tech mattress composed of a series of water tubes. After months of visiting bedroom stores and mattress retailers, Mother had chosen this bed as the cure for her sleeplessness and fibro myalgia. Six months after delivery, neither condition had improved – plus she didn’t like using a small step stool to ascend/access the bed. To borrow an analogy that could not have been made at that time – getting into this bed felt to her like assailing The Wall in Game of Thrones (nor was she a fan of Pink Floyd).

So we inherited the four-poster. Boytwo would graduate to the Lincoln Bed in a few years after he graduated from his crib. We learned to love spreading out. Besides many good nights of sleep, there is really only one story related to this bed. While hosting the annual Snob Hill Christmas Party a few years after we moved in, our neighbor the Death Star heaved herself upstairs rather than send her obedient lackey and sycophant husband, Sam, just to nose around the second floor of the house, ostensibly to retrieve her coat.

Her husband was code named (by us, anyway) Sam for Secret Agent Man because he had “retired” from some sort of other job while in his 50s to become a real estate agent for the company co-owned by our next-door neighbor. He never seemed to sell anything. We think he just liked to see his name planted on signs throughout town like toadstools after a heavy rain. Still, he seems to still have captured the soon-to-be deceased widow market—those little old ladies to shed their mortal coils as well as their earthly abodes—an always diminishing but ever sustaining segment of the local housing economy.

The coats were piled on our four-poster. And, yes, we did—and still do—have a brass chandelier above the bed, a perhaps extravagant touch, except we had acquired it during a silly bitof aggressive bidding – fueled by the double trouble of competitive bidding and an open bar at our sons’ school’s annual dinner auction. It was for a good cause we told ourselves, but the truth lay elsewhere, hung-over. The morning after (there’s got to be one and there’s no pill for it), as the boozy fog lifted, we stared at it – the chandelier – wondering what we were ever going to do with an extra chandelier (and reciting the morning-after mantra “What were we thinking. What WERE we thinking?”) an answer appeared – the bedroom.

Out of breath, and thinking they were unobserved, the Death Star said to Sam, the almost code-like, “To the manor born.” They nodded to each other, as long-established married persons often do in the nearly silent, private language, created during their years together. We could only ponder her assessment of our boudoir and recall the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King of Swamp Castle says, “One day, lad, this will all be yours.” To which his son Prince Herbert replies, “What, the curtains?”

The next bed we did not purchase sits now in pieces in the living room. The four poster this spring let us down finally – and literally. The footboard suddenly split one night when we were sleeping, no athleticism required.  The jokes have abounded about whose side was the one that collapsed. Thanks to the dust ruffle, the temporary repair we made with lag bolts and sistering boards, we were able to make the repair, but it bothered us knowing it was there and not knowing when next it would fail. Then a Father called the offer of his four-poster king-sized bed. He was reluctantly downgrading to a single bed so a Mother could continue to make it for him. The king-sized bed had become for her a painful, herculean task to change the sheeting.

And so, almost 20 years from the receipt of our last gifted place of repose, we have avoided again the opportunity to buy a bed. Yet, there are still consequences. The bed has been sitting in pieces in the living room for more than two months with a deadline of Thanksgiving to install it in our upstairs master bedroom. It’s not as easy as it may seem, but that, as they say, is another story.

For now, we will ponder all of this history from just unpurchased beds. We’ll sleep on that...for a bit longer.