Emily Nedell Tuck

Last summer (2023), I decided to take an online “Fundamentals of Interior Design” class at Houston Community College, just to see where things might lead.

Admittedly, it wasn’t entirely out of the blue. Forty years ago, I started out my academic career as an undeclared Interior Design major at The University of Texas, but due to some kind of accreditation snafu, the program morphed into “Interior Architecture,” where it remains today–everywhere in the US, in fact (Interior Design means something different in the UK), housed in Schools of Architecture. It seemed more like an architectural specialty, and I wasn’t even sure who hired Interior Architects. Couldn’t a licensed architect also do interior architecture, like, when he designed the outside of the building? From the presentation we went to, it also seemed dry, with the things I loved now trivialized by the new program director as mere “decoration,” rather than a vital part of our visual and material culture, and also an important source of pleasure for most ordinary people.

But it was what it was then, just as it still is today: “Interior Design” is not what people think it is, and it shares that in common with the Master’s in Library Science, the degree I currently possess. Interior Design today is architecture, space planning, building systems, public safety and codes, construction materials and designing environmentally with a small amount of what people think of when they hear “interior design.” In fact, it seemed when Interior Design went over into Architecture, things also philosophically (and aesthetically) changed. Textile design and art, all historically-inspired design, went out the window.  

I was still going to do it, though.

However, when I shared the change and my future plans in order to secure the necessary approvals to move from Liberal Arts / Undeclared to an Interior Architecture, my older-than-average father protested. “Architecture is a man’s world! Trust me, Emmy, you will never get ahead in that field! It’s not for you.” How about Interior Design? I was kinda going for that, well, at least initially . . . ” I hedged. “Oh forget it!” he said, exasperated and shocked at my naivete. “That is worse! Interior design is a gay man’s world, and you will never get ahead there, either!”

“It’s not for you” was among my parents’ favorite expressions when the answer was no, but they couldn’t explain to me why not in a way that I would ever agree with or accept. (“Can I have an electric guitar?” was another “It’s not for you.” Can I go to Camp Longhorn? Another “not for you.”) However the reader may feel about “Interior Design” or “Interior Architecture” as a viable major for a promising AP / Honors student, it wasn’t completely impractical in my particular situation. I could draw remarkably well then, and having been raised on Dover books, dollhouses, Town & Country, Vanity Fair and Sotheby auction catalogs which I mined for inspiration for my dollhouse mansions, I already had an exceptional knowledge of art, architecture, historic interiors, pattern and antiques upon entering college at 17. I was handy with an exacto knife, wood stain and resin; I had drawers of min-wax stain, testor’s enamel paint, and 00 brushes, dollhouse electrical wire, beads, findings and tiny lamps. I made things, including miniature furniture to 1:12 scale. I was already very good at drafting. 

Apart from my collection of Dover reprints–I began dwelling in the “Narnia of Old Europe” from an early age–my art education came also from checking out library books and copying the illustrations, or else studying the interiors in paintings to make furnishings for my period rooms (I made a Golden Dawn / masonic temple out of a wine crate, my favorite. The intricate floor tile pattern was copied from a mysterious painting by the Flemish painter, Jan van Eyck). Now, at the time I was pursuing ID at UT in the early 80s, my father acquired three high-end custom drapery stores which he had initially hoped to franchise, just as he had done with muffler shops in the 70s and transmission shops before that. But design trends, fabrics and fashion were definitely not his thing. Dad couldn’t tell a black from a brown sock. I don’t know why he ever got into draperies except to keep his close-to-my-age girlfriend entertained. During this time, I secretly hoped he was going to leave at least one those drapery stores to me, which was also partially spurring me on to pursue interior design; although thinking back, it was probably had more to do with the dollhouses.

At UT, I aced my two Architecture survey courses and “Furniture Appreciation.” I could tell you the likely provenance of any antique chair. 

That year, or shortly thereafter, he gave the three failing businesses to my eldest sister and her husband. “It wasn’t for me,” he said of himself. “Too many gays.” He later mentioned that he gave the business to them because they both “studied Business” at UT, and they would know better how to run a drapery store than someone “like me,” his daughter who studied art–or interior design–whatever I was studying these days. But I was too young, inexperienced, and still in school. For my fashionable older sister and her talented husband (and his very creative, personable, very artistically-gifted retired father, who could man the store while they visited clients), it all worked out well, and it became a launching point for other, far more lucrative ventures in window treatments and home decor.

I changed my major to English Literature and Classical Languages, a perfect pairing. I had studied Latin throughout high school and continued with it in college, adding Ancient Greek to my repertoire. “Teaching is a good profession for a woman,” my father said approvingly. While he was not Catholic, he had often shared with me how he had benefitted from a Catholic education in high school, which he recalled favorably except for failing French three times. He respected and encouraged my passion for British literature, ancient philosophy, European history, Latin, Thomas Aquinas and Étienne Henri Gilson. We often shared books, like Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. While I studied English, I still loved art and design, which to me was deeply rooted in spirituality. I still appreciate Augustus Pugin, William Morris and John Ruskin; even German idealist and Lutheran theologian Rudolph Otto, who wrote about architecture and its connection to the sacred in The Idea of the Holy. 

By the end of the 1980s, in addition to the drapery business having become a kind of albatross around my father’s neck, my mother’s once thriving advertising agency, the only one in greater Houston, which had recently moved into the iconic deco Transco Tower, closed due to Houston’s oil crash (1986-1988). This is also when most of Houston’s landmark establishments closed. Her original Alphonse Mucha lithograph (I loved that piece!) and other art pieces were sold at auction, just as they had been acquired.

Dad moved out of the house to be with his close-to-my-age girlfriend. Only a short time after my mother was finally convinced that my father wasn’t coming back, she went from a diagnosis of “clinically depressed” to “terminally ill.” She was someone I had known my whole life only indirectly, through the words and interpretation of others (She loves you, but has a hard time showing it. She cannot relate to you because she never had a childhood like yours. She has a very high IQ, a math genius, sharp in business, but she doesn’t understand you because she never went to college. . . my mother was really just “a part of the furniture”). I left home at 17 to go to The University of Texas, so I missed out on the adult relationship my much older sisters presumably enjoyed with my mother. I was raised to be independent, to be a “whole person,” someone who needed no one else to be happy. That was the major theme of my upbringing. I tried my best to live up to the stoic ideal both my parents imposed on me from a young age, believing it was a weakness or shortcoming on my part–some form of mental illness requiring professional intervention–if I felt a normal human need for affection or companionship. This is absolutely true. Because I did not know better, I went to a psychiatrist to try to cure my feelings of loneliness, thinking there was something wrong with me for having them in the first place. I must not be “whole.”

In the meantime, over and over, without any prompting, my father shared with me that he didn’t feel guilty about his decision to leave my mother, which made me think he probably was feeling something. He wrote me long letters on legal paper about his lack of guilt, convincing me that he felt nothing, despite having been married for 30 years. He believed that he too, had only a short time left on this earth with a heart that was failing, and being married to my mother was not good for his heart. Wasn’t he entitled to happiness before he died? I didn’t take sides or judge. For most of the late 80s and early 90s, I was away at school anyway, completely consumed with my studies and fairly insulated from the calamitous changes that were happening back home. By the time I graduated from college, or maybe it was graduate school–it all runs together in my mind at this point, like looking though a keyhole–there was nothing left of home.

No art, no rugs, no antiques, no home at all to return to, not even a couch to sleep on. Nothing tangible. My drawing pads, my paintings, my journals from living with a host family in England at 16 and traveling through India at 17–my dollhouses and room boxes–my books! and I had some rare ones, too, at least OP, from Samuel Weiser’s in New York–and many handwritten letters from Immanuel Velikovsky to my best friend’s mother–everything was gone, except for a very thick file of photos of smooth fox terriers, other people’s dogs, which my father had kept locked in a mahogany Louis XVI style writing desk (my mother had bought the desk) to study bloodlines and plan potential matches. 

After the death of my mother–on that morning, I was interviewing for a once-in-a-lifetime tenure-track faculty Librarian / Cataloger position at Bryn Mawr College (my Latin & Greek were pluses)–not sure why they couldn’t have waited until after my interview to tell me, instead of ringing by room at 6am to share the bad news, which made me feel sinful for going to the job interview, for pursuing money a time like this! But I suppose it was incumbent upon me to curtail the all-day interview which had been scheduled in advance with the search committee in order to catch a flight home. I flew home directly from Philadelphia to attend the funeral and at that time made a small pile of things I wanted from the house, which was my house (to the extent that I had a bedroom and art studio there, it had been my permanent residence), my stuff and photos, nothing of any monetary value; but all of my things, including the room boxes, art, books, journal and dollhouses were discarded anyway. By then, everyone was too busy with their adult lives to be bothered sending me my things. Unlike my sisters, who received art work and rugs and furniture, I received nothing from the house, not that I wanted things, and what was left behind went to estate liquidators. Being the youngest at 23, I didn’t own a house, or anything, and had no money of my own, having just graduated with my MLIS with an emphasis in Cataloging and Rare Books and Manuscripts (I thought it an excellent use for my Latin) and Technical Services from the University of Wisconsin. 

Now, my plan all along had been to get an academic library job and then continue to pursue my education wherever I ended up, so I would have a way of supporting myself through a doctorate, which in the Humanities, is eight years attending full-time, sometimes longer. People are generally unaware of that fact, I think, because a JD is only three years and an MD is four years. Why would a Humanities doctorate be eight? That makes not sense to people. Sometimes it takes time to write a dissertation, so that makes it ten years for many. That is a long time to not be working in society. Despite my father’s promises of support, don’t worry about the money, I was worried, very worried, and rightly suspected that he wasn’t good for it, another reason to obtain the MLIS first. This strategy is called using the MLIS as a “hopper” degree, that is, to get the academic degree one really wants. Lots of academic librarians do this, or attempt to pull it off, because universities typically offer their employees free tuition and time off to take classes. Although as I discovered, just as many people, probably more, get a master’s or doctorate in a subject area, find themselves unemployable, and then go back to get an MLIS in the hope of obtaining stable employment. To able to teach, or to be competitive as an academic librarian in the ever tightening job market, I would need a doctorate, or at least another master’s in a subject discipline.

But a recession was on in 1990/1, the year of my graduation, and no one was hiring librarians, let alone academic ones. One is not qualified to be a School Librarian with an MLIS degree. Especially with the semi-official downgrading of the MLS/MLIS from an academic to some kind of vocational (like Education) or technical (like MIS) degree, and with the seats of library schools always full of academic drop-outs or post-docs, the more competitive universities, those with graduate programs and/or special collections, only wanted librarians who already possessed a second subject master’s for entry-level employment. As one bow-tied librarian asserted, when I was on an interview with SMU years later, at a time when I had just given birth to my son and my husband was laid off,  “One cannot very well manage academic library collections, provide bibliographic instruction, assist with research, or expect to ‘command the respect of the faculty‘ without subject expertise, usually evidenced by an academic credential.” How could I command the respect of their faculty without a second MA? Because of my background in Rare Books and Manuscripts (RBMS), history and English literature, proficiency in Latin (especially Medieval Latin)–but lack of a subject second master’s–I concentrated my efforts that year of my graduation on the independent libraries: the Morgan Library (everyone there had a PhD, I was told), the Newberry, the Huntington, the Rosenbach, the American Antiquarian Society . . . a small library at St. Olaf’s College devoted to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard . . . seminaries, Graham Arader, various auction houses, and the Library of Congress. 

The New York Historical Society invited me for an interview and instructed me to buy a round trip ticket to New York, but they went on a hiring freeze. Since I wasn’t going to be reimbursed by them for the ticket, I went to New York anyway, staying for free in a tiny interior service room of a Loews hotel arranged by my father through a family connection whom I’d never met, someone named “Johnny.” I went to one of my favorite places, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where I knew that Madeleine L’Engle (Wrinkle in Time) had been a librarian. She was only a volunteer librarian, it turned out. Bruce J. Ramer, a famous New York antiquarian book dealer, had offered me a position many weeks before when he came through Madison, but as a condition of employment, Ramer wanted me to right away fly to Tokyo with him to an international antiquarian book show. I didn’t know what I might be getting myself into with him, so I declined his offer, much to the chagrin a book dealer on State Street, who had arranged for the meeting at Amy’s bar. In the late 80s and early 90s, everyone referenced and studied Ramer’s exquisite catalogs. Maybe I should look him up while in NY? I thought about it. Desperation was sinking in. 

Weeks after a phone interview, the Center for Bibliographic Studies in Riverside, CA offered me a rare book Cataloger position, which would have been fantastic, but by then–weeks had gone by since that phone interview–I was moving to St. Paul for a job with a New Age / Occult publishing company who was interested in my Latin, Greek and tiny bit of Hebrew for editing books on kabbala and ceremonial magick (the “k” means that it is real magic, not slight of hand) for mass market/trade publication. The owners, who were Wiccans, were impressed with my knowledge of hermeticism and the occult. I was soon promoted to “Astrology Editor,” with astrological Sun and Moon sign books being the company’s bread and butter. My face appeared in a blurb in Publisher’s Weekly: “Emily Nedell, Astrology Editor.” I learned a great deal from that experience, more than I cared to know, but mainly that I couldn’t live very will on 18K in St. Paul. I supplemented my income from the publishing company by working at Goodwill as an intake clerk and cashier. I had some great conversations about Bernard Lonergan’s Insight with seminary students I met at the theological bookstore near St. Paul Seminary. But it was all beginning to wear on me, the long hours, the freezing cold, the poverty wages, and in all honestly, the extent to which the crowd I ran with really believed they could simply bend the world to their will despite what I or any normal person would consider to be pretty compelling evidence to the contrary. 

My new  boyfriend, a fellow editor at the company–also a celebrated author of ceremonial magic(k) books who studied music and philosophy at UCLA (and had trained to become a cantor, even written a thesis on ancient Jewish rituals of the high priests)–would dress up in priestly vestments, perform magic rites for our group (Wiccan weddings, too . . .) and other groups and sing in the most amazing voice. I can still hear it, his voice had such a unique timbre. He would also play a variety of instruments–synthesizer, organ, theremin, symbols, singing bowls. He was very talented, a kind of performance artist of ritual and motivational speaker who belonged back in LA. He could also do slight of hand magic on a professional level (was a lifetime member of an exclusive magician’s club in LA called The Magic Castle). On a first date, there was a bulky glass ashtray at our table which he made disappear by tossing it into the air. Poof! It vanished. It was astonishing. He knew all of the best entertainment spots and techno clubs in the Twin Cities. A few months into the relationship, however, he became furious with me for inadvertently setting an empty Jack in the Box cup down on a “consecrated altar.” To me, this altar looked like a black box or big speaker positioned between two columns against the wall in his apartment. It was always there, just part of the furniture. Nothing was ever going on with it, not that I could see anyway. How did that cup get there? he asked me with a look of panic on his face. At first, I thought it was an act; I was waiting for him to say, “Just kidding! Ha ha!” The cup was a turning point in our relationship: the spell was broken. Once I realized that this all wasn’t just a creative outlet, but something he believed in–a side which he had carefully concealed from me up until that point–I did not want to go out with him anymore. We held incompatible world views.

I put in my year with the New Age/Occult publishing company, but I had to somehow get out of there, go back to school and get that second MA to get my career and life back on track. I did a deal with my father, who hated the idea of the magician boyfriend, by signing away claim to title to some property owned by my mother, a horse farm in Richmond Rosenberg (suburb of Houston), so he could sell the land. At that time I did not know I was actually entitled to anything, since no one told me I was. It was easy to give away what I didn’t have. I was happy to have my education paid for and to escape that awful place. Seemed a good trade, and all I had to do was sign some papers and have them notarized. 

I then spent most of the remainder of the 90’s pursuing the second MA, as pathetic as this may sound. For two years, the two years my father paid for (and he didn’t have to pay any rent, because for 5oK, he bought a small ruin of a 1940s house close the campus, on the market for over a year because it looked God-awful, which I selected and renovated with the help of a male friend who lived rent free as part of the deal. It was gorgeous in the end, but Dad never saw the before and after, nor did he care to hear about the house and all that we had done to it ourselves), I got stuck at IU Bloomington in a program that was DOA. No faculty to teach graduate-level courses in Medieval and Early Modern European History due to an early retirement incentive package intended to eliminate many of the older tenured faculty who were concentrated in the Humanities. This, combined with a maternity leave and a one-year Sabbatical in Italy by two professors, meant there was no one there to teach graduate students. I had gone to IU specifically, as I stated in my letter of intent, to study under Dr. Edward Grant, who went Emeritus in 1992, the year I arrived. Someone I respected with remarkably similar interests to mine at UW had studied under Ed Grant and highly recommended their program. “You have come at a bad time,” the Chair, Ann Carmichael, said. “Things will get better.” I got my electives in Classics out of the way, as the Chair advised, and worked at a used and rare bookstore (not Caveat Emptor, but the other one. . . ) and a student job in the library fulfilling ILL requests, to wait it out, while forging connections with faculty in other departments across campus. Paul Vincent Spade in the Philosophy Dept, for example, was an inspiration to me. I had taken Philosophy of Language under Martinich at the University of Texas, so I was primed and pumped for a grad course in medieval logic and semantics, what Spade taught. Only the History Department would not let me take a class from Dr. Spade and count it toward my Master’s in History. I didn’t understand the logic of that.

Gradually, I could see that the interests of the remaining faculty in the History Department and mine were not in alignment. The Renaissance professor who returned from her year off in Italy was good, I made an A in her class, but she was a one trick pony. The few who remained specialized in women, gender, disease and something called “history of the body,” whereas I was focused on the life of the mind, scholasticism, literature, art, architecture, and the influence of the Church on belief and culture, what I considered higher order things worthy of study, preserving and passing on to future generations. To me, History was a backdrop to understand and perpetuate knowledge of the broad sweep of civilization, a rich tapestry of human intellectual, cultural and creative achievement. I didn’t want to study death and disease, the body, gender, or people who didn’t have an impact for whatever reason–wrong place, wrong time, wrong sex. I just wanted the purple and gold, banners waving in the air. . . 

My best friends were seminary students (Who else studies Latin at the graduate level?). I lived in the library where I worked as student job, or at the used bookstore. I lived like a monk. I was an hour and half to the nearest city (Indianapolis), and IU didn’t have a well developed coffee house or bar culture like at UW, where people went out at night and socialized. I didn’t own a TV. I just read and wrote, went to class, worked in the bookstore and library. It was a small world. But I always felt confident that there would be a place for me in the larger world, just as people believe in the concept of soulmates. There was an ideal job waiting for me at the end of all this. There had to be, too few people were studying it.

With the encouragement of a professor in Classics, which was my minor, I began working on a directed study/ thesis on the Contemptus Mundi tradition in Western thought and literature from Augustine through the Renaissance. “This is really you!” Ian Thomson said with enthusiasm as he read my proposal. He had a wonderful Scottish accent from St. Andrews. Under his direction, I had spent hours in the library grappling with the Patralogia Latina, struggling to read poetic Latin written by Church Fathers. He was the one who put me on to Contemptus Mundi in the first place. But in many ways, yes, it really was me! It was a very useful framework later on, for teaching World Literature, which I did for a few years until World Lit was no longer taught. One really cannot understand Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Hamlet or Milton’s L’Allegro Il Penseroso or many works of the Medieval and Renaissance periods without Contemptus Mundi.

After a year or more, the History department hired a professor from the Toronto school, a beautiful pre-Raphaelite-looking woman, thin with long red hair, to fill the position Ed Grant had held–or no, actually, she was not a new hire, she was the maternity leave professor who returned; that was it, because I remember wondering how she could be so slender after having had a baby. She only wanted to do “Herstory,” as she put it, “divining women’s voices from the language of male denigration and misogyny.” Only, I didn’t want to set out to “subvert patriarchy” (aka, the Church) or attempt to “blur the distinction between the sacred and the profane.” I didn’t care about anorexic saints or lesbian nuns (nothing against lesbians or nuns. . . ). Why was she even teaching? It was like oil and water between us. She didn’t do Latin, but Old French, which she insisted I learn so I could study “women’s voices.” “Herstory” was the very sort of thing, same approach, which made me not want to pursue grad English, why I opted for History instead, which I believed was grounded in a more academically rigorous, evidence-based practice. I sort of told her so, politely, in her graduate seminar, when she was having us accept at face value that all historians are biased and that history is just a form of storytelling. In her opinion, there is no escaping subjectivity, so one might as well embrace it! This was her justification for doing “Herstory.” I disagreed. Good scholarship is always objective, or strives to be.

I mentioned what a wise philosophy professor told me:

“Objectivity is always worth striving for, even if we may never know if it has been achieved. Just because an ideal is not achievable does not mean it isn’t still worth striving for.” Maybe he had said “Truth.” But one can substitute just about any abstract ideal or universal and it works just as well.

Her insistence on calling the Church “patriarchy” was also cringeworthy to me, from a scholarly perspective. 

Eventually, I told her, and then the Chair, and then finally The Chronicle of Higher Education, that what she was doing was not History–but it all might not have bothered me so much, or come to that point, if after a year of hardly offering anything at all, the department would compromise just a little bit and let me count Paul Spade’s graduate philosophy courses in Medieval and Renaissance philosophy toward my History degree, instead of saying, that isn’t History. So what, he was in “Philosophy.” Who cares? His specialty was the intellectual history of the High Middle Ages. Everyone in the medieval world knew him. The Department Chair, a woman, said she would only approve something interdisciplinary if it had to do with the study of women. 

Why would you allow interdisciplinary studies in History only for studying women? Indiana had more Medievalists than any other school in the country, but when I was there, you couldn’t get an interdisciplinary degree.

After the CHE rung up the Chair to confirm my allegations for their article, which was not about objectivity, but about bias in higher education against Christian students, something much more inflammatory and easier for readers to grasp, the Department Chair suggested I might be better off in Religious Studies. The dispute between the History Department and me was documented in First Things magazine after a professor at Notre Dame, Dr. Marsden, took note of it. (He took note of it because I wrote a letter to him which he kept, apparently, until the day he died, as after he died, an associate contacted me letting me know how much our correspondence had meant to him.) It was then referenced in some book on religious freedom in higher education, which I have on my shelf. Thing is, though, I never felt as if I were exercising my own religious freedom in any way; I was just trying to comprehend the beliefs and motives of those who lived in the past, especially people of influence who wrote in Latin, the language of educated people prior to 1800 and of the Latin Middle Ages. My own religious beliefs had absolutely nothing to do with it. Objectivity was the point I was making, not imposing my own religious views or political agenda on the past.

Also to the point, what I emphasized to the Chair, was that I wanted to make progress on my degree so I could leave there, not spend a year or two in Bloomington, learning French, or Old French, just so I could study “women’s voices.” Graduate history requires that the student be able to engage with primary sources. All I could engage with were texts written by men who wrote in Latin, which should count for something. 

Given that my electives had been Latin Paleography and more Latin, I applied to Classics (the dwindling department, which boasted two old Medievalists, was very glad to receive me), thinking it was the quickest path to a Master’s so I could leave with a degree in hand. I would simply flip the major and minor. People do that all the time. But Classics didn’t have enough faculty left to support graduate studies, either, due to the same early retirement incentive package. As I discovered, would take me years to get through taking only one or two grad-level classes a semester. I then longed to attend a Catholic university, like, well, “Catholic University,” where the faculty would not tell me I belonged in Religious Studies, or that my interests in Aquinas and intentionality was passe, or that I had to learn Old French because Latin wasn’t good enough to fulfill the language requirement for the history degree because women didn’t write in it.

No, I am sure they would never tell me that at Catholic University, or Notre Dame, or Fordham.

I applied and was accepted to Catholic University, but couldn’t afford the cost of living in D.C. I didn’t know that when I applied. Why would I know that? There was no Internet yet. I went to D.C. to check it out, driving there from Indiana. In all honesty, I had wanted to go to a Catholic university in the first place. That was always my first choice. I thought that was where I belonged. And a city like D.C. with all its museums and historic collections would provide me with ample work opportunities. But my father had vetoed it once before. He did again. While initially when we discussed it, he said, “Follow your dreams!” which is why I drove out there, the cost of the tiniest apartment in D.C. was too much, and there were no scholarships, stipends or housing assistance for master’s students. I think my eldest sister and the girlfriend also had something to do with it, though. “You kept changing your major, and then you wanted to change schools!” I heard it from both of them on separate occasions, phrased just that way, justifying their low opinion of me. My father said, “Come home, Emmy, we will figure things out.”

But he wasn’t there.

By then, too much time and resources had been squandered in pursuit of a second MA so I could get an academic library job, so I could afford to pay for another degree, so I could either teach at the college level or become a curator of rare books and special collections. I was like the old woman who swallowed a fly. I was beginning to wonder why I swallowed the fly. . . 

By then I was 27, and I felt like my life was already over. 

hat was left of my family back in Houston after my mother died didn’t understand why I wasn’t advancing, why I kept changing my major, why I now wanted to change schools, why I was pursuing a second MA and not a doctorate, etc. “Just get a degree! Any degree!” my eldest sister screamed at me on the phone one day, baby crying in the background. I knew from the outside, the the optics looked bad. Thing is, by then I had racked up a bunch of grad courses in History (A’s) and Classics (A’s) which wouldn’t transfer anywhere else, because graduate-level courses never do from school to school. After the bachelor’s, there is no “transferring” of credits–well, maybe six hours, but that is it. People generally are unaware of this fact. If you leave, it is game over, especially then, before online classes. And while degrees are forever, credits toward an academic degree expire after five years.

It had become clear by the end of my second year that the university wasn’t actually going to replace the tenured faculty who had retired. The Department was only hiring Adjuncts, and Adjuncts cannot teach the grad students. I wasn’t going to be able to get the degree I wanted or study the with the sort of people I wanted to study with. What could I do? I thought to sue the university using a pro bono lawyer. Yes, they lied, stating in a printed bulletin that they had faculty there who were teaching courses which were not being taught because the faculty were not there. My letter of intent had been very intentional: here is what I am coming to study and why. Obviously, I am an A student! It was unfair; they should have read my letter and decided they were not a good fit for me, or warned me that some faculty were gone. But nothing could be done about it. “Plus, they are paying my salary,” he added. He worked in a free legal clinic on campus. “I can tell you this. They have never been successfully sued. It’s because they have sovereign immunity.” (What, like royalty? Don’t we live in a capitalist society?)

I also observed this downsizing trend was happening everywhere at public universities, as schools in the 90’s sought to expand their growing Nursing, Business and Engineering programs at the expense of the Humanities. I’d had some minor achievements, though, a lengthy article on Elizabeth Eisensteins’s Printing Press as an Agent for Change was accepted for publication, and Dr. Mary Blockley, Medievalist in the English Department at The University of Texas, whom I’d had as an undergrad, contacted me about a graduate program in Medieval Studies she was attempting to start at UT. She was interested in my Latin Paleography, but there could be no stipend. She also liked and remembered me from her class, but paleography, the ability to read medieval manuscripts is a rare skill! I remembered from when I was at UT that their Classics Department, which was the largest in the country, had been hostile to Medievalists, refusing to teach Medieval Latin on principle, insisting it was a corrupt form of Latin. “There is one Medievalist now,” she offered. My family was oblivious to any of my achievements or that people generally thought well of me. 

I got in my car with my two dogs and drove back home, or what was left of my former life in Houston from nine years ago. I had wanted to bring my mission oak furniture and gothic church pew with me, but my car didn’t have a tow hitch or tow capacity, being four-cylinder. I had acquired a few beautiful antiques, unique pieces, driving the backroads of Indiana with a friend with a truck, someone who collected antique musical instruments and built his own harpsichords and clavichords. My father refused to pay for movers or a truck, so I sent what I could through a Pac-n-Send and sold the rest, arriving with nothing but boxes of books. My heart felt happy, unburdened, especially as I rolled into Texarkana listening to the Indigo Girls with tall pine trees lining winding asphalt roads, happy in part because I would have “family” again. 

By that time, Dad no longer lived in Houston, but in the nearby town of Brookshire, which is like a far out suburb with large parcels of ranch land, oil derricks and truck stops; and he was always elsewhere that year, in Europe I think, just a disembodied voice, with a voicemail message which said in a terse monotone, “I am not available. Please leave a message.” If I ever did manage to make contact with him, he immediately put down the phone and made to speak to the my age girlfriend, stonewalling me, just as if I were a collection agency calling to collect on a debt. I couldn’t figure it out. Maybe there was some guilt or shame on both our parts for being failures now. Long after he died, after I was married and had kids of my own, I learned what he had done to me, so he really had some things to feel guilty about. 

Nevertheless, I feel I had it better than most people in this life, so I have no right to complain about anything.

The year I returned to Houston was 1994, the same year as Reality Bites, a comedy filmed in Houston about a college valedictorian (Winona Ryder) trying to start a career in the “real world” of Houston. Except she had a family and friends in town, where I no longer did–well, there was one, a son of a lawyer who rented the downstairs of a little house on Bell St. where we watched Reality Bites together on VHS, then went outside to admire the view of downtown Houston at night from his front yard. I’d known Mike since 7th grade. Mike was brilliant, but mentally disturbed and drug addicted, someone really not too stable or easy to be around for any length of time. It had always been that way. He didn’t respect boundaries, or was always pushing them for a laugh, and it would inevitably go too far, someone would get hurt, property destroyed, etc. At my father’s farm, I had told him he could not ride the pony, it would support only the weight of a child. I turned my back for a minute. He just had to mount her and make her walk a distance under his almost 300lbs for his amusement, crushing her until her legs folded under her and he tumbled off. He thought this was hilarious. I couldn’t take being around him for long. He later became famous for a legal case he won, which is why a movie was made about him celebrating his life after he died of a drug overdose at 32. Aside from Mike, there was no one I knew in town.

Everyone I had been close to had left Houston to go to college when I did and they never came back. Yet strangers I met out socially at art museum openings seemed to know me or of me. I looked a lot like my eldest sister, who was ten years older. “You come from a good family,” I was told by a man who said he knew my sister and father from years ago. “What do you mean by that? What do you mean by ‘good’? In what way ‘good’?” Money good or morally good? Good to spend time with, hang out with–how exactly do you mean?

It pissed me off, people in Houston, complete strangers, assuming I had access to some great wealth if only I weren’t so proud, or frugal, or something, when I was barely subsisting on the complimentary bread at La Madelaine while working for minimum wage at Barnes and Noble, in a one-bedroom apartment I could not afford, one that was infested with fire ants that would stream out from under the baseboards whenever I set down dog food and swarming all over me in bed at night, especially at that time of the month. When they decided to sting, it was all at once; they somehow communicated telepathically with each other, so you had to be careful to brush them off gently so as to not make them angry. They lived in the walls and ignored the ant baits set on counter tops (up high so the dogs couldn’t get to them). But that apartment allowed me to keep my two dogs just a while longer, until I no longer could, where all other apartments had a “two dog-two bedroom rule.” I could not afford to move. Even with the fire ants, which I demonstrated (all I had to do was put food out), Hidden Village said with so many vacancies, they would not release me from my contractual obligation. I went back to the shelter days later to get “Annie” after a VA nurse I met at Cafe Express explained how shelters worked, especially that one on Almeda. They refused to tell me if she had been adopted out or put down. I was also having night-time panic attacks–the VA nurse nailed it–which I had just assumed was congenital heart failure, like what my father had. I would die in my bed and they would eventually find me covered in fire ants. 

And then a new turn of events: men who took me out pulled out large bills on a first dinner date, sensing I had fallen into a class beneath them. A partner at Coopers & Lybrand with arrogant monogrammed shirts said, “Every woman has her price!” slowly tossing hundred dollar bills, one by one, down on the table of the Rainbow Lodge with an idiotic grin on his face, as if this were my lucky day! This wouldn’t be so remarkable if it weren’t a pattern of men thinking I was for sale or could be bought. Was this a Houston thing? He didn’t even wait until after dinner, he was so eager to seal the deal. I took a hundred of the top off the pile and with it took a cab home. I was soon forced by necessity to give away my other dog, break my lease, and move to a tiny studio apartment in the Montrose area for $325/month, which I liked very much because it was affordable, old and in the thick of things, with casement windows, and by then, most of my new friends were artists, bohemians, adjunct professors and creative types anyway. It was across from St. Anne’s and Cafe Adobe, above an art gallery. One evening, at the Gallant Knight, a man on the periphery of my friend group slurred, “Know what your problem is? You’re hard core single! That’s right. Hard core single!” I cannot say this didn’t bother me. The youngest in the family internalizes all criticism, takes it to heart, because we are raised in a world where everyone presumably knows better, even better than we know ourselves. Was I HCS? It turned out, I was not, but I would not know that for a few more years to come. 

I am still three classes short of a second MA at the University of St. Thomas, Liberal Arts with a concentration in History/ Art History. It isn’t a very competitive school, but it is Catholic; it allowed me time to figure things out and overcome feelings of social isolation in a supportive community, especially when I first came back to town. I fit right in at UST, and their career center helped me to land a very good professional job in Spring which put my academic career on a hiatus. My professors were impressed with me, one telling me I needed to get my doctorate. I know, I know! I wish I could! They wrote encouraging letters to me on my research papers. Like an addict, I had pawned my mother’s jewelry for a fraction of their value to pay for tuition (Why didn’t you auction them at Sotheby’s asked my sister, astonished at my lack of business acumen), refusing to give up on my dreams of getting the second MA to get that academic library job, as silly as this might sound.

I knew I would only ever be happy at a university. I wanted that academic library job, far away from the ugly realities of Houston.  

The estate jeweler, Tannenbaum, glancing at me and my last name, said, “Oh, you’ve been in here before. Aren’t you a dancer?” clearly confusing me with the close-to-my-age girlfriend, by now my father’s wife, who did resemble me–really my mother–just a little bit. “A dancer? No, I’m the daughter. These were my mother‘s.” Oh, I’m sorry, he said, looking down through the loop at a large diamond he had just popped right out of its setting to weigh it. Why had she been in there? I wondered. The Contemporary Art class I took with the money was excellent, mainly because it filled in an important gap in my knowledge, as it was not anything I was ever drawn to. 

But by then, I was working as an art/history Museum Curator, so it made sense at the time. I’m not sure the MA still does at my age, and those credits, as with all my others, have surely expired by now. 

Years later, after my father lost his eyesight, I took his thick file of show dog photos and beautiful old hand-penned pedigrees from England (He had been invited to judge dog shows at Crufts, various English terrier groups, quite a rare honor for an American!) By then he had sold the antique desk for money to live on, the last thing of value he possessed, although technically it was mine, as were (it turned out) many of the other things he eventually sold, ruined, or gave away.

In the end, there was nothing left but an empty apartment, couch, bed and small wooden chest of drawers. He went blind after the heart transplant, so he had no use for nice things. The close to my age girlfriend / wife wasn’t sticking around for this, but she never did stay with him for long anyway. She left town after he went into the hospital. The only reason he survived at all was because of her dogs, she reminded me. They were at a veterinarian’s office when he hit the floor, so oxygen was available. I don’t blame her for leaving, though. She was 33 years younger, and she had to figure out what she was going to do for money now that it was all gone. 

It happens. But they didn’t have to run through it all in the way that they did, blowing it all on cars and homes and condos and clothes for her–seriously, who in their right mind buys Prada, Versace or Dolce & Gabbana–including using up what had been left to me by my mother, money which had been deliberately kept hidden from me all of these years, and for what?  My father would occasionally call me to come and get her left overs, ridiculous couture costumes she could not pack into her bags to take with her. I got money for these clothes however I could through River Oaks consignment boutiques. To fill the gaps in his life between her arrivals and departures, my father had other young women whose rents he was paying. One of them, a nice fresh-faced small town girl (and I do mean “girl,” with no family in Houston) he had been supporting in a luxury apartment at Westheimer and Bammel Lane. She tried to commit suicide, cutting her wrists, when he tried to end it. “She’s crazy, who would do such a thing?” my father said, as if he had nothing to do with it. He didn’t want to talk to her, so he sent me. I told her, “I’m sorry, my father is not a good man. He did the same thing to me, and I’m his daughter!” That made her laugh. We both laughed and cried. At least I cheered her up. 

What kind of father says to his daughter, I’m buying a house in Memorial with a huge garage apartment. We feel where you are living in that place in Montrose is unsafe, and we are concerned about you! We love you! We had no idea you were living that way (after they visited me that one time)! Come live with us! And then, on the very day of the scheduled move, when my stuff was boxed up and movers already arrived, he tells me, and only when I called him asking where the key was hidden so I could get in, that the deal “fell through.” He had backed out because she left town again, breaking his heart. “I feel like a yo-yo!” he exclaimed on the phone. “No, Dad, I am the yo-yo. I am the yo-yo! Don’t you get that? You didn’t bother even to tell me! Now, I have no apartment. Where am I to go? Movers are here. I have work tomorrow.” “Don’t know hon, I don’t know, but you cannot come here.” Why not? Where are you? Why can’t I come there where you are? “I have only a one bedroom [at the Four Leaf Towers, a luxury high-rise],” he said. He left me homeless and didn’t care. Tough love was one thing, but this was something else entirely. I was devastated. I was working, making 28K, but it was Sunday afternoon, my $325/mo apartment had already been leased, putting me in a precarious situation. 

One day, many years later, after I was married and had children of my own, my father called to share the good news that she was coming to get him so he wouldn’t need to trouble me for groceries or anything anymore. He was so happy! They had recently remarried–the divorce was for a business reason, to transfer assets–and remarriage was probably so she could easily receive spousal social security benefits; but she had remained living apart in another state for years. He asked, could I be there to help her load the car? I was concerned, of course. But I had also been worried about his being alone, especially since my husband and I were moving to California again for a job transfer. Dad had already set fires in the microwave trying to cook frozen dinners and the apartment complex wanted him out. No one else was looking in on him, and no home would take an old broke blind man on dialysis. His personality wasn’t so good, either. What friends he had, business associates, stopped visiting a long time ago. Everyone in my family hated him, each for his own reasons. His grandkids never came to see him. “What are they saying about me?” he always asked me. “Dad, I see no one in the family. No one talks to me, either.” There I was, like Cordelia in King Lear. We went to see him off and help put his things in the car. She said she wanted to take his chest of drawers “to stage houses” since it was small enough to fit in her car. I thought it a bit ominous–wouldn’t he be using his dresser?

On the way back to Vegas that evening, she called and asked for a credit card number so they could stop at a motel and spend the night. I obliged, but only if I could give it directly to the desk clerk. Within a few weeks he was dead, since she didn’t take him to dialysis or give him his meds. “He wanted it this way,” she insisted, asking me for money to help bury him. 

Last year, when I was 58, because I had no family photos, and absolutely nothing of my first 17 or more years of existence, my other sister who lives in Boston sent me a photo of my mother standing in the kitchen holding a drink with a blurry profile of teenage me smiling in the foreground. I didn’t feel any warm fuzzies, only a vague sense of impending doom.

Funny thing, I didn’t remember that we had Morris’ “The Strawberry Thief” for window treatments over the sink! How could I have forgotten that? The shades looked really crisp and great, as did the wallpaper, a perfect complement. I loved the juxtaposition of the traditional with modern to create a sense of warmth in that kitchen. 

At the end of “Fundamentals of Interior Design,” students are given two design challenges (one client per week) where they must design from scratch two master bedroom suites for two clients.

It is kind of fun, you know, to the extent that you are given a prospectus (one paragraph description) of each client and their needs, and then you knock yourself out for one week to search for each and every item to go into the room(s), from flooring to faux beams to window treatments and wallcoverings, faucets and fixtures, vanities and sinks, and put it all together into a PowerPoint.

Every surface and finish in the room must be accounted for, just like when I was making room boxes out of wine crates. 

In class, everything you come up with MUST be a real product capable of actually being sourced. If you have a vision, but you cannot translate that vision into saleable products and services to make your vision reality, too bad! It’s a lot of searching for products online, which is, I suppose, an important part of what an ID ends up doing, after they take 60 hours of Technical Drawing, Architectural Drafting, Rendering, AutoCAD, Revit, Sketchup, Lighting, Costing, Presentation Drawing, Kitchen and Bath, Textiles, and Professional Ethics for Designers, apprentice under someone and pass the NCIDQ exam. It isn’t all sitting around playing with pantone decks or making mood boards.

And it is a lot like being a librarian, in fact, which of course, I already am. It is a lot like decorating dollhouses, which I still do.

I can do this! And better, much better, I immediately realized, than my young classmates, who had no knowledge of the past. I should have done this years ago. My sails were turning and a warm wind was filling them up!

My first client, Ryan Humphrey, wanted a bedroom suite (“suite” means it includes a master bath). He “collects vintage cadillacs and leans toward modern.” He races cars for a hobby. Mid-century modern was the obvious choice for Mr. H, a “confirmed bachelor,” but I mixed it up with modern Italian, a sturdy Nella Vetrina leather storage bed, so it didn’t look like a period room or too matchy matchy.

I hypothetically acquired a few original but impeccably restored pieces off of 1st Dibs (I learned about 1st Dibs from an acquaintance of mine, “Metro Retro” Joe Marcinkowski, who owns and sells the largest collection of authentic Mid Century Modern furniture in the US), including a low boy and Adrian Pearsall chairs, whose authenticity a collector like Mr. Humphrey would surely appreciate, as they were made around the same year as his vintage cadillacs. I also found some retro mid-century modern wallpaper, which was really not easy because even today, the major wallpaper design houses are British, and MCM was strictly an American design phenomenon. (The Euro equivalent of MCM is “Scandinavian design.”) Chevron tile in the bathroom echoed the cadillac V logo and its vintage upholstery.

I hit all the points for that project. 

My second clients in week 2 of the design challenge were Cindy and Rita Davidson, “two women expecting a baby,” same last name, so I inferred they were a lesbian couple in need of bedroom suite. It had to be “functional and relaxing.” There were other parameters involved with that one. . . they each have their own sleep and work schedules (clue: the space had to be designed for each to wake and dress without disturbing the other, so task lighting and a walk-in closet). The bedroom was outfitted with pocket doors and a bump out (I put them there, it wasn’t part of the specs) which could be used for a nursery and a home office. The couple like to travel. Not sure to where and I couldn’t ask them.

I chose an eclectic Southwest theme for them, finding a wonderful “Los Rios” fabric from RM COCO to use as the basis for the color palette and I spun everything off of that; plus a pinky “mink” color that is feminine, but not too feminine. They also got a corner fireplace and zellige tiles in the bathroom. . . a walk in closet, for two women would have a lot of clothes. . . a chandelier over the bathtub . . . glider rocking chair. . . art on the walls. I really got into it, eagerly crossing the line from interior design into decoration.

Putting it all together using PowerPoint was fun. As one moves up in the ID program, one learns software techniques for rendering which will be better than Power Point for project boards and making virtual rooms.

Now, the very first assignment in ID (we had less than one week to do this, but I had 2.5 days because I signed up late for the class) is to make a collage to explain “who you are as a designer.” I created this composite based on images I already had on my computer, things I had downloaded because I liked them or some aspect of them. I dragged them over to PowerPoint and voila! Assignment done.

and this:

But she didn’t like mine, particularly. She said (ouch!) it wasn’t enough of “me,” of who I am. Oh, but it is totally me! Ask anyone who knows me! 

She deducted 10 points for its “not being me.” 

The truth is, as time went and I got to see what she liked, I also think she saw my passion for historic decoration as socially irresponsible, or at least out of step with the ID program at HCC, opposed to her spare ethos and ideology of sustainability and eco-friendliness, which I associate in my mind with Western cultural decline and slipping into a Dark Ages. 

“Honestly, who wants to live in a container or pod?” I wrote in a three paragraph essay to demonstrate that I had read and understood the chapter about architects solving real-world problems. An old friend of mine in Dallas would be quick to call it “Cultural Marxism.” Interestingly, though, Cultural Marxists I am sure would would blame “Post-Capitalism” and greed for the state of things today.

Many Conservatives blame it on Neo-Liberalism and the loss of religious values, as if bringing prayer in school back would magically restore the middle class (I taught ELA in public school for a short while–they got rid of the study of English Literature, which is why they call it “ELA” now–and noticed many students no longer stand for the pledge; a public school teacher cannot say anything about it or pretend to notice or care). I would personally like to restore a lot of things, like leather, as in shoes and handbags. Companies want us to pay the same for plastic and claim some moral high ground on their hemp-and-cardboard hang tag that “vegan faux leather” is “better for the environment.” I seriously doubt that! Synthetic shoes take much longer to biodegrade than leather. And bring back cotton, not “moister-wicking polyester,” which isn’t a real thing anyway. Just try drying dishes with it. 

I try to take care of myself spiritually, which I do in part by collecting fabric and wallpaper swatches. I have bins and binders full of them. They make me feel happy, as if they were postcards from old friends in nice places saying, “Wish you were here.” Each one has a personality, expresses a different mood, conjures different feelings and emotions. 

But, in my own defense, I have also recovered a few antique chairs at my house, am in the process of selecting draperies (for real now, not just pretend), and wallpapering a bathroom (that may be just pretend; I do not know how to hang wallpaper except in a dollhouse), so it is not completely impractical or irrational for me to have so many samples and swatches. I’ve even mounted some of them on scrapbook paper so you can see what it might look like against different wall colors.

I’ve been studying designer fabrics for so long I could literally pass an exam! What is the provenance of this sample? What is the style? What are its attributes? What might it be used for? 

And of course, I am studying Interior Design now, after all, which justifies my indulgences in interior fabrics and wallpapers: $2-$5 for a sample is really no big deal. 

I order fabric samples (called “memo samples” because the source and ordering info is on a card on the backside), many of them (my favorites) from the UK, and one day, if the opportunity arises, I will be prepared to help someone else looking for just the right thing, that special fabric, e.g., a pattern perfect for, say, a Tudor Revival bungalow home, which will magically pull the whole room together, that wallpaper which you cannot buy in the stores or see anywhere else in Houston. But speaking from experience, it is always easier to start with a beautiful pattern, then two complementary patterns, and go from there. Wall colors are easy to change and color match, but finding patterned drapes (or comforters) to go with your existing color scheme, furnishings and rug can be an absolute nightmare. I’ve been there many times.

I like American and British Arts and Crafts, Glasgow School, Art Nouveau, and Vienna Secession. . . Roycrofters . . . . Greene and Greene. Whistler’s Peacock Room. I like Edwardian-style, especially . . .  C. F. A. Voysey. Tudor revival. I like antiques, dark walls, natural wood grains, jewel tones, moody spaces, tonalist painting, rich interior fabrics and wallpaper. Chocolate, teal and mink. Purples and golds (my husband calls them “Methodist church colors”), olives and its complementary coral oranges; velvets and roughened silk. I like GP&J Baker and British-inspired designs. I also love the organicism and nouveau vibes of the 70s. I love prints, real prints with texture and dimension and actual works on paper; woven and embroidered jacquard fabrics, of course; real furniture made from real trees with fine wood grain; oil-based stains and paint, hammered metal, evidence of the handmade. I like darkness and warm lighting, intimate spaces. I do not like white walls and chandeliers without shades; I don’t want to look at light bulbs or strips. I hate LEDs. It is ugly cold, unnatural light. Hard on the eyes. The human eye and our mammalian brains have evolved to respond to warm, burning light (I have stockpiled incandescent bulbs, even for the Christmas tree. . . I want gentle glinting light, not glaring diodes!). 

I am obsessed with the Arts and Crafts Revival in all its forms. I feel as if I am a small part of the revival whenever I buy the magazine. 

“How do you buy a French chateau and hang grommet top draperies?” I overhead myself saying in a nasally tone to my best friend a few weeks ago. I despise grommet top drapes, but I suppose I sounded fairly obnoxious saying so. 

In design school, one must suck up criticism. It’s part of the design process. In the end, I made an A in the class, but I had to watch a movie on global warming and write an essay on sustainable design to get that A. 

In my retirement, or next career, whichever comes first, I would really like do so something more creative than be a librarian. It isn’t that I do not like being a librarian per se, but librarianship itself has changed. The academic library I knew and loved and devoted a large portion of my life to is gone. I do not know about special collections being gone, but we don’t have them in Houston, so it is a moot point unless I am willing to abandon my family and run away from home, which has crossed my mind from time to time. 

The academic library was once a beautiful thing, the work of many hands, a cathedral to learning, a sublime experience, its collections a form of scholarly communication–and to me, personally, a daytime cocktail party with interesting, self-actualized people coming and going (at least when I was working the desk and managing the collection, which I actually did for a few years, years ago, before they eliminated print and locked librarians away behind swipe card entry doors)–with the primary service of an academic library being a collection embodying and perpetuating intellectual and cultural knowledge, celebrating the achievements of others and turning people on to things they might like. 

It showcased things educated people ought / would want to know to remain educated, keeping them in the know. It was the essence of goodness and truth, a celebration of academic achievement, the thing that justified the university (now the tables are turned and they expect us to justify ourselves to them!), an experience, what renewed the academic commitments of scholars, and kept research interests from fizzling out. It was worthy of time and devotion, of self-sacrifice and the mediocre pay, in part because it was also permanent, or at least enduring. It stood for knowledge, the life of the mind, objectivity and the pursuit of truth. 

But now, because of progress, it is not that at all, but something else entirely, colorless and unimaginative, a proprietary search engine, and what once defined our very professional practice is gone, or regarded as vestigial and irrelevant to the wider world, in part because we have made it so.

Commitment collections, to vendor neutrality, to intellectual freedom and life-long learning is gone.

What constitutes an academic library today is an aggregation of proprietary commercial subscription databases prefixed by a search box and some citation management tools. EBSCO + ProQuest databases + database C, D, E, F, G . . .  commodities we activate to permit institutional access, set it and forget it, except for processing annual invoices and running usage reports whose results contain no actionable intelligence (we are going to buy the same databases each year). We must proclaim this as “progress in the field” or else be accused of failing to evolve. There is little thought to the user experience of a library beyond search and retrieval, facilitating “access to” vendor products. It’s all “pull” and no “push.” There is no unique library experience, where we represent and preserve bodies of knowledge. Also, most disheartening to me, is that the outside world cannot access our resources anymore, even if they might want to, further diminishing their (and our) value in society. At many institutions, once you graduate, you cannot return to do research. “We are not licensed for that.” That is no answer! Whatever happened to our library professional commitment to life-long learning and intellectual freedom? It is ridiculous that people who graduate from medical or law schools, or with any academic degree, cannot return to access academic libraries to do research. That is ridiculous.

Of course, people also ask, “We have databases and search engines now, so why do we need libraries or librarians?” People always ask me that. . . it is pointless to answer them. Whatever a librarian says regarding librarianship is always suspect anyway.

I am no technophobe or Luddite. For thirty years, I have ridden the wave of automation in libraries and museums, even sometimes been at the forefront of the wave, even working myself out of a job on more than one occasion, a bit too eager to demonstrate my value. (The new website, the proxy server, serials solutions, system upgrade, instant messaging, inventory program and half a dozen other things were completed within three months of hire at the theological seminary. But no one can live on 38K in the San Francisco Bay Area, let alone with two small children in full-day daycare.) 

To be completely honest, I am not seeing too many waves these days, another reason I am keen on pursuing yet another credential even though I am, arguably, close to retirement. All I see are hospitals and clinics springing up all over all around me, and freeways and cars going nowhere. I have no idea why the traffic here in Houston is so bad (and why are people here so sick or clumsy that we need urgent cares on every corner). The more freeways they build, the worse the traffic gets. Where is everyone going? “Probably to their second jobs,” my husband offered. 

However, I was very pleased and surprised to discover, when I took my husband to the new UTMB hospital for emergency gallbladder surgery, that UTMB has pretty good taste in art. Throughout their new hospital, they have reproduced the paintings of Galveston artist Rene Wiley and painted the walls to enhance the experience of the art, just like museums do. I wandered the entire hospital admiring the art, hunting for more and more Rene Wiley pieces. I even took one son on a gallery walk around the hospital and he too was impressed with the art. UTMB’s medical offices also have surprisingly good art, too. I recognized reproductions of the work of commercial artist, Norman Wyatt Jr, at my own doctor’s office. Well done, UTMB! I could do that job, buying art for hospitals and doctor’s offices. 

I got my MLIS degree before the Internet, during what is sometimes considered the high point of publishing in the US, more than a decade before Google. No one saw it coming in the late 80s (Hot Tub Time Machine is one of my all-time favorite movies!). At the end of the 80s and into the 90s, my expertise was in bibliographic metadata, special collections, historic prints and descriptive bibliography. English Lit. Art History. Rare books and Manuscripts. Latin Paleography, Medieval and Neo-Latin poetry (as mentioned, the Contemptus Mundi tradition, pastoral fantasy, Edwardiana; and, above all: the influence of Christianity on British literature, art, and various design reform movements . . . the Anglo-Catholic Movement and Gothic Revival of Pugin, then Ruskin, and his disciple, Morris, who influenced Stickley, who influenced Frank Lloyd Wright . . . ). I also learned Unix. Also Perl. C++, too. VB and VBA. SQL. JavaScript–all that stuff was once needed for library technical services, where now our systems are hosted, managed for us.

Ancient Greek too, for reading Homer, the Gospels, Plato and Aristotle. I loved Greek; also teaching ecclesiastic Latin to elementary school students at a private, rogue Catholic school, as intriguing as that sounds. At Cardinal Newman, I developed a graduated curriculum for all grades, infused with personal mottos (every child in my class had one, with a coat of arms), Harry Potter, certamen games, the Latin Vulgate, Catholic doxology and traditional songs (like Adeste Fideles, a.k.a., “Come all Ye Faithful”). I taught Art and Art History there, too; one very successful project was a Vanitas collage (I let my kids cut up my cherished Connoisseur magazines for images of luxury items, a true act of devotion); another was a Mary crayon-resist watercolor wash for Mother’s Day. When the school closed, and a few times before then, I was told I was the best Latin teacher the school had ever had. It helped that I have a collection of rare books which I acquired back in the day, and a large classics library consisting of discards from libraries at universities who no longer teach Classics. That school specifically requested ecclesiastic Latin (which is Medieval Latin), my specialty. 

In library school, I specialized in descriptive bibliography, a.k.a. “Cataloging,” which is where were learn how to properly describe a bibliographic / intellectual object. (Naturally, I was interested in Latin books and incunabula.) Museums have a similar, but less descriptive record which is called a “tombstone record” (as in, what basic information is preserved in perpetuity on a tombstone or epitaph). A number of years ago, the Getty Research Institute, who publishes the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, tried to advance a new, more descriptive cataloging standard for art museums, similar to what libraries use, which would also necessarily make their own vocabularies more purposeful. I worked on this grant-funded project at the MFAH, although many curators, the modernists mainly, there were ideologically opposed to description and “labels” (It isn’t a label, it’s metadata, I explained again and again). “Description is interpretation.” they said. “Who are we to interpret a work?” Um, I thought that is what Curators did, no? No, that is what art historians do. We want to be able to spin a work way and that. We don’t like “labels.” I was undeterred. I mined MFAH and art history publications for metadata to allow for a good CCO/CDWA record and an apt descriptive title in the absence of one. The project was a success, the Curators loved it, but the grant ended and my boss jumped over to the Menil Collection, leaving me a lose ends in the Registrar’s Office at the MFAH. Plus Dr. Marzio, the Director, had died and they were on a hiring freeze until a new Director could be found.

Years prior, I helped to launch the Americana Exchange, now the Rare Book Hub, an online auction site for collections of Americana started by Bruce McKinney, whom I met in San Francisco. I had been driving up and down the California coast looking for a library job, since Houston was tapped out of library jobs. He invited me to his home to show me his collection of Americana and I went, although I was apprehensive about going to a stranger’s home (I Googled him and saw he was legit, and his pretty wife came to the door, which put me at ease). I became a “bibliographer” for AE. I returned to Houston. I wrote a few articles to create content and help promote the new site. Then I went to work for an Art Institute in San Diego where I set up both a new campus library and also design library to support their Interior Design program. On my salary, which sounded grand by Houston standards, I qualified to live in low-income housing (not Section-8, but a special program in California for salaried renters like teachers and librarians), which is what I did, living in hipster North Park and driving just a few minutes into posh Mission Valley for work.

Later, I had a fantastic opportunity and made good money, for me, when I went to San Francisco, but that software company closed two years later in the recession of 2008 (that was the one with the bank bailouts). One evening at a company party, I got to meet the “son of Adobe (founder John Warnock),” Christopher Warnock, who is a philosophy major and letterpress enthusiast. I do know a thing or two about letterpresses and traditional printing techniques. Did I mention I am a former Curator of a printing museum? I didn’t know “who he was” until my boss said, “Emily, do you know who that is you were talking to all night?” Glad I didn’t know, because had I known, I never would have talked to him! Honestly, I thought he was just some dude crashing the (black tie) party, because that is what he looked like. Some scruffy guy in jeans who came in off the street to get something to eat. Like the prince and pauper, California millionaires like to go around disguised as homeless people. They shop at Target. It’s a thing out there.

After the Great Recession of 2008, a time when angel investors divested themselves of start-ups, and many start-ups companies like mine (Groxis, Inc.) shut down, my husband and I returned to Houston because Obama was offering 8K for first-time homebuyers and by then we had two kids. We couldn’t afford to buy in the SF Bay Area anywhere where the schools were above a 2 or 3. We  tried and tried, even going out to less desirable areas, like “Stockton.” He could get a transfer back to Houston, same employer.

While in California, my husband and I traveled around and took photos of old mission-style churches and a few historic homes, which I loved. I even wrote an article for American Bungalow, a historic home being renovated and converted into a bed and breakfast which I discovered on a backroad of Napa. I delighted in the Arts and Crafts antiques in the stores around Ocean Beach in San Diego, which had more Ellis-inspired designs, with his signature peacock feather inlay. We discovered a stone church from 1894 with original Tiffany glass on Coronado and tried to photograph it, but we really needed a tripod in that dim light. Later, we rummaged the salvage yards around Berkeley and discovered wonderful old doors, windows, hardware, ornament and stained glass, some extracted from old churches.

We vowed to one day return with a truck after we had a home of our own. When we went back to the Bay Area (no truck, but better camera), I couldn’t get near the most significant example of the Mission Revival style in Berkeley, St. Mark’s Church. Too many homeless were there that day, it was like a zombie apocalypse to get to the front doors. I walked toward the door, but they rose up out of the grass to approach me for change, or else because they thought I was one of them and it was time to go inside the church to eat. I fled back to the car. While in Berkeley that same day, we swung by Serendipity Books, a famous used and rare book store, only to discover it was closing for good.

What was happening to my world?

Barbarians and usurpers rummaging the carcass of Empire. . .

One of the philosophers I studied in school was Hegel, who believed (I think all 18th-19th century Germans did, it was just part of their Zeitgeist) in an invisible force or presence called the Zeitgeist (discussed in Phenomenology of the Spirit and elsewhere). By the way, this force is the same thing as Adam Smith’s invisible hand, or where he got the idea from. Also, Karl Marx’s dialectic, same Idea with the capital i. It applies to libraries, too. Through collections, organization and display–through materiality–the library served as a mouthpiece for the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age, the collective unconscious which gives rise to culture. Culture is always a collective, and really collections are the only way for the Spirit to make its presence known to us. Has the Spirit gone online? Only time will tell. Librarians once organized titles into visible collections so that culture, the Zeitgeist, could be fully expressed and experienced by others, much in the way pagan ceremonies attempt to manifest deities in smoke from burning incense, without which, the spirits cannot take shape. Collections are about context, meaning, the broad brush, movements, the big picture, not just “access to” books or information. Meh! That is such an uninspired view of our professional practice.

And presumably, these days, no one is needed to organize anything for anyone else because we have search engines. We’ve gone from a curated experience to a self-serve Dairy Queen. And despite our best efforts to preserve texts and the records of them for the future, the books are all gone. They are not online either, as many people assume. 

They are all at my house, because I took them home when the library got rid of its collections.

I brought home books on the history of interiors and design, art and art history, including some beautifully illustrated books with engravings and chromolithographs for plates. (I was certain that they would be worth something some day, but now I’m really not so sure.) I have collected books on illustration, historic design and art as long as I can remember, often drawing from the pages or incorporating decorative motifs and patterns into my paintings. Architects who became successful illustrators and artists have a place of honor on my shelves. Many designed textiles, wallpaper and furniture. Stickley gets way too much credit. It was the work of American architect Harvey Ellis who designed the pieces which are most sought after today by collectors. I have a rare book on Ellis and a CD of every issue of American Craftsman which I think I got from the HRC in Austin when then they were digitizing them. I remember now, I drove to Austin to see them and they kindly gave the images to me on a CD, professional courtesy. 

I am also fastidious in my own way, just like a real ID would be. I recently ordered two Hinkley light fixtures and was bitterly disappointed, just as any real interior designer would be. I want my antiqued bronze fixtures to look like antiqued bronze, not black. Black is not “antique bronze.” Is bronze the new black? No! I told Hinkley so, that their descriptions of color online are misleading, but I kept the black light fixtures out of sheer practicality, meaning I liked them better than anything at Lowe’s or Home Depot. 

No, despite losing major points on my design projects at the community college, I think I would really make an excellent ID. I know the difference between “ecru,” “taupe” and “beige.” I can still draw. 

I used to be a whiz at furniture provenance (as mentioned above, I took a “Furniture Appreciation” course in my first semester at The University of Texas in 1979, but my years of dollhouses and Dover books gave me a real leg up in that class!). I am still a walking Grammar of Ornament, another Dover book I still own, along with Speltz’s The Styles of Ornament, and Projective Ornament by Claude Bragdon, so mysterious and beautiful! Not like those Wayfair people who insist on lumping everything with a pattern or more than two colors into the fake category of “boho.” I know suzani and ikat, for example. And Jacobean. Not that I can define these necessarily, but I definitely know them when I see them. I know the provenance of patterns, even certain color combinations. Of course, I love British-inspired design most of all, and most things built, written, published, created or designed ca. 1890 to 1925. I collect illustrated books from that time period as well. 

Another challenge–or an assignment with a short deadline–I had in that class was one where we had to research two architectural design companies in Houston who hire IDs, one commercial and the other residential, and compare them.

My prof hated my choice of David Weekley. . . she took off major points for that. . . but it isn’t like she provided the class with a pick list. I myself live in a DW home. Everyone in my neighborhood does, too. She said that David Weekley is not an architectural designer of residential homes. I don’t know why not. He hires architects to design his homes, I would assume. He (it is family-owned, there is indeed a “David Weekley”) sometimes hires Interior Designers, as I showed on Indeed.com. I thought that was the whole purpose of the assignment, to identify where we were potentially going to work after design school. She also asked us to “describe the culture” there, too, but I didn’t know how to do this because Glassdoor was forcing me to rate my current employer before I could get in to see the reviews, and I didn’t want to do that. What was I supposed to do, call up random people at David Weekley and Gensler and say, “Tell me. How do you like working there? What’s it like? How do you like your job and your co-workers?” 

Right. No, I wasn’t going to do that. . . She counted off more points! 

Gensler was my commercial AD. I know of Gensler only because they design and build libraries. But I suspect from their website that Gensler hires only beautiful people to work for them. My presentation is below.

Also during this class, I had to design a kitchen. That was the first project, actually.

I loved the kitchen I designed on paper because of the rippled opaque glass in the upper cabinets which would add fire and movement through reflected light, but I was uncomfortable not knowing how to calculate the amount of light needed for the space because my walls and finishes were dark, like a small playhouse theatre.

The kitchen was an intimate, cave-like space with slate (porcelain emulating slate, because we know real slate has durability issues) floors, and an island in the middle for cooking over fire with glinting, reflected light in the glass and copper. The palette was green, charcoal and copper with some ivory tan enamel trim. I haven’t taken lighting yet, so I wasn’t sure how many recessed lights, pendants and central fixtures were needed so the eye could discern that the color of the island was a dark green, not charcoal grey or black, and that there was enough light on the countertops. I wanted a warm, burning light, not soupy and diffuse LEDs, with their notoriously poor CRV (Color Reflective Value). That year, we still had a choice of lamps (now all alternatives to LED are banned). That people see the true color of the island was important to me. I’m sure there are algorithms for light which can be applied in these situations. Or maybe designers use software like SketchUp and the algorithm figures it all out for them.

I asked my professor, but she did not respond to my email about methods for calculating the proper amount of light needed in a room with dark finishes. I haven’t taken “Lighting for Interiors” yet.

I got dinged on the light fixtures, not because I didn’t put enough in, but because I couldn’t source them. I broke a cardinal rule of design class. I tried, and in all honesty, I deserved to be dinged. But they really made the space! I offered alternatives, but this prof doesn’t like choices.

“Don’t provide me with your choices! Present me with your vision!”

My greatest interior design challenge will be to get on with a company with a product or service I love. I am ambitious, but I have been known to chase unicorns.

That is also what I like best about me, however. I consider it to be my best quality, in fact!

For example, I have written to a few companies who sell historic wallpapers and textiles, companies I like, asking them if they could use a Sales Rep. in the Houston area.

Most of the companies whose products I like are headquartered or have showrooms in Dallas, not Houston. RM COCO and Loloi are not here, for example–I need to go to Dallas to see their stuff, but I have no legitimate business justification or excuse for driving four hours to go there just to look at fabrics I cannot buy because I am not a member of the trade and I cannot afford anyway. I like Graham & Brown wallpapers, although their custom draperies leave a lot to be desired, quality-wise. I love many of the carpet designs by Momeni (I purchased three when Robert’s Carpets near me was liquidating their rug gallery), an overlooked source for Arts and Crafts / Revival rugs with a modern styling. One company I discovered a few years ago which you probably haven’t heard of is Bradbury & Bradbury, in Benicia, CA. 

Bradbury & Bradbury is so great! They even make dollhouse versions of their historic wallpapers, which of course, I have. 

Even though they are not open to the public, I’ve been inside of the B&B workshop where wallpaper is still made by hand through an elaborate silk screen process. I have seen this with my own eyes because we used to live in Vallejo, next to Benicia, and I showed up there one day with my family (standing way in the distance to not be in that particular photo) and knocked on the door. We were treated to a demonstration. One color is put down at a time, carefully moving frame by frame, to make a wallpaper frieze.

At the end, it looked like this:

We loved the tour and seeing the beautiful samples on their walls. At least I did. They have many lovely designs, and the silkscreen process gives their wallpapers a sense of dimension. Some patterns are complex, requiring layer upon layer of perfectly stenciled silkscreen to get it right:

Historic neighborhoods which have Victorian homes and bungalows would make excellent B&B customers.

Maybe one day I could represent Bradbury & Bradbury or Morris & Co., or even boutique firms who have reproduced historic wallpapers from archives of the V&A Museum, which has become a cottage industry in England. In my gypsy caravan of samples, my collection, of everything good from everywhere in the world–and I know, for I keep up with these companies despite American Bungalow magazine folding–Arts and Crafts Revival hasn’t, I bought a copy yesterday–I could travel to St. Pete where there is a new museum dedicated entirely to the Arts and Craft Movement!

And as I discovered to my great delight when visiting St. Pete, there are historic neighborhoods full of bungalows all around there. Who even knew bungalow homes were in Florida? Step this way to order museum-quality reproduction wallpapers, friezes, window treatments and interior fabrics! I might think to put postcards or sample books in Sherwin Williams locations, because, astonishingly, SW is the only place left in many cities to actually see any wallpaper sample books.

For a start, if I had my ID credential, I could meet clients and sell right out of Sherwin Williams. That’s right, Sherwin Williams. 

This is another unicorn scheme of mine, but really it is more about Sherwin Williams than me. I’m convinced that Sherwin Williams retail locations, which are everywhere, could sell more paint and compete with Lowe’s and Home Depot–after all, Lowe’s now sells Sherwin Williams paint, so why does anyone bother even going to SW?–if they pushed wallpaper and window treatments, a neighborhood design center, right there in their stores, becoming a one-stop shop for interior design and DIYers. Many locations in Houston, including the one by me, even have a coffee maker and a large table seemingly designed for looking through oversized wallpaper books, an excellent start. They just need the vision, the marketing, the sample books, and someone to manage them.

Also, along the same lines as this, I don’t understand why the Amish furniture store in Houston sells mission furniture and not soft furnishings and lamps to go with Arts and Crafts style. That makes no sense. Rugs, lamps, accessories and artwork are low-hanging fruit. The Amish are missing out on potential sales by insisting on being so plain. (Historically, you know, the Amish had nothing to do with Arts and Crafts style! Shaker was always their thing. But I suspect their furniture is not handmade, either.)

From what I have seen in Houston, there are many designers who cater to the 1% who can afford Schumacher, Thibault, Lee Jofa, Scalamandre, Carole and GP & J Baker. We are talking, hmm, $300 to $500 a yard or more. Well, at least $150. . . It all depends on the fabric, of course. Even their scraps on eBay are exorbitant. Who is buying them off eBay, I ponder, as I myself browse remnants and discontinued sample books. Rich quilters? Frustrated decorators? Pillow makers?

And how many others like me are there out there, I wonder, as I see GP&J Baker memo samples with gromets in them selling on eBay for ridiculous sums. 

Maybe lots of people, perhaps most people, like what I like! 

Houston has no shortage of lux showrooms, which is surprising to me, since most of the city is a slum, at least compared to how Houston used to look when I was growing up here. (People above a certain age refer to what used to be here as “Old Houston.”) I know that there are “some nice areas,” as if I didn’t know about Bellaire, West U or River Oaks! Here is one person’s more eloquent description of Houston on Quora: “Houston presents a dramatic example of high-poverty neighborhoods radiating out into the suburbs, sprawling alongside America’s now fourth-largest city. Meaningful reductions in poverty have only occurred in the downtown core of the city. Elsewhere, high levels of poverty have persisted in many close-in neighborhoods, while suburbs and exurbs, especially to the east of downtown, have seen increasing poverty take root in areas that were once comfortably middle class.” I read recently that Houston has more newly poor neighborhoods than all of Detroit. 

Indeed, this makes me question the viability of Interior Design as a career choice for the next phase of my life, but I wouldn’t necessarily hang out my own shingle, even though I would love to.

Ideally, I’d work for a vendor. They have “Resource Librarians.” 

Thing is, if were to work for a vendor, I’d have to like their fabric, or whatever it is they design, manufacture, sell, or procure. I would want to believe in it, not just pretend to like it.

It will likely be my last job, what will make my whole life up until now make sense. “Oh, I see where you were going!” anyone would say looking at my resume, as if all this time I had complete control over my life and my career trajectory, rather than having to make do with whatever was within 25 miles or one hour commute from my suburban home in SE Houston, where we ended up, just like everyone else who lives there, because the homes are affordable, the neighborhood is safe, and schools are good. Geography is destiny they say. But for the record, I believe in Kravet, not so much “Holland and Sherry,” for example. I realize, though, when placed in certain contexts, almost any fabric, even the ugliest couch, can look good. It just has to make sense in the context of the room. (It is a conversation, one piece plays off another.) And ideally, I want to talk to people, not sit in an empty room of bins stuffing envelopes. That’s just sad . . . but maybe if they offered me a good discount on fabric, it might be OK . . . And despite my own aesthetic tastes and preferences, I’m an intellectually curious person, open minded, eager to discover what are your colors? What is your style? What do you like about that? Maybe you will see something in it that I haven’t seen before to better appreciate it myself. I would be the sort of person who would say, “if you like this, you’ll probably like that,” and maybe (if it were allowed) stuffing into the mailer a few more samples than what was requested, writing on a sticky “Give these a try!” with a smiley face.

Houston also has a Design Center open to “members of the trade.” I went in anyway, no one stopped me. I wanted to see other Arts and Crafts-inspired wallpaper books by GP & J Baker after I came across one intriguing memo book at High Fashion (which I think is closing, or getting rid of interior fabrics?). But, apart from my calling Houston a slum and hating grommet-top drapes, I am more a woman of the people. Or more realistically, I have no desire to sell what I myself could never myself conceivably in a million years buy (like Roche Bobois), which I suppose is a bit limiting from a Design Sales perspective.

But Sherwin Williams already has the store locations where the 99% live. I think I know the product lines in the price points of the people who shop at Sherwin Williams. Middle class DIYers whose home is all they have, so they want to make the best of it. RM COCO and P. Kaufmann (do I use a slash or a period after the P?), another favorite, not Lee Jofa, not Mulberry, not GP&J Baker. I doubt people around here are spending over 4K for two custom draperies by Carole, whose books you will find at Ethan Allan, and one other place I know, a spritely widow who runs a legacy drapery store who these days mainly sells motorized blinds (You can stand outside her shop and yell “Good morning!” at the windows and the motorized blinds will go up). With rents being so high now, she had to close her location in Friendswood where she had been forever and move into a strip mall next to a “vape shop.” 

There is another lady in Galveston with a shop open by appointment only (I went in anyway, I had to pee, and luckily for me, she was was expecting a very important client that morning) who deals only in Fabricut/ Trend, which is really strange to me with all of the historic homes down there. Seriously, you’re showing Fabricut/ Trend to the Bishop’s Palace? I wish I had a store on the Strand. . . or Post Office street . . . specializing in historic wallpapers, fabrics, lighting, tile, art, salvage and hard to source architectural elements for historic homes.

I would be great at that!

For interior fabrics, I wouldn’t just carry one or two product lines, like my competition, but have a whole resource library in a variety of price points so people could sit, have coffee, go though the many sample books at their leisure, even check them out to see what the fabric looks like in their home. 

Getting back to price points . . . I know exactly who would be in that middle class sweet spot of $30-65 / yard. I know I would do a whole lot better–well, just about anyone could–than the back few rows of interior fabrics at Joanne’s. What is Joanne’s problem anyway? It’s like they are not even trying! Not only is their selection of interior fabric very boring, it never changes, I mean for years; and there they force you to lift the whole heavy wide bolt off the rack and carry it up to the cutting table, no samples allowed. I tell women I meet there–and I have met many since at Joanne’s, one is forced to stand in two excruciatingly long lines, one for cutting and one for paying–to just go down to Fondren and spend the day. I know it is far away, a 40-mile round trip, and the area is now seedy–bring a friend with you–but especially after you have hit Sunny Road (What an asset to Houston! Her store is better than the whole Design Center!) and Interior Fabrics (I’m not a fan of that place, but you can at least get in and out in a minute, easily seeing all that they have tacked up on their walls), Perfect Window is a real treat: all interior fabrics are $15 /yard (as opposed to $150 / yard across the street) and they let you bring in scissors to cut your own samples. You can wander around that dark opium den of interior fabric bolts and cut away, no one bothers you; you can find some really nice jacquards there, the sort you flip over and the colors are completely different on the underside (How does that even work? How is one side red and other blue?). When you are ready to buy yardage, someone will kindly carry the bolt to the front for you. It is a high point of my trip down there, so I save it for last, the bottom of a fabric flume ride!

Due to an unfortunate accident with an upstairs toilet at our house, I can also tell you all the very best tile showrooms in town. If you have already visited Floor & Decor, everyone’s starting point, then the Daltile and the Emser showrooms on Fuque–I find personally objectionable Emser’s ersatz ink jet prints of photos of marble and wood laminated onto tile–Gustav Stickley would be turning in his grave!–and Design Sales consultants, please do not insult my intelligence by telling me that 12 x 24 porcelain planks will make my tiny bathroom seem bigger, because we all know it doesn’t work that way. After that, there is Keystone (five stars, excellent showroom! Well worth the drive. . . candy bowls with chocolate bars, too, always appreciated after a long drive out a dusty barren highway), Stone Source (never been, but I like what I see on Linkedin). . . and more. You can tile crawl for days on end here in Houston, burning a lot of gas and never reaching the end of the tile selection. You will probably end up back at Floor & Decor buying that blah gray plank flooring and white subway tiles (well, mine are technically Artisan Oyster and they have some movement to them with deckled edges to resemble something hand-made) even though you told yourself when you started that you were not going to do that. Thing is, if you live in a house like mine, and I think most people outside of Houston’s inner loop do, slate and marble just don’t look right, especially for the upstairs family bathroom. If I had to do it over again, I would not have selected a JM Vanity but allowed the USAA-approved remediation specialists to do built ins, which would have saved a lot of money and eliminated the unsightly gap of a few inches between the countertop and the wall we have now with a standalone high-end vanity not intended for a small bathroom. That dust-collecting gap of fallen toothbrushes and washcloths is considered a “design flaw.” I just didn’t trust their taste in cabinetry after how they did the wall texture, which I had to take a sander to.

These are all invaluable lessons for me as an ID.

For some reason I haven’t been able to figure out, Houston is a tile and stone slab mecca. Honestly, why so much stone and tile but no interior fabric or rugs? Must be a lot of echoing homes out there. On the high end is Pomogranite, which has good artisan tile. If you want a stone listello for your bathroom or mosaic tile backsplash, that is the place (They carry New Ravenna!) By the way, don’t go to Ferguson for vanities. I know a discount outlet out on Hempstead Hwy where you can pick up authentic James Martin Vanity and other designer bathroom vanities for a 1/3 the price. I know good sources for quality doors, too, a family-owned business, son goes to Texas A&M but works in the store summers to help his aged parents, arthritic store dog, quality solid-core mahogany doors; but also in another awful part of town with tanker trucks barreling down on you. You’ll pay the same price at Lowe’s for fiberglass. 

And I know this workroom, a little rundown place never open on Saturdays and which always looks closed whenever you drive by, because for some reason they blackened their windows with film. They never answer the phone, I think because they do not speak English confidently. You just have to go and try the door. They are a best kept secret in Southeast Houston, Pearland actually, since the other workrooms on our side have closed. They have racks of memo samples nobody has ever seen before. It stumped me even, and I really know my sources . . . next time I go, I’m going to use Google image search to get to the bottom it. When I asked the guy, I think he is Vietnamese, he said “Magnolia” (as in Joanna Gaines’s Magnolia?), “That all Magnolia fabric!” but I don’t believe him. Jo puts her name on everything. 

Calico does the same thing–white labeling with their own names and numbers–to keep you from buying the fabric from “Fabric Guru” or “Fabric Carolina” and making drapes yourself, or taking the fabric to a workroom like to that guy above, which is exactly what I would do, because, even as a design student and member of AISD, I am not a “member of the trade,”; but I can almost always figure Calico’s out. It’s pretty obvious to me, probably to most people in the trade (or anyone with Google image search on their phones), and sometimes on a roll the name of the designer is right there, printed on the edge: “P/ Kaufmann.” I know my GP&J. I know Scalamandre (Who wants zebras on a red field, or zebras at all? And why the arrows? Who would hunt or hurt a zebra?). You can spot Ralph Lauren a mile away, it still looks like the 80s. But there are always good things at Calico. Their buyer does a great job curating the store. I wish one would open in Clear Lake, for we have no place to buy window treatments or wallcoverings. Calico charges $100 for each lux memo sample you take home and they refund your card when you bring them back. One day, I left Montrose and drove back to Clear Lake with $1,000 in memo samples! All very high end, including GP&J Baker’s “Pumpkins.” I worried the whole way home and back: what if I get into a car wreck and the samples get ruined? I was really looking forward to seeing what such fine fabrics would do for my demode home. However, they looked much better in the store, and frankly, what a relief to have my desire for costly fabrics extinguished.

Another workroom was in League City for many years next to the city library, an ancient Chinese couple who had a peg wall of Kast interior fabric books. I’d never heard of Kast! Kast is local? I got very excited. I went to go see them because I wanted to find out if they had even more books I had not seen at the workroom, and if they designed their own fabrics there, or how did it all work? 

Kast used to be in Pasadena across from Metro Retro’s Furniture warehouse, in another gritty, razor-wired, industrial part of town. They were in that location on Preston, they told me, because a part of their business at one time was car upholstery. They didn’t sell to the public, they are wholesalers (but they were selling remnants that Saturday), so I suppose it didn’t matter where they were. Kast had some pretty good interior fabrics, nice weights, small to medium scale prints, adventurous color combinations, and very reasonably priced. I was impressed! They also shared that for a long time, COVID prevented them from being able to fulfill orders for interior fabric since their fabric is made in China and they couldn’t get their containers into the ports. I never did find out who actually designed their fabrics, though. There were no designers there, or Apple computers, or drafting tables, just some bookkeeper ladies standing around. They didn’t seem to know much. Now they are closed, or they moved to the far north side of town. 

I just love poking around places that are not technically open to the public. I’m really looking forward to exploring Dallas’ Design District some day. 

I could be really good at this, I think. I could really do something good here and help a lot of people, if only I had the chance and some ID credential to back me up! 

The store manager at the SW location by me, who looks like a scruffy John Goodman and sort of knows me by now, was skeptical when I pitched to him my concept for “Sherwin Williams Neighborhood Design Centers.” In my idea’s defense, I said, “Hey, if I bought my ‘Dover White’ paint from you for almost $100 a gallon because it perfectly coordinated with the A Street ‘Anemone’ wallpaper I found in this wallpaper book in your store, other people will do the same.”

No one but you ever looks at those books, he informed me. Most other stores have gotten rid of them (true, one day I went around to all Sherwin Williams stores in my area to see what wallpaper books they had left). People just come in and buy paint. No, I said, explaining his business to him. Contractors are buying your paint. But guess who is picking out the paint colors and telling the contractors what to buy? Whenever I come in here, more and more wallpaper books are missing (Did you know your Vincent Van Gogh wallpaper book from BN wallcoverings in the Netherlands is gone? Some A Street books are gone, too.) and they are always all flopped over. Clearly, other people are using them. And no one else has them in Houston but SW! Lowe’s doesn’t have them! No one else in Houston who sells paint also has wallpaper sample books. But guess what? Lowe’s is now selling your paint. So, you should at least put out a sign letting people driving by on Hwy 3 know that you also sell wallpaper! Get more books in here. I promise you you will sell more paint. Then, branch out into widow coverings! Offer a samples /design resource library. Make this area into a neighborhood design center! 

He couldn’t see the potential of an in-store design center, and it probably wasn’t his call anyway.

He walked back to his post behind the paint counter and vacantly gazed out the store front, cars whizzing by on Highway 3, a road to Galveston lined with tank farms, vein clinics, auto repairs in total disrepair, bail bondsmen, dog kennels, halal fried chicken, Asian massage, smoke shops, boat storage places, all negatively impacting our home values. I could tell, and not just from this one conversation, that he wanted nothing to do with wallpaper or home décor, or that little corner of his store which made him feel just a bit uncomfortable. If ever a customer headed in that direction, he would bark defensively, “If you need help with wallpaper, call the 1-800 number! I can’t help you with that!” 

I really wondered what he really thought about Lowe’s now selling Sherwin Williams paint. If I were in Cleveland, I might walk into their home office and make my case for Sherwin Williams Neighborhood Design Centers.

I fell in love with that idea. 

“But what would you get out of it?” my husband inquired, meaning, as always, how would it benefit us financially. He is an accountant/CPA, and always asks those kinds of practical questions, completely ignoring the big picture. “I don’t have the details all worked out yet,” I reassured him, even though, as with many of my unicorn schemes, money really had absolutely nothing to do with it. I was, as always, lamenting the degradation and loss of our material and visual culture (like why cars today all look the same and are only black, white, gray; we used to have a wide range of color choices, like chocolate brown, mist green, teal and powder blue . . .) and thinking that a library with wallpaper and drapery sample books, a design resource library inside of Sherwin Williams, would be a great resource for our area. Something nice for a change!

But I live in a suburb of Houston, and realistically, I, a 59-year old librarian and former medievalist, Arts and Crafts revivalist and Anglophile, taking interior design classes at a community college, can only do just so much to keep our visual, intellectual and material culture from completely. . .  slipping . . .  away.