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.  It’s like an elective or something, not anything serious one need be concerned with.

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 failing businesses to my eldest sister and her husband. “It wasn’t for me. Too many gays,” he said, referring to his own discomfort with the salesmen at interior fabric showrooms and trade shows, a very different world from the automotive parts industry he was used to. He later mentioned that he gave the business to my sister and her husband because they had 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–or English, or 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 a preparatory high school, St. John’s in New York, 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 (now “Williams”) 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. My mother 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, sharp at a tack in business, but she doesn’t understand you because she never went to college. . . ). I left home at 17 to go to The University of Texas, so I missed out on the adult relationship with her that my much older sisters enjoyed. We did not have much of a relationship, I think because she was just done with motherhood, and had nothing more to give to the cause by the time I came along, so many years after my sisters. She’d had surgery for ovarian cysts which made another pregnancy unlikely, so it was assumed I was another ovarian cyst until the doctor detected a faint heartbeat, like Horton Hears a Who! Not that it mattered to me that she didn’t want to raise me. I was brought up to be a “whole person,” someone who needed no one else to be happy. 

Independence was the major theme of my entire upbringing. Dad advised: “Don’t get married, Emmy. Write books.” I tried my best to live up to the stoic ideal both parents imposed on me, even believing it 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. True story: When I was 22, when I first moved to Madison, I went to a psychiatrist asking why I could not be happy in my apartment alone for days not speaking to anyone, and if there might be something wrong with me. Was I “co-dependent”? I didn’t like that feeling, not being a whole person. A whole person had zero emotional drag and could do great things in this world.

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 like guilt. He wrote me long letters on legal paper trying to convince me that he felt nothing, despite having been married to her for over 30 years. He felt justified by his own mortality. 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, but I could not afford to render opinions. For most of the late 80s and early 90s, I was away at school anyway, consumed with my studies and fairly insulated from the calamitous changes 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. 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 Dad couldn’t have waited until after my important interview, instead of ringing my room at 5:30am to share the bad news. But I suppose it was incumbent upon me to curtail the all-day interview planned weeks in advance with the search committee because my mother had died. Plus, the ticket home had been purchased for me by my father, who was clueless that interviews for faculty appointments usually run the entire day. I flew home from Philadelphia to attend the funeral proceedings in Houston, staying alone in the empty house, making a small pile of things I wanted, just my own stuff and mother’s day gifts from me my mother saved, nothing of any monetary value–they were to be mailed to me; but all of my things, including the room boxes, my art, books, diaries and dollhouses were discarded anyway, by accident, even though I was the only adult child who had ever actually lived in that house. Everyone was too busy with their adult lives to be bothered sending me my things, and what was left behind went to estate liquidators. What I wanted was not of any value anyway, as opposed to say, a painting by Signac or Guillaumin, or some antique Tabriz rug, bronze statues, baccarat crystal or Limoges flatware. Being the youngest child 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 even longer. People are generally oblivious to 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 no sense to most people, especially since doctorates in the Humanities seem a dime a dozen. And sometimes it takes even longer than eight years, you know, to write a dissertation, so that makes it nine or ten years in actuality. That is a really long time to not be employed in what is considered prime working years (I am reminded of that joke: A hiring manager says to the candidate, we’d like to make you an offer, but we were wondering if you might explain the five year gap on your resume. The candidate answers, “Oh that’s when I went to Yale.” “OK, well, then, you’re hired!” The candidate responds, “Thank you, because I really need this yob!”). Despite my father’s promises of support through a doctorate and saying, “Don’t worry about the money,” which he often did to assuage my fears, I was constantly worried about it, because I couldn’t see what was there, and I rightly suspected that he wasn’t really good for it anyway, another reason to obtain the MLIS first.

This strategy, by the way, is called using the MLIS as a “hopper” degree 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 to compensate for low pay. Although as I discovered, just as many people, probably more, get a master’s or doctorate in a subject area, find themselves to be unemployable, and then go back to get an MLIS in the hope of obtaining stable employment in an academic library. To able to teach, or to be competitive as an academic librarian in the ever tightening job market, I certainly would need a doctorate, or at least another master’s in a subject discipline. Curatorship in Special Collections was another attractive option, but the second MA was absolutely necessary for that, too.

A recession was on in 1990/1, the year of my graduation, and no one was hiring librarians, let alone of the  academic variety. 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 disenchanted academic drop-outs, 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. The hopper degree strategy was a Catch-22.

As one bow-tied librarian asserted years later, when I was on an interview with the library at SMU, at a time when I had just given birth to my son and my husband was laid off (in Houston we were facing homelessness, using the last of our savings to drive to Dallas and pay for that hotel room): “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.” No, of course not. How could I possibly command the respect of their faculty without at least a second master’s degree? I had come close to a second MA, but no cigar. I could not command the respect of anyone, how I felt at that time, exhausted, also terrified that during that day-long interview my breasts would start leaking through the front of my blouse. I had to try hard to concentrate on the faces and questions of the interviewers and the not the face of my baby waiting in the car with his father whilst I babbled on about how I would go about prioritizing which of their resources in Special Collections to digitize first.

Because of my background in Rare Books and Manuscripts (RBMS), history and English literature, proficiency in Latin (especially Medieval Latin)–but lack of a second subject 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 in the red neon window seat of 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 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 drink cup down on a “consecrated altar.” To me, this altar looked like a black box or 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 for him, 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, away from the pagans and fortunetellers, 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 in the first place, and I was happy to have my education paid for. Seemed a good trade, and all I had to do was sign some papers, have them notarized and mail them back to the attorney. 

I 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, I got stuck at IU Bloomington in a program that was DOA. The year was 1992. There were no faculty to teach graduate-level courses in Medieval and Early Modern European History due to their floating an early retirement incentive package probably intended to eliminate many of the older tenured faculty in the Humanities. This, combined with a maternity leave and a one-year Sabbatical in Italy by two History 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, now Emeritus (meaning: retired). “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 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 harmonious 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, academically-speaking. The few who remained in Medieval and Early Modern History 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 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, women’s spirituality, misogyny, or people who didn’t have an impact for whatever reason–wrong place, wrong time, wrong gender. I just wanted the purple and gold, banners waving in the air. . . what was glorious, beautiful and good, worth preserving for the future. 

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 even had a gorgeous life-like oil of young Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) from the 1930s which I’d found at an antique mall in the middle of nowhere in Indiana, which I took to be a sign. It looked sort of like this, but much better, with the same characteristic expression and round spectacles, except in my painting it showed his ringed hand forming a sideways benediction, index and middle fingers pointing like “I bless you, you’re on the right path, now get to work on your Latin!”

The one time my father came to see me in Indiana, he was appalled by the portrait. “Oh my God. That’s Hitler’s pope! Why do you have that on your wall? That man was a monster!”

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 healthy 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 the library doing a student job which I was great at, though I had my MLIS already, so why wouldn’t I be great processing ILL requests and shelving books (there is a library school there, so of course, impossible to obtain a professional librarian job), and took my dogs to the lake and forest to look for geodes and salamanders (Indiana has giant ones, called “hellbenders”). While I was cut off from the world, I always felt confident that there would be a good place for me in the world, just as people believe in the concept of soulmates. There was an ideal job waiting for me at the end of all this, since too few were still studying these things. 

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!” Dr. Ian Thomson said with hearty enthusiasm as he read my proposal. He had a wonderful Scottish accent from St. Andrews–also loved golf, a true Scotsman. 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 had returned; that was it, because I remember wondering how she could be so slender after having just 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,” her outrageous and offensive blurb for an undergraduate survey course in Medieval History. I didn’t care about anorexic saints or lesbian nuns (nothing against lesbians or nuns. . . ). Trans Jesus, Jesus as mother? She approached history entirely through the lens of Caroline Walker Bynum. 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” and “women’s spirituality.” “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 storytelling. In her opinion, there is no escaping subjectivity, so one might as well embrace it. This was her justification for doing “Herstory.” I refused to accept her argument. “Good scholarship is always objective, or strives to be.” I mentioned what a wise philosophy professor told me:

“Objectivity is 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.”

Her insistence on calling the Church “patriarchy” was also cringeworthy to me, you know, 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 courses in Medieval and Renaissance philosophy toward my History degree, instead of saying, that isn’t History–but what she was doing, all this stuff about gender, is History? So what Dr. Spade was in “Philosophy.” His specialty was the intellectual history of the High Middle Ages, which is philosophy. Everyone in the medieval world knew Dr. Spade. Even his name sounded cool: Paul-Vincent-Spade. The Department Chair, a woman, said she would only approve something interdisciplinary if it had to do with the study of women. 

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. What? No! The dispute between the History Department and me was documented in First Things magazine after a History 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 who was cleaning out his office 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, people who by all accounts were religious Christians (unless they were Jewish or Muslim, etc.). 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, which 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 those who wrote in Latin, men, 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, it’s no big deal. But Classics didn’t have enough faculty left to support graduate studies, either, due to the same early retirement package. I discovered it would take me years to get through a Classics MA taking only one or two grad-level classes a semester. Then I longed again 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, or that I had to study medieval sexuality / lesbian nuns–but studying Aristotelianism or philosophy was out of the question. 

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 out Catholic U and locate a place to live, driving there from Bloomington. In all honesty, I had wanted to go to a Catholic university in the first place. That was always my first choice, even though I am not Catholic (Let me tell you, it is not easy to become one, either. Someone on the inside must sponsor you, and there is a lengthy hazing process which takes an entire year, sometimes many years, called the “Period of the Catechumenate” . . . ). And a city like D.C. with all its museums and historic collections would provide me with ample work opportunities in RBMS/Special Collections. Washington D.C. is actually one of the few cities where librarians are always in demand–true even today. 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. They were pouring poison in his ear. “You kept changing your major, and then you wanted to change schools!” they complained of me. You weren’t focused! I heard the f-word from both of them on separate occasions, justifying their scorn, and perhaps even deserving to be ex communicated from the family. My family was like that, if you were not successful, you were written off–like what they did to my Cousin Patty when I was in third grade. I really liked Patty, who took me to flea markets and was fun to hang out with, a grade school teacher who told me about having to inspect the heads of her students for lice (What’s lice? I recall asking her) when she taught school in St. Croix; but they stopped inviting her over, I thought, because she was poor.

I never saw her again.

Family members like her just disappeared, one by one, excised from my life, as my parents became well off. Our family does that, writes off family members if they do not measure up. That seems to bely the very concept of “family.”

They also did it to my sister–the middle sister–for a while. I don’t know for how long. They pretended my sister was dead when I was in high school and she was in medical school and engaged to a surgeon. I’d never heard of parents doing this before, except from watching Fiddler on the Roof. (My parents loved that movie and often played the soundtrack.) As I recall, the falling out was over a comment made by her outspoken surgeon beau about my mother’s excessive drinking, which my mother probably was that afternoon–drunk. In Fiddler, Tevye was an alcoholic, a seriously flawed character, almost a buffoon, who cannot see beyond his own prejudices and dated cultural biases; and yet in the movie, he claims some sort of moral high ground (as did my own parents) in pretending his daughter was dead because she was going to marry someone of a different faith. The movie came out in the 1970’s. It was intended to be dramatic irony, critical of Tevye’s point of view, not advocating the practice of disowning a child and pretending she is dead. My parents not only mistreated my sister, but misunderstood the movie, completely missing the point. . . 

Many years later, I spent time with a cousin in California who said her parents (my aunt, my father’s sister) did the same thing to her, all because she went to nursing school instead of medical school. “Yeah, they didn’t speak to me for years, they were so upset that I became a nurse.” They also pretended she was dead. 

My father said, “Come home, Emmy, we will figure things out.”

But he wasn’t there, and there was no home.

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, pursuing my dreams. I was like the old woman who swallowed a fly. I was beginning to wonder why I had ever 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 back then, before online classes. And while degrees are forever, credits toward an academic degree generally expire after five years.

It had become clear by the end of my first year that the university wasn’t actually going to replace the tenured faculty who had retired, at least, not any time soon. The History Department was only hiring Adjuncts, and Adjuncts cannot teach the grad students. That is the way it works. I wasn’t going to be able to get the degree I wanted nor study the with the sort of brilliant people I always admired and really wanted to study with. I explained the situation, even sending home copies of the course offerings. My family was just expecting me to “make it work.” Make it work! But I could not. I had no money or assets of my own to be able to leave there, just pittances from the library and bookstore and what small sums my father would dole out–it was never a lot, just enough to live on, according to a monthly budget. One time, I got fined by the city for not mowing the lawn, ever; it had become a rabbit sanctuary. But the huge double lot with trees, now returned to pristine wilderness, made it really expensive to mow. I was facing steeper fines by the city if I did not cut the grass, but I was concerned also about mowing down the rabbits. You handle it, Dad said, not giving me any practical way to solve the problem. Also, I mentioned in the same conversation, the septic tank needed to be pumped again, my toilet wasn’t flushing. “I don’t want to hear any more about the house! I only want to hear about Plato and Aristotle.” I got another part-time library job, 10hrs. / week, for $10/hour, at the Kinsey Institute (part of Indiana University) cataloging gay porn, Centurions catalogs and S&M materials. I asked my boss, what is the difference, in terms of cataloging, between sadomasochism and torture? The images stayed with me, people being humiliated and abused and tortured for the entertainment of others, a parody of hell.

I had thought to sue the university using a pro bono lawyer, at least to recover my tuition and go somewhere else. 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. They had advertised a Medieval History program that didn’t exist. My letter of intent had certainly been very intentional: here is what I am coming there to study and why. Then, the Department Chair had strung me along, promising things would get better. 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 only this. They have never been successfully sued. It’s because they have sovereign immunity.” The university was bullet proof. 

But 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 often at the expense of the Humanities, often in the name of greater institutional accountability. Therefore, there would be fewer jobs in the Humanities, and fewer jobs led to more downsizing. Maybe it was time to do something else. I’d had minor academic 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 (from Yale), whom I’d had as an undergrad, contacted me about a graduate program in Medieval Studies she was attempting to start at UT, even as it was being phased out everywhere else. I was flattered. She was particularly interested in my Latin paleography, but there would be no stipend. She also liked and remembered me from her class at UT, but paleography, the ability to read medieval manuscripts–also be able to accurately describe, transcribe and assign provenance to a text–is a rare and necessary skill! Medieval scribes wrote in a cribbed and abbreviated form of Latin, often substituting ligatures for endings and words. Some letters and abbreviations were unique to that monastery. 

The ability to read medieval Latin handwriting (Latin paleography) is an increasingly rare skill–but not too valuable in Houston, TX.

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. This would necessarily inhibit Medieval and Renaissance Studies there. “There is one Medievalist now,” Dr. Blockley offered; but I couldn’t afford to move to Austin. I was also going to present a paper on the “Speculative Grammarians of the 11th Century” with a professor at UH at the MLA Conference soon. My family was oblivious to my academic achievements or that people (even from Yale!) generally thought well of me. 

I had wanted to bring my mission oak furniture and gothic church pew with me, treasures I’d scooped up at antique malls traveling the backroads of Indiana with a friend who had a truck–he had educated me about various aspects of classical music (I will forever associate the music of German Baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann with Indiana)–but my car didn’t have a tow hitch or tow capacity, being four-cylinder. My father refused to pay for movers or a truck, said he couldn’t afford it, so I sent what I could through a Pac-n-Send and sold the rest at auction. My heart felt happy though, 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. At that time, he was always elsewhere, 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.” He was not available anymore, at least not to me. 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 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.

Everyone else I had known or been close to in high school had left Houston to go to college and they never came back. Yet strangers I met out socially at art museum openings seemed to know me, or of me. The reason for this was I strongly resembled 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 infested with fire ants that would stream out from under the baseboards like a jet whenever I set down wet dog food and swarming all over me in bed at night especially at that time of the month. I observed that they somehow communicated telepathically with each other, so you had to be careful to brush them off gently so as to not make them swarm. But that apartment allowed me to keep my two dogs just a while longer, until I no longer could, where other apartments in Houston imposed a strict “two dog-two bedroom” rule, requiring one bedroom for each 15lb of dog. I could not afford that or to move or break to the lease. Even with fire ants nesting in the walls, Hidden Village said with so many vacancies, they would not release me from my contractual obligations. My father initially said he’d help pay my rent until I got established; I guess working at Barnes and Noble counted as established (Dad, I make $6.30 an hour. . . Don’t worry hon, you’ll be a store manager in no time! The cream always rises to the top!) The office lady drawled: Well darlin’, I don’t see your daddy’s name on the lease, we just see your name. . . . I went back to the shelter days later to get “Annie” after a VA nurse I’d met at Cafe Express explained how animal shelters here actually worked, especially that one on Almeda, which turned out to be a notorious killing shelter. I had sent Annie to the gas chambers, all because she had been stress barking and digging up the carpet while I was at work, and because I couldn’t rent an affordable one bedroom with two dogs in Houston. I had to get Annie back. She was not at the shelter. They refused to tell me if she had been adopted out or put down, per the pink paper I had signed in duress. 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. That’s ridiculous, I said to her, how can it be a panic attack if it occurs when I am sleeping and wakes me up at 2am? I’m not thinking, I’m asleep.

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. I think I must have been attractive back then, at least cute, 5’0, 90lbs, size 0-2, long chestnut hair with natural waves. A partner at Coopers & Lybrand with monogrammed shirts said, “Every woman has her price!” slow motion tossing hundred dollar bills down on the corner 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 off the top 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 hand-crank casement windows, and by then, most of my new friends were artists, bohemians, adjunct professors and creative types anyway. I painted a lot on weekends, when I wasn’t driving to Spring for a library job, and my artistic friends would come over, sit on the floor and paint with me, an advantage of having no furniture. My apartment was across from St. Anne’s and Cafe Adobe, above an art gallery. One evening, at the Gallant Knight, a homely man with bangs (what grown man wears bangs?) 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 always internalizes all criticism, no matter the source, because we are brought up in a world where everyone else knows better than we do. 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. The University of St. Thomas 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, no conflicts, and their career center helped me to land a good job, which unfortunately also put my academic career on a hiatus. My professors were impressed with me, or at least pretended to be, 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 another semester (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, living the the life of the mind.

The estate jeweler, Tannenbaum, glancing at me and my last name, said, “Oh, you’ve been in here before (I hadn’t). 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. Was she selling the jewelry my father was always buying for her? I got almost nothing for the necklace, but I had absolutely no idea of its worth, so I was pleased with the check, which exceeded my expectations. The Contemporary Art class and others I took with the money were excellent. Contemporary Art filled in an important gap in my knowledge, as it was not anything I was ever drawn to on my own. I’ve decided that educated people know about things human beings would not, under normal circumstances, be drawn to, like, or appreciate. This is why you cannot buy Milton or Shakespeare at airports. 

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 to be allowed to judge British breeds!) 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, it turned out, as were 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, even when he wasn’t sick and/or blind. She left town to go back to her house to be with her boyfriend after he went into the hospital. The only reason he survived at all was because of her dogs. I had heard the story over and over. They were at a veterinarian’s office when he hit the floor, so an oxygen mask was available, or he would have died right then and there. 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. 

I understand people not saving enough for the future, or being able to save for retirement (I personably despise Suze Orman: “If people would just stop having manicures,” she said on her show one day, “they would be able to save up a million dollars in five years for retirement!” I’ve NEVER had a manicure or pedicure in my life. Where is my million dollars?). But they really didn’t have to run through it all in the way that they did, right before my eyes, a montage of cars and homes, second homes and condos in resort areas all for her, trips for her, jewelry for her and clothes for her–ridiculous things–a rich diet of Neiman’s and Saks, “tigers on a gold leash”; cosmetic dentistry (porcelain veneers) at the Houstonian! Seriously, who in their right mind buys Prada, Versace, Hermes or Dolce & Gabbana–$500 jeans–including using up what had been left to me by my mother, money (and a will!) 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, couture she could not cram into her overstuffed bags to take with her “back home” to her house in another state–yes, they were married but not together–after a week-long shopping spree at the Galleria. The remaining clothes had to go, I had to drop whatever I was doing and come get them if I wanted them. Eventually, I surmised the urgency was because another girl was about to fill the void of empty life–he couldn’t stand being alone–and that one couldn’t very well be allowed to see women’s clothes hanging in his closets.

The pattern would repeat itself, my being summoned to pick up her crumbs, for which I had to pretend to be grateful.

Turned out–truly, I wish I had never discovered this, and that it could be wiped from my mind–it was my money they were spending toward the end, only I did not know that back then. That’s presumably what the divorce and remarriage to her had been about. According to the will, Dad was not allowed to touch the assets my mother had left me if he remarried, and he had remarried immediately. Sadly, I never suspected my mother might have left me anything at all, let alone 3M. I was alone in the house with her for that entire weekend, when she was sick in bed on morphine (I broke open the glass ampules and mixed the powder with the solution, pulling them into the syringe as the nurse showed me), but she never said anything to me upon waking but, “Forgive me!” No one told me I was entitled to anything. I never even thought to look for a will on file at Harris County. My husband found it long after everyone and everything was already gone. 

Another time, I heard that the close to my age girlfriend had accidentally left her “jewelry bag” on the plane and filed an insurance claim; why was she traveling domestically (Houston to Albuquerque?) with all that expensive jewelry from Tiffany’s in the first place, let alone leaving it on a plane? No woman in the world would do that. I put 2 + 2 together, and it seemed to me that she was trying to sock away cash for herself, perhaps to buy her freedom and get away from my controlling father, like Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer) in Scarface trying to get away from Tony Montana; but maybe I’m giving her too much credit. Maybe she was a complete ditz who simply left her “jewelry bag” on the plane.

I always got some small amount of money for her leftovers (unfortunately, one cannot return haute couture for cash) however I could through River Oaks consignment boutiques, and checks coming in the mail from the sale of her clothes really brightened my day. While we were close to the same size, she never bought anything I would want to wear, it was a bunch of weird stuff, but seeing the price tags, how much was spent on her costumes, made me physically ill. I tried to suppress my feelings of resentment and not succumb to envy or desire, like a good Catholic would. Contemptus mundi. Contemptus mundi. It was all Vanity, right? Anyway, she’s the wife, you’re the daughter, she’s the wife, you’re the daughter. I would say to myself. Be spiritual. Rise above. Detach yourself, like the medieval saints (St. Jerome was always my favorite saint, since he was an ascetic, is the patron saint of librarians, and had an Aslan lion for a pet). Blast some Bach (Toccata in D Minor) or Rossini’s Petite Mass or Nine Inch Nails, whatever works.

They were seemingly clueless about how I was living. For my birthday one year, she sent me Dead Sea bath salts from Neiman’s. I didn’t have a bathtub. I tried to return it to Neiman’s for exchange that weekend and looking forward to having the opportunity to get a lipstick or something, but the salesgirl said it had been purchased too long ago, so no longer in their system. Another year, for my birthday, they sent me an authentic wooden nutcracker, a painted soldier which stood several feet high. Not really something a young woman in a tiny studio apartment would want, but at least I was still in their thoughts. I gave it to a friend Anthony, an Adjunct at the University of St. Thomas, who had young nephews coming to his house for Christmas. They would enjoy using the nutcracker, making its mouth crack open nuts by pulling down the lever its the back.

To fill the gaps in his life between her arrivals and departures, my father had other women whose rents he was paying. I met many of them. Not sure why he wanted me to meet them. One of them, a nice fresh-faced small town girl from Lubbock, or some such place, he had been supporting in a luxury high rise apartment at Westheimer and Bammel Lane. I met her twice at dinner, many weeks apart. She said she was a physical therapist, but with the size of her breasts relative to the size of her waist, I thought she might have been something else. One day, she tried to commit suicide after he broke it off with her. “She’s crazy, who would do such a thing?” my father said incredulously, as if he had nothing at all to do with it. He didn’t want to talk to her and was refusing to take her calls, so he sent me to go talk to her after the suicide attempt. 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! Just think about that!” That made her laugh. We both laughed and cried and hugged. At least I cheered her up and explained who she was dealing with, even if I couldn’t solve her rent situation. 

“Expect nothing and you will not be disappointed,” the saying goes. One of the funniest arguments I got into was with a Shell engineer I dated for six months before I ended it with him for a combination of reasons, including how he treated his dog. He demanded to know if the gift he had bought me for my birthday “met my expectations.” I had already thanked him for the Victoria Secret bra and panty set and shown sufficient appreciation for the gift, I’d thought, but I didn’t like where the conversation was heading. I insisted that it is a gift, I had no expectations of a gift. This either offended or unnerved him, not sure which. Of course, you had expectations of me! He just wouldn’t let it drop. I thought it rude that I should be put into the position of appraising his birthday gift to me, or telling him how much he should have spent on me. As an engineer, maybe he was trying to understand the inner workings of the relationship, but personally, I have always tried to resist reducing my relationships with the opposite sex to business transactions. I realize other women are not this way, and that I may be more complicated than most in this regard. 

For example, one of my closest girlfriends also dated a Shell guy, a tax accountant, and right off the bat she gave him a laundry list of suitable gifts for each occasion: flowers and chocolates on Valentines Day, a piece of good jewelry for birthday, etc. Things were clear–like taxes. These were the rules. I was astonished, but actually, to be honest, it worked for both of them. I myself do not want a quid quo pro. That seems to bely the very concept of a “gift.” A gift should not be compulsory. 

But to be completely honest, as much as I aspire to be spiritually detached from the things of this world, Contemptus mundi-style, I do feel a sense of pain reflecting upon one time when I was disappointed by having expectations, which is why I try to avoid having them at all now. What kind of father says to his daughter, I’m buying a house in Memorial with a huge garage apartment. We (he and his-close-to-my-age-girlfriend) 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! It is dangerous! Come live with us! Go see the house, I’ll have the agent show it to you. . . .

They were so happy that I had agreed to the arrangement! My father thought it might alleviate her boredom if I were around so she would not leave him again. 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 so I could get in, “Oh, uh, the deal on the house fell through.” He had backed out at the last minute because she left town again, breaking his heart. “I feel like a yo-yo!” he exclaimed on the phone, expecting pity from me.

“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, right now, needing an address. 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 leased only a one bedroom [at the Four Leaf Towers, a luxury high-rise],” he said. He left me homeless and didn’t care. I was working, making 28K, but it was Sunday afternoon, and my $325/mo apartment had been leased, putting me in a precarious situation.

That afternoon I moved in with a complete stranger, some man I’d met at a museum singles art opening who had given me his number. It was still on a cocktail napkin in my purse (I may have rung up others first, but no one was picking up on Sunday afternoon). I called him and said something like, “Hi, remember me? I’m in a bit of trouble. . . Can I move in with you? Just for a few days.” He was a retired judge who knew someone I knew, so it seemed safe. We lived together for six years. After I got to know him, I felt a sense of responsibility for him, like when one rescues an animal no one else wants. It turned out, he had a wasting disease which was causing him to lose motor control of his extremities, but it was affecting other things, too. His father had died unable to breathe from the complications of the disease. He didn’t have much, and was hardly working, but he had kindness and shelter, and like me, he was alone. I’d never watched Seinfeld before, or had a TV, even though it was 1996. A few years later, I met my current husband and fell in love, which I didn’t even think possible after a certain age. 

One day, many years later, after I was married to my husband 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 us for groceries or anything anymore. My father was so happy! He asked could I be there, to help her load the car? I was concerned, of course. And I knew I would likely never see him again. 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. “This isn’t an assisted living!” the office staff informed me. 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, by then, although he could still tell some pretty funny jokes. 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.” They didn’t. There I was, like Cordelia in King Lear. He’d given his kingdom away, but there I was to the end. 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. My husband obliged. I thought it a bit ominous–wouldn’t he be using his dresser? 

On the way back to Vegas that evening, she called me 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. It was a very nice house. 

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, where I had been literally steeping in the past since the day I was born. 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 as a designer. 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,” you know, those little gray houses or concrete high rises, fascist architecture (like what was erected under Franco in Madrid in the 1950s and then replicated in Miami). 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, why it is now called “ELA.” Many students no longer stand for the pledge, but a public school teacher cannot say anything about it or pretend to notice or care . . . so I don’t think prayer would go over well). I would personally like to restore a lot of things, like leather, as in shoes and handbags. Americans eat so many burgers, where are the hides going? Designers 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. It’s true, 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. Maybe it goes back to the backroom of the drapery store, all of those memo books to explore.

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 they 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, standing there forlorn in the bedding section of JCPenney’s, worn paint chip pulled out of my wallet for each of the boy’s bedrooms. 

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 varnish, even its smell. I like darkness and warm lighting, intimate spaces with a hint of mysterium. I do not like white walls and chandeliers without shades in them; 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 blame Biden for the silly light bulb ban. Portrait artists cannot paint under LEDS. Poor color reflective value.

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, which I currently am. 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 now. 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 themselves 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 the 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. 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 which 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.

But now, because of progress, it is not that at all, but something else entirely, colorless and unimaginative, a proprietary search engine populated by subscriptions, and what once defined our very professional practice is gone, or regarded as vestigial and irrelevant to the wider world, in part, I believe, because we have made it so. Commitment to collections, to intellectual freedom, and to 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 to write papers and get assignments done. The day after graduation one is ex communicado.

Why would anyone want to access scholarly databases after he graduates? someone asked me.

Of course, with this new. more limited library service model, 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 these days 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 anyway, 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, which may or may not happen. 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. 

In my own defense, 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 self-selected Latin mottos (every child in my class had one, with a coat of arms), Harry Potter spells, 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 on my part); another was a Mary crayon-resist watercolor wash for Mother’s Day, where the autistic boy who never spoke made the most amazing portrait! I met his mother and the whole experience brought me to tears. I was pregnant with my second at the time, so emotions ran through me. When the school closed, and a few times before then, I was told I was the best Latin (and Art) 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. It was wonderful until my paycheck began to bounce (I’d rush to their bank after school) and the school shut down.

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). 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, even the modernists who had been opposed ideologically to description, but the grant ended and my boss jumped over to the Menil Collection, leaving me a lose ends without a sponsor or purpose 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. 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 with him, 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” (son of founder John Warnock), Christopher Warnock, who was a philosophy major and letterpress enthusiast. I do know a thing or two about letterpresses and traditional printing techniques, and philosophy. Did I mention I am a former Curator of a printing museum? I am well versed in traditional printing techniques. I didn’t know “who he was” until my boss said, “Emily, do you know who that is you were chatting with 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. Some scruffy guy in jeans who came in off the street to get something to eat. Like the prince and pauper, California millionaires often go around disguised as homeless people. It’s a something they do, a form of humility.

After the Great Recession of 2008, a time when angel investors divested themselves of start-ups–something to do with mortgage swap defaults–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, so we did.

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. (My husband used a very good film camera, but on that day, he forget to angle the flash upward, rendering the images unsuitable for publication.) 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 for dim light we really needed a tripod. 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 in fear. 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 any 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 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, Augustus Pugin and Walter Crane and C.F. A. Voysey, 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 reason 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. I like Graham & Brown wallpapers–I’m into wallpaper, too–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 at B&B one day with my family (standing way in the distance to not be in that particular photo), knocking 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. There are people who like what I like.

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? All of you coming out of the Arts and Crafts Movement Museum, step right this way to order museum-quality reproduction wallpapers, friezes, window treatments and interior fabrics! (What a great location for an interior design store specializing in historic design.) 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, the Amish had nothing to do with the Arts and Crafts style! It’s almost a contradiction. Plainness and 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 $175. . . 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! There is an untapped market, I know it!

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 was here as “Old Houston.”) I know that there are still “some nice areas,” as if I didn’t know about Bellaire, West U or River Oaks! Here is one person’s more apt 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 really 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. That might be problematic.

It will likely be my last job, what will make my whole life up until now make sense, the cherry on the sundae.

“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 due to my husband’s career. The homes are affordable, the neighborhood is safe, and schools are presumably good, even though years ago–I did not know this until it was too late–CCISD got rid of the study of English and American Literature for all grade-level ELA classes. Yet, it is still considered “good” by some objective measure, where I would give it an F for failing to educate my son. One day, he came home from school saying (Although I do not think this was a part of the CCISD curriculum) that the Romans never fed Christians to lions. Why do you think that? Because the Romans were Roman Catholic. That elementary school also taught him to do math using “window panes,” the most inefficient way possible to solve math problems. 

For the record, I believe in Kravet, not so much in “Holland and Sherry.” I realize, though, when placed in certain contexts, almost any fabric, even the ugliest couch, can look good (and sometimes the most astonishingly beautiful things are on the precipice of ugly, walking the line). It just has to make sense in the context of the room. And ideally, I want to talk to people, not sit in an empty room of bins stuffing envelopes. That’s a sad existence . . . but maybe if they offered me a good discount on fabric, it might be alright . . . And despite my own aesthetic tastes and preferences, I’m an intellectually curious person, open minded, eager to please and 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 detected 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. It is the librarian in me. 

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, as those people work on commission.

Sherwin Williams already has 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 has 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 would 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. A real design library. I’d leave design magazines out for inspiration. It would also be, in part, an art museum, a gallery of fabrics. I would be open Saturday and Sunday, not like that place out on Old Katy Road, Design House / Fabric House, where I can never go because it is always closed on weekends.

Getting back to price points . . . I already know 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 boring to begin with, but it never changes, I mean for years it has not changed. 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, as one is forced to stand in two excruciatingly slow lines, one for cutting and then 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 Houston Design Center put together) and Interior Fabrics (I’m not a fan of that place, but you can at least get in and out in quickly, easily seeing all that they have tacked up on their walls), Perfect Window is a 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; you can find some really nice jacquards there, the sort you flip over and the colors are completely different on the underside. When you are ready to buy yardage, someone will kindly carry the bolt to the front for you. Twice when I bought fabric to recover chairs, they decided to just give me the rest of the bolt. Perfect Window 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 these days, then the Daltile and the Emser showrooms on Fuque–now 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 brimming with chocolate bars, too, always appreciated after a long drive out a dusty 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 and stone listellos just don’t look right, especially for an upstairs family bathroom. If I had to do it over again, I would not have selected a JM Vanity (my husband was really keen on it) but allowed the USAA-approved remediation specialists to replace the old built ins with new 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 serious “design flaw” for bathrooms, I discovered in my ID class, and frankly, I am not enjoying the two-inch crawl space underneath the vanity either, not a good choice for humid Houston, for reasons I do not want to disclose. I just didn’t trust the contractor’s 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 do 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 they may seem to be the only place in town aside from Lowe’s or Home Depot, but there is a discount outlet out on Hempstead Hwy where you can pick up an 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, not a nice part of town. 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. 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. Maybe it was “Mag Fabric” which is different from Magnolia.

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 simply 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 still not a “member of the trade” so unable to buy from wholesalers; 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. You can spot Ralph Lauren a mile away, still so 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? It happened to me once with library books on loan from Rice University, with each of the five books in my crumpled trunk costing me $125, since rainwater got in. Those kids who read ended me in the rain couldn’t figure out how to defog their windows. But I was really looking forward to seeing what such fine fabrics would do for my home. They looked much better in the store, and frankly, what a relief to have my desire for expensive fabric extinguished.

Another workroom was in League City for many years next to the library, owned by 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 the Kast showroom, because I wanted to find out if they had even more books I had not seen at the workroom. 

Kast used to be in Pasadena across from Metro Retro Joe’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 in LA, where they are trucked all that way to Houston. 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 in sweats. 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 now, too. You need a better system.) 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 a neighborhood design center inside Sherwin Williams, 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 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 . . . what happened to Jaguar? They look like Toyotas now!) 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 consummate 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.