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 fact¹; ID is housed within Schools of Architecture. I wasn’t even sure who hired Interior Architects. Couldn’t a licensed architect also do interior architecture when he designed the outside of the building? From the presentation I went to, it also seemed dry, with the things I loved trivialized by the new program director as “surface treatment,” ornament, rather than a vital part of our visual and material culture–and also an important source of pleasure for most ordinary people. We had to accept at face value the dubious proposition that the functional is the beautiful, or that the two were synonymous–a spare aesthetic which only architects buy into, and no one else actually believes. 

However, when I shared the change and my future plans in order to secure the necessary approvals to move from “Liberal Arts / Undeclared” into “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 said feeling the waters. “Oh forget it! That is worse! Interior design is a gay man’s world, and you will never get ahead there, either! It’s not for you.”

“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 accept or agree with. (“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 had taken art classes as electives in high school, and before that, taken classes at the Glassell School at The Museum of Fine Arts. Upon entering college at 17, I already had exceptional knowledge of art, architecture, historic interiors, pattern and antiques. I was also handy with an x-acto knife, wood stain and resin; I had drawers of min-wax stain, tester’s enamel paint, and 00 brushes, dollhouse electrical wire and tape, beads, findings and tiny lamps. I made things, including miniature furniture to 1:12 scale. I was already good at drafting, scaling, drawing and painting. Also, for what it is worth, two of my best friends in high school were gay. They shared my enthusiasm for art, antiques, vintage clothing and rummaging antique malls to find beautiful things from bygone eras.

Apart from my cherished Dover books, my art education came from checking out library books and copying the illustrations in them, 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 inspired by a mysterious painting by the Flemish painter, Jan van Eyck. I also made, or started to make, a vignette of St. Jerome’s Study (after Durer), complete with miniature tea-soaked tomes, hour glass, skull and lion. At the time I was pursuing ID at UT in the early 80s, my father had 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 / mistress entertained. During this time, Freshman year in college, 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 than the drapery stores. 

At UT, I aced my two Architecture survey courses and “Furniture Appreciation.” I could tell you the likely provenance of any chair. I was pretty good with oriental rugs, too.

That year, or shortly thereafter, he gave the failing businesses to my eldest sister and her husband. “Too many gays,” he said, with them not around, referring to his own sense of discomfort around the effete salesmen at high-end interior fabric showrooms and trade shows. Designer fabric just wasn’t “for him.” I could see that. 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 an upscale drapery store than someone like me, his creative daughter who had studied Art–or Interior Design–or British Literature, or whatever I was into these days. 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, much to the chagrin of the nuns. 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 opulent 80s, however, things were winding down. Designer everything was suddenly out of favor. In addition to the lux drapery business having become a kind of albatross around my father’s neck–another reason for wanting to unload the stores–my mother’s once thriving advertising agency, the only one in greater Houston, and which had recently moved into the iconic deco Transco (now “Williams”) Tower, closed due to Houston’s oil crash (1986-1988). This is when most of Houston’s landmark establishments also closed. Her original Alphonse Mucha lithograph 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, an affair that had gone on for years, he revealed to me. Only a short time after my mother was finally convinced that my father wasn’t coming back, she was diagnosed with clinical depression and then terminal cancer. Now my mother had always been an enigma to me, 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. . . ). 

It didn’t matter to me, though, the relationship I never had. Independence, being a whole person, was the major theme of my entire upbringing. I tried my best to live up to the stoic, creative 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 need for a relationship. My father advised, “Don’t get married, Emmy. Write books.” When I was 21, when I first moved to Madison the summer before graduate school, I went to a psychiatrist demanding to know why it was I could not be happy in my apartment or library alone for days not speaking to anyone, and if there might be something wrong with me. Was I “co-dependent”? Was I not a “whole person”? The psychiatrist, a Freudian, merely wanted to probe where I got this idea of wholeness from, why it was that I was not allowed to have needs, and who had told me these things. Then I got into a relationship which lasted about three years–well, on and off long distance for about ten–and the bad feeling vanished, so I no longer concerned myself with it. I became self-actualized, rose to the top of my Maslow’s pyramid, now able to focus on meaningful abstractions like the “Miltonic sublime” or “intentionality” or Ancient Greek verb tenses.

In the meantime, my father often shared with me that he didn’t feel guilty about his decision to leave my mother for a my-age girlfriend, even though mom was dying, which made me think he probably was feeling something. He wrote letters to me on legal paper trying to convince me that he felt no guilt. He felt justified by contemplating his own mortality, for he believed that he too had only a short time left on this earth, with a heart that was failing. Wasn’t he entitled to happiness before he died? I didn’t take sides or judge, but at that point in my life I could not afford to render opinions. For most of the late 80s and early 90s, I was away at school, 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. 

After 1990, the year of my graduation, there was no house, no art, no rugs, no books, no antiques, not even a couch to sleep on. My drawing pads, my paintings, my journals from living with a host family in London at 16 in the 80’s–at the height of punk rock and “Boy of London” fashion–and backpacking through India at 17; Indira Gandhi’s autograph from a meet-and-greet–my dollhouses and room boxes–all my books!–gone–and I had some pretty very rare ones, too, at least OP, from Samuel Weiser’s in New York–and the Bodhi Tree in LA–and many handwritten letters from Immanuel Velikovsky to my best friend’s mother and autographed first editions–everything was gone, gone, to an estate sale, 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 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” there)–not sure why my father couldn’t have waited until after my interview to tell me, instead of ringing my room at 5:30am to share the news just an hour or two before I was to catch the commuter train from downtown Philly to Bryn Mawr. But I suppose it was incumbent upon me to curtail the all-day interview planned weeks in advance with the search committee, since the airline ticket from Philly to Houston had already been purchased for me by my father, who was clueless that interviews for faculty appointments usually run an entire day. 

I flew home from Philadelphia to attend the funeral proceedings in Houston, staying alone in the house for a few days while relatives, friends and well-wishers came and went. I made a small pile of things I wanted–just my own stuff–which were to be mailed to me at a later date; but all of my things, the room boxes, my art, books, diaries and dollhouses were casually discarded. Everyone was too busy with their adult lives to be bothered sending me my things. Being the youngest child by far, I didn’t own anything, and had no money of my own, having only recently 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, ideally special collections, 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 five to seven years, sometimes even longer. People are generally unaware of how long it takes to get a PhD in the Humanities, I think, because a JD and ED are only three years and an MD is four years. Why would a Humanities doctorate be five or more? That makes no sense! Sometimes, it takes even longer to write a thoughtful dissertation. That is a really long time to not be employed in what is considered one’s 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!”). 

I went to Library School at UW Madison, a wonderful place–the best place I’ve ever lived. It would be a very quick degree for me, given my electives (two semesters in grad English, mostly spent deconstructing texts, apart from the class in “16th century Protestant Poetics,” where I concluded in my final paper, against my professor’s foregone conclusions, that Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms were not inherently “Lutheran,” or Reformed Protestant, which was slightly anachronistic for the period, but more Christian Humanist, that is, somewhat more Catholic-leaning, at least his sources of were–Italian, not scriptural) were already out of the way. My family did not understand this sudden detour from English into librarianship. If not English, why not law school? That was the obvious choice. But within my field, this strategy is called using the MLIS as a “hopper degree,” using librarianship as a means to get the academic degree one really wants. However, after learning that most of my English professors at UW thought great literary canon were “texts,” essentially no different from other “texts,” and serving no purpose except to generate more “texts,” I became unsure of the degree I really wanted, another reason for pausing to pursue the MLIS at that time. The people doing the best work, the scholars I admired most, like Barbara Lewalski, were either in Special Collections or had abundant access to them (at Harvard). Rare books and manuscripts curatorship was what really turned me on, studying old texts and engravings, and I had my Latin to give me a competitive edge in that field. Besides, I wanted for myself the life of the mind, a life of beauty and creativity, of purpose and truth, plumbing life’s great mysteries often locked away in libraries in Latin and other ancient tongues, while writing books and living in a college town like Madison. That was the ideal life, not lawyering. 

Honestly, who in their right mind wouldn’t want such a life for themselves, if given a choice of what life to live? “Gaudium de veritate,” said Augustine, or someone after him. There is joy in the pursuit of truth, and if one is going to pursue truth in life, where better than at a university? 

Lots of aspiring academic librarians attempt to pull this off, at least, the strategy of using the MLIS as a “hopper degree,” because universities typically offer their employees free tuition and time off to take classes, and because library directors are also often required to have an MLIS and a doctorate in something. No one cares what their doctorate is in per se, the credential is what matters, their degree merely a totem, serving as evidence of their academic commitments, rather than knowledge of anything in particular. Therefore, in my field, getting an advanced degree even in Comparative Linguistics or Art History is on some level practical, or at least, not wholly impractical, as the rest of the world might perceive it to be. Once employed at a university where tuition is free, academic librarians tend to rack up credentials, availing themselves of free tuition, which opens up possibilities for adjunct teaching and makes them more competitive for other academic library jobs. Although just as many people, probably more, get a master’s or doctorate in a subject area, find themselves unemployable, and then go back to get an MLIS in the hope of obtaining a stable job at a university. 

To able to teach at the college level 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. Special Collections became a primary objective, especially with my Latin and Greek and love for tradition, intellectual history, prints, art, research, antiquarian objects, and specialization in RBMS in library school and passion for intellectual history and historic design. But the second master’s was necessary for that, too, it turned out, even though I’d done an extensive practicum in Rare Books, taken “Latin Paleography” and “History of Books and Printing” from different places. 

Back then, those who wanted to specialize in rare books and manuscripts, and could afford it, attended the prestigious program at Columbia University, the Rare Book School (RBS), where founder Terry Belanger determined which applicants were “qualified” to take what courses. For me, a young woman of unknown provenance and no connections coming into the city to take a one week summer class, he decreed (completely overlooking my 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices on the application form) “watermarks” or maybe “History of American and European Papermaking,” which is pretty much the same thing as watermarks, and nothing I was interested in. When I asked him why he felt I was not qualified to take “Descriptive Bibliography” or “Rare Book Cataloging,” when, after all, I had a Master’s in Library and Information Science with a 3.8 GPA and an emphasis in RBMS, and had worked in Special Collections doing rare book cataloging at UW, Belanger told me coldly, “You cannot get blood from a stone.” It was papermaking or nothing. 

That summer, instead of RBS at Columbia, I went to AB Bookman’s one week seminar in the antiquarian book trade, held at the University of Denver. It was potentially a good networking opportunity, inexpensive to attend (we stayed in dorms), and it was interesting learning about the commercial side of the book business. Besides, book and print dealers are very fun people. ABAA (Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America) dealers came from all over. The seminar covered things like buying at auctions, book valuation and appraisal, writing and accurate and ethical catalog copy, and how to account for time spent for items sitting in inventory when calculating the price, how to replenish stock, how to dress a book (put mylar on a book jacket), preservation, marketing, shows, and other practical things. It covered how to use AB Bookman’s listings to buy and sell books, which is how it was done before the Internet. Many of the leading dealers were there, and a handful of librarians–even a Librarian of Congress! It was pretty awesome, although it lacked the cache of the Rare Book School.

By 1992, the Rare Book School at Columbia was shut down by the Provost, not for discrimination or violating Title IX, which it most likely was, but because it was decided that a library school program was unworthy of being housed at Columbia University. Seemed “just desserts” to me! Had I attended one week in the summer of ’89, it might not have altered the trajectory of my career. But then again, who knows. I might be at Sotheby’s by now.

A recession was on in Dec. 1990/1, the year of my graduation, and no one was hiring librarians, let alone of the  academic variety. I observed that established antiquarian book and print dealers in large cities were also closing, or retreating to the suburbs, a trend which continued through the 90s. Some decided to operate by mail order catalogs and AB Bookman listings. Without a storefront and some public platform for a charismatic owner-collector to cultivate the next generation of collectors, they would all soon disappear, along with model railroad shops and dollhouse stores, antiquarian print shops, antique shops and independent bookstores.

The market for rare books typically follows the art market, which typically follows the stock market, which also crashed in 1990/ 1991, forcing many major galleries to close in that year.² Then, with the semi-official downgrading in that same year of the MLS/MLIS from an academic credential to some kind of vocational (like Education) or technical degree (like MIS, but with less rigor), universities only wanted librarians who already possessed a second subject master’s for entry-level employment. At the same time, with the emergence of MIS, the MLIS was not good enough for corporate or enterprise systems, managing intranets and databases, doing business or legal research or web development, or any of the things they said we would be able to do with the MLIS degree should we decide not to be librarians. 

Months before I graduated with my MLIS, the new Provost of Columbia University declared Library Science to not be a theoretical discipline worthy of being housed at CU. After CU closed its library school, thirty other library schools at colleges and universities across the country followed suit, domino effect. Therefore, after December 1990, the month and year of my graduation with the MLIS, my degree was no longer seen as sufficiently academically rigorous for entry-level library employment at universities, because the MLIS was no longer considered an academic credential which would qualify for faculty status, which academic librarians almost all are, or were. ALA had fought for faculty status for academic librarians, but it turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. Now we all had to have second master’s degrees in academic subject areas to get an entry-level job.

The cost and difficulty of attending graduate school for a third degree when I could barely keep my head above water with my first and second degrees set me back many years in a profession that was already in precipitous decline due to many factors, including automation, digitization and Google. “What did we over do before Google?” an HR lady exclaimed. “I believe back then you consulted a librarian.” 

It was all circling the drain. . . . literature, art, rare books, history, culture, beauty, knowledge, academia. . .  what will be preserved for the future and who will preserve it?

As one bow-tied, elbow-patched librarian stated a decade later–that guy was a real dweeb–when I was on an interview with the library at SMU in Dallas, at a time when I had just given birth to my son and my husband was laid off (in Houston we were facing homelessness, and using the last of our savings to drive to Dallas and pay for one night in a 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 in some subject discipline? Why had they even invited me to interview? 

By 2003, I had actually come close to a second subject master’s a few times at different universities–by then I probably have enough credits for a doctorate–to get that entry-level academic library job or to teach–but no cigar. Therefore, I could not very well command the respect of anyone, also how I felt at that time, sleep deprived and exhausted, also terrified that during that day-long interview at SMU my breasts would start leaking through the front of my silk blouse. I had to try hard to concentrate on the faces and questions of the interviewers and not imagining the face of my hungry baby waiting in the car with his father while I babbled on about how I would go about prioritizing which of their resources in Special Collections to digitize first, a question I was asked multiple times in the course of the interview, like an interrogation, seeing if my answer might change.

But back in 1990, thirteen years earlier, because of my background in Rare Books and Manuscripts, history and English literature, Art, proficiency in Latin (especially Medieval Latin), etc.–but lack of a second subject masters–I concentrated my efforts the 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 had invited me for an interview and instructed me to buy a round trip ticket to New York, but they went on a hiring freeze right before my trip, calling off the interview. Since I wasn’t going to be reimbursed for the ticket (no interview, no reimbursement), I went to New York anyway, staying for free in a tiny windowless interior service room of a Loews hotel in mid-town Manhattan, with accommodations arranged by my father through a family connection whom I’d never met, “Johnny.” Resume in hand, I went to one of my favorite places in Manhattan, 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. After this, to save on rent in Manhattan, he said I could live with him in his brownstone. I didn’t know what I might be getting myself into with that man, especially since he blew cigar smoke in my face under the red neon light of the window seat of Amy’s bar where I informally interviewed. I declined his offer, much to the disappointment of a book dealer on State Street who had arranged for my introduction to the famed bookseller. In the late 80s and early 90s, everyone referenced and studied Ramer’s exquisite catalogs. Maybe I should look him up while in NY? Desperation was sinking in. 

Weeks after a phone interview, the Center for Bibliographic Studies in Riverside, CA (Laura Stalker) offered me a rare book Cataloger position, which would have been fantastic, but by then–really, weeks had gone by since that phone interview, why would I think they were going to hire me?–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 were practicing Wiccans and serious occult book collectors–the latter being how I came to know the owner, Carl Weshcke. I wrote a letter to him, then interviewed. He was impressed with my extensive knowledge of hermeticism and the occult, kabbalah, astrology and the Golden Dawn.  . . A.E. Waite, Israel Regardie . . . I was soon promoted to “Astrology Editor,” with astrological Sun and Moon sign books being the company’s bread and butter. After a few months, my face appeared in a blurb in Publisher’s Weekly: “Emily Nedell, Astrology Editor.”

I learned a great deal from that experience, but the most important lesson that I couldn’t live on 18K in St. Paul.

By the wintertime, it was necessary to supplement my income from the publishing company by working at Goodwill as a cashier and donation intake clerk. Under the buzzing eye of a security camera, I sorted and stuffed donated clothes into large burlap coffee sacks–careful to extract and toss dirty underwear, things with missing buttons or armpit stains–closing the sacks with zip ties, piling them high as I could–but, toward the end of my shift, the sacks, like the boulder of Sisyphus, would roll down again because, at 90lbs,  I lacked the strength to hurl the stuffed sacks to the very top of the heap. Being an Intake Clerk, I mistakenly thought I would have first dibs on anything good someone donated to Goodwill; but it doesn’t work that way. Even today, employees cannot buy from their own stores, and when donations are dropped off, they are sent off to a centralized location for pricing and redistribution. On the weekend, even in a blizzard, when anyone drove up to the donation side of Goodwill, little me would trudge out in duck boots to unload their vehicles, much to our mutual dismay. I cashiered as well, neatly folding cartloads of clothes and wrapping glassware as if it were Bloomingdale’s, as we were taught to do.

Around this time, for my birthday, my dad’s girlfriend for some inexplicable reason sent me a $450 Dooney and Bourke handbag from Saks Fifth Avenue. Why that bag? Do I look like that sort of person? It looked like something an old lady would carry to a country club. But a gift receipt was inside. The sales lady at Saks in Minneapolis graciously assisted me with the return. “Here dear, why not this lovely key ring?” The difference was paid to me in cash! I could pay my heating bill, great birthday gift. Now the editing job, my real job, was somewhat prestigious, challenging and fun. I liked it well enough and I was good at my job, especially ghostwriting missing chapters, which was often needed to finish manuscripts or make them more marketable. The Wiccan owners and my authors liked me. Carl L. Weschcke was really something; former head of the NAACP in Minnesota, former vice president of the ACLU, Grand Master of high magical British order (Ordo Aurum Solis), and a Wiccan high priest. 

In St. Paul, I also had some great conversations about Bernard Lonergan’s Insight with seminary students whom I met at the theological bookstore near St. Paul Seminary. I have always aspired to religion and philosophy. Theology was just a jumping off point into that heady realm, but it made no sense for me, in terms of a career. That is a man’s world. That much I knew. I was not born into that religion anyway. Even though I had read the Gospels and Plato in Greek and Aristotle in Latin (the Latin translations out of Greek are standard references for scholars), but there was nothing there for me, no way for me to live, despite my monk-like austerity. As Theology was a dead end, and English Departments were no longer about the study of “literature,” I imagined myself teaching Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation History, my best bet for it would allow me to put my language skills to use. 

The summertime visitor would likely find St. Paul charming, its tree-lined streets punctuated with historic churches, and Grand Avenue, with its block after block of homemade ice cream shops, upscale cafes, quaint boutiques, coffee roasters, dog walkers, and famous Hungry Mind bookstore. But it wasn’t all dust moted floating in the air. The area just a few blocks north of Grand Ave, north of Summit, where I rented an apartment in a historic home converted into quadruplexes, was not safe to walk at night. (The area is still not safe, rated a D- for safety.) I made my best efforts to not be in any way judgmental, racist, classist, vulnerable or afraid, all while tethered to a slow-walking grass-sniffing puppy–a gift of my father, a renown breeder of dogs. A lady with a black eye and bloody head followed me home one night asking could I please, please, drive her to an ATM–and yes, I did oblige her, so to not hurt her feelings; and then, because she had no bank, to make use of the ATM, it turned out, could I please, please, cash a pay check (given to her by a woman whose house she cleaned). Her drug-addicted boyfriend would beat her if she could not come home with the money! I told her I would drive her to a grocery store and they might cash her check, but they did not. I knew nothing of third-party checks, but if the grocery store wasn’t cashing it, I wasn’t either. Knowing where I lived, she returned the next day, banging on my door, wondering if I had a TV she and her boyfriend could borrow until payday. I revealed the inside of my place, which was empty except for books and an air mattress on the floor. Why you ain’t got no TV? It was amazing to her anyone could live without one. Since I had nothing she wanted, she never came back.

By the time summer ended, it began to wear on me, the long hours, the poverty wages, the derelicts and wackos going up and down the street yelling–and then, the icing on the cake, the attempted rape at gunpoint by a perfectly normal-seeming, well-dressed attorney I’d met out one evening, of all places, at an upscale bar with pool tables on Grand Avenue. He was an impressive pool player, whose great height, I observed, gave him a distinct advantage clearing the table. He drew a crowd, he played so adeptly, ball after ball in the pocket, bam–bam–bam–just as he called it. After chatting with me at the bar for a few minutes and learning I was new in town–the reason why I was there alone–he said he had to run to meet friends, but he invited me to his apartment off Grand that Saturday night to attend a party so I might meet people. Of course I went. Finally, I could finally meet some normal educated people in St. Paul! He opened the door and in I went. But that night, no other guests arrived. After locking a latch strategically placed at the very top of the door frame far out of reach for someone my stature, the psycho did his best to terrorize me–calling me “Clarice” and making vulgar tongue gestures. Seeing as I did not catch the movie references–and I wasn’t real sure about the tongue thing either–really, was the creep threatening me with oral sex?–made no sense–he started again, changing tactics by pointing a gun right in my face and saying how much he hated Jews and they all should die! I denied being one, but he kept on, I surmised, because it didn’t matter one way or another; there was no vetting process. The whole night, he placed the gun down only briefly, on a high shelf above the fireplace mantle, while he drank alcohol from dirty glasses strewn all over his apartment and becoming increasingly agitated, working himself up again and again. He took his clothes off until he was in a muscle undershirt and shorts and demanded I take off mine. I became a sack of flour, recoiled into the core of my being; but, as much as possible, I did not give him the satisfaction of being terrorized by him, as studies at UW Madison (we were required to attend a rape prevention class at UW) explained that rapists get off to violence and struggle, so best not to feed it. The more you go along with it, the more you kill their mojo. He continued doing a convincing Neo-Nazi Aryan act, probably lines from another movie I hadn’t seen. Yeah, I know what you mean. I hate them, too! Hey, we have a lot in common! I cajoled, pretending there was absolutely nothing wrong with this whole situation. Because I had gone to his place of my own volition, no one would believe my story, as he “was a lawyer” (I believe he really was, that part was no act, because that place would cost in rent) and I was just a stupid girl, he impressed upon me multiple times before finally unlocking the door and letting me go out into the morning light, exhausted but completely unscathed, except in spirit, which meant from a certain perspective, I was truly blessed.

St. Paul was surprisingly seedy and rough, nothing at all like “Prairie Home Companion,” a radio show on NPR I’d tuned into every Sunday afternoon for many years. That radio program represented a distillation of the quaint wholesome Midwestern values that I cherished, and presumed would be there in St. Paul, just as it had been in Wisconsin, where just about everyone is a particular flavor of Lutheran. The Lutherans there emphasize that, that they are a certain kind of Lutheran, so as not be confused with the “other kind” of more liberal Lutheran. In Wisconsin, Lutheran men tend to wear beards, I observed. But after I lived in St. Paul, I understood why Garrison had moved his famous radio show out of downtown St. Paul to New York City. I had lived in NYC a summer and I walked around everywhere–East Village, Soho, Broadway, often in heels–and nothing bad ever happened to me. I didn’t think St. Paul could get any worse, but then I discovered “Frogtown.” Another party, where a nice girl had no business being.

One evening, only two months after I moved into that place in St. Paul and one month after the incident with the sociopathic attorney, the historic row house right next to my mine blew up in the middle of the night, my bedroom window shattering, the glass blowing in and covering my mattress, bathing me and my puppy in shards. I awoke to a BOOM! From the intensity of the blast, I imagined it had been a lighting strike. There was a wall of fire outside the window, red lighting up the entire room and frantic banging on my apartment door, “Fire! Fire! Get out!” I was standing practically naked on a street at 3am clutching my robe closed with one hand, holding a dog leash in the other, surrounded by gawkers, while explosion after explosion filled the night sky. I feared my car would explode from the force of the blasts and intensity of the heat; I could see heat waves coming off my silhouetted car as the house behind it burned and fireballs blew into the sky. The water from the fire hose arced over it to the roof of the house behind. All I could think while I stood there was . . . I have to go to work tomorrow! No sick time or personal days. . . “Drums of chemicals in the basement combusted,” explained the fire marshal Saturday afternoon as he poked around what remained of the house next door, gathering charred samples from the stinking black soggy moldering pile using one of those spiked poles for collecting garbage, sniffing and depositing samples into zip lock baggies. “Meth lab,” he explained. You know the people? No, no, never met them. “Well if you see anyone, call me.” He extended his card.

I have always been a resilient person, but all it began to wear on me, these and other bizarre incidents, coupled with the fact that the crowd I ran with from the New Age publishing company–“Blessed be!”–really believed they could simply bend the world to their will by channeling some “hidden current of a new Aeon” or invoking spirits, or by potions and amulets, or carrying around drawstring sacks of magically-charged pebbles (like Dumbo feathers), despite what I, or any normal person–just looking at them and the cars they drove–would consider to be pretty compelling evidence to the contrary.

That year, because I worked for the largest Occult/New Age publisher in the world, and because I had nothing better to do, I attended various pagan ceremonies and gatherings, which was fascinating from a sociological perspective. I never saw evidence of anything, although one time, during an “invocation of the goddess,” a tall candle stuck to the floor by wax fell over, which was caused a great raucous. “Blessed be! She is here!” To me, it was a lot of smoke and incense, someone claiming they saw something, like that game we used to play at slumber parties in second grade at my best friend’s house. Somehow, at Maureen’s house, “Bloody Mary Worth” showed up to write messages in Crest red gel toothpaste on the bathroom mirror in order to frighten us. My friend also had a Ouija board at her house, too–it belonged to her older siblings. Once I learned its diabolical purpose, I couldn’t believe such a thing designed to speak to spirits, was sold as a toy by Milton Bradley! When I saw it in the toy store so innocuously shelved among the board games, it seemed even more horrifying. Her house was dark, had crucifixes in every room, and spice boxes containing frankincense and myrrh with potpourri her mother made out of dried rose petals and spices; also hamsters, which I was not allowed to have. Also, she learned in her CCD class I was going to Hell, but it was still OK for us to be friends, the priest had told her. Believe me, I am no cynic. Like everyone else at the party, I tried my best to make out a shape or see something in the smoke. Like everyone else, I wanted to believe, because if anything existed, spirit or demon, ghost, goddess, or any supernatural being, I would be assured that God existed.

For the most part, though, these were people with limited education and means, and zero sex appeal, who professed some vague belief in a fat mother earth goddess with a skinny goateed horned god as her consort, curiously reflecting the general physiognomy of the crowd. Even when they tried to invoke Egyptian deities, a practice known as “Kemetic Wicca,” I knew it was amateur hour. . . No self-respecting deity would show up for that. I wanted something more ceremonial, more beautiful, more authentic, more inspired–some “solemnity,” as C.S. Lewis would say–some Latin and Enochian magick to summon an angel to appear. Of course, I would be happy for the rest of my life just seeing one, or something, and leave it at that, not tempt fate like Faust by asking it to do me any favors. 

Many of the titles the New Age / Occult publishing company published appealed to people just like those weak people, who thought they could be helped by crystals and candles or spells, or by idols of animal-headed gods; or perhaps, people just like me, really, who were just intensely curious about the existence of the soul, an afterlife, an astral plane, or even an Invisible Hand or Geist. All I had for evidence of divine providence or angels thus far in my life was, “Hey, it could have been worse!” After the captivity by the lawyer and the house fire, I sent the dog home and moved into a tiny efficiency in a gated apartment building in downtown St. Paul, with high security (underground garage, cameras even in the hallways, doors that would lock behind you), where a fellow editor at the publishing company lived one floor up, as fate would have it.

We began to see each other. 

My new boyfriend was a celebrated author and editor at the publishing company, the author of one of the bestselling books on ceremonial magick ever written. He was a rock star in that small world, which I learned, was full of even smaller worlds! He had studied music and philosophy at UCLA and then trained to become a cantor, even writing a thesis on ancient Jewish rites and rituals of the high priests. He was the real deal, triple fire sign, too, Aries–Sag–Leo. We had a lot to discuss, he and I . . . Apparently, there is a whole body of literature of Jewish magick (the “k” on the end signifies is real, not illusion) going back to King Solomon, who supposedly, according to lore, had the power to conjure angels and demons. How did I not know that? My new friend, pushing forty, had quite a wardrobe (from LA?) and the aplomb to pull it off. He would dress up in priestly vestments, perform magick rites for various groups (he did Wiccan weddings, too . . .) and sing in the most amazing voice. I can still hear it, his voice had such a unique timbre to it. He would also play a variety of instruments–synthesizer, organ, theremin, symbols, singing bowls. He was a very talented guy, a kind of performance artist and motivational speaker who belonged in LA, where he was from, not hiding his light under a bushel at the publishing company in St. Paul. 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. “You are not a smoker, are you? Does this ashtray offend you?” He made it disappear by tossing it into the air behind my head. Poof! Like when I fake-throw a tennis ball for my dog. The ashtray was not in his hand, not under the table, not up his sleave. . . He also knew all of the best entertainment spots and techno clubs in the Twin Cities. He was a great showman and a fun person, full of life, and an ordained High Priest of many magical orders. But I thought he could be himself around me, let his hair down, just be normal, not a priest or magician or tantric master, as girls named “Amber” and “Raven” and his followers expected him to be–some kind of “magic man.” Between us, though, two reasonably educated people, he was an author, scholar, radio personality and an entertainer. He was a performance artist. It was theatre. I respected that. But I was not allowed to be in all places with him, as I was not part of those particular groups–like the Rosicrucians who came to his place on Sundays. Probably best, because I might start laughing seeing a bunch of grown men performing rituals, kneeling and bowing, or whatever they did, even though on another level, I really appreciated it. 

Months into the relationship, however, I inadvertently set a Jack in the Box drink cup down on a “consecrated altar,” probably while fishing for something in my purse. To me, this altar looked like a black box, small cabinet or speaker positioned between two columns with fake flames against the wall in his apartment. Nothing was ever going on with it, not that I could see anyway. How did that cup get there? he asked me with a panicked look. At first, I thought it was magician’s patter. I was waiting for him to say, “Just kidding! Ha ha!” But he was terrified, his face blanched, which in turn terrified me. Then I knew–and he knew I knew the truth. The cup on the alter was a turning point in our relationship. The spell was broken. Once I realized that this all wasn’t just some creative outlet for him, but something he actually 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 mean, he really believes that he has magic powers? Who does he think he is? And was I ever the target?) To his credit, though, at least the magician was not a charlatan. He really believed in the power of ritual and magick to improve his life and the lives of his followers, and belief in magick is a rare thing in this world.

Shortly after this, I started to see a religious Catholic man slightly older than me, a junior architect, who lived in the same building. We hadn’t gotten very far into the relationship, maybe three dinner dates. He was a cautious person, admittedly a bit too timid for me. He kept grilling me about the publishing company and the weird guy he’d seen me with at the mailboxes, the one wearing the oil coat duster, and asking if he thought it was over between us. Yes, yes, and anyway, what does it matter what he thinks? The architect then told me that he could not see me anymore because on the evening of our third date, when we were out to dinner, the fluorescent light over his drafting table exploded, dropping phosphorus powder and glass on top of his drawings. He was too afraid to go out with me after that. “It’s your ex! I think he’s jealous! I’m not comfortable with this–it’s too weird for me!”

The first book I edited working for Llewellyn Worldwide. I could put Greek, Latin and Hebrew to use. Note: It was first published in 1991, not 1951. At Lewellyn, I edited many trade publications on kabbalah, astrology and ceremonial magick.

I then did a deal with my father, who hated the idea of the magician boyfriend (whom he met one time in New York–“He’s not for you!”), by way of signing away claim to property owned by my mother, a horse farm in Richmond / Rosenberg (suburb of Houston), so he could have clear title and sell the land. I did not know I was actually entitled to anything, since no one told me I was. By selling the land, he could afford to pay for my education, he explained. It was easy to give away what I didn’t have in the first place, and I was so happy to do so to have my education paid for. All I had to do was sign papers, have them notarized, and mail them back to the attorney. I consulted with my older sister first, who did not receive such papers, but advised me to sign. “You didn’t work for that money. It isn’t yours.” Being the youngest, I always did what was expected of me. 

I spent most of the remainder of the 90’s working while pursuing the second MA to obtain entry-level employment at a university. But for two and a half years, the two my father paid for, I got stuck at IU Bloomington in a program that was DOA.

The square in my progressed chart now made perfect sense!

The year of my arrival at IU was 1992. I learned that there were no faculty left there to teach graduate-level courses in Medieval and Early Modern European History due to the university’s floating an early retirement incentive package intended to eliminate many of the older tenured faculty concentrated in the Humanities and other “academic” areas. It had been very effective. Early retirements, combined with a maternity leave and a one-year Sabbatical in Italy by two History professors, meant that, upon my arrival and for a year after that, there was almost no one to teach graduate students in my field.

I had gone to IU specifically, as I had stated in my letter of intent, to study under Dr. Edward Grant, now Emeritus, and with others who were not actually in the History Department, but Medievalists nonetheless. “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 and in a student job in the library fulfilling ILL requests while forging connections with Medievalists in other departments across campus. Paul Vincent Spade in the Philosophy Dept, for example, was an inspiration to me. As an undergraduate, I had taken an extremely challenging upper division/graduate class in Philosophy of Language under Dr. Martinich at The University of Texas (so challenging, in fact that by the end of the course, the very sight of the textbook stimulated IBS; but I made the highest grade in the class). I had already studied Speech Art theory and formal logic. Of course, I had years of Latin. I was primed for a grad course in medieval logic and semantics, what Spade famously 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 at IU and mine were not in alignment. I was still dwelling in old Narnia, my imaginary world of Oxford and Cambridge dons, like C.S. Lewis and R.R. Tolkien. I loved Thomas Aquinas and anything to do with Aristotelianism, English and German history, art and literature for that matter. I liked historiography written from 1945-1965. The Renaissance professor who returned from her year off in Italy was OK, 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 at IU specialized in women, gender, disease, and something called “history of the body,” where I was continuously focused on the life of the mind, scholasticism, literature, art, architecture, iconography, philosophy and the influence of the Church and religion on culture; more traditional pursuits, what I considered higher order things worthy of study, dedication, and preserving to pass on to future generations. To me, History was a backdrop to understand greatness, the broad sweep of civilization, a rich tapestry of human intellectual, cultural and creative achievement. Otherwise, who cares? I didn’t want to study the history of death and disease. I was paying out of state tuition, after all, and I didn’t want to waste time and money to the body, gender, women’s spirituality, their sexuality, misogyny, Foucault, 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 and good, what was worth devoting the rest of my professional life to. I never suspected or considered that my orientation to the world was theologically-based, rooted in a Judeo-Christian world-view. 

To me it was logical. How else does civilization advance, if it cannot recognize and build upon its achievements, or else has lost the will to do so?

Once again, 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 that I was on the right path. It looked sort of like this, but much better, wearing full papal regalia, with the same serene characteristic somber expression and round spectacles, heavily varnished, 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!” He was fluent in Latin, which I imagine it is much easier for Italians to master.

The one time my father came to see me in Indiana, he was appalled by the portrait. “Oh my God, Emmy. That’s Hitler’s pope! Why do you have that on your wall? That man was a monster!” How did he know? (Oh, yes, he was born in 1926 which would have put him at St. John’s about the time Pacelli was coronated. . . ) What had been an expression of serene detachment from the world and source of inspiration for me became a look of cruel indifference to the suffering of others. It was confusing to me, this dark side of Contemptus Mundi, so I took the picture down.

While the library at IU was good, 7.7 million items, life in Bloomington had not been ideal for me. In that college town in the middle of nowhere, my dating and employment opportunities were limited. Indiana was too rural. I was an hour and half to the edge of the nearest city (Indianapolis), and IU didn’t have a well developed coffee house or bar culture like Madison, where normal, educated people went out at night and socialized, talking about imaginary numbers, Hilbert spaces, Wittgenstein–betting money on whether or not Vitamin K is really a vitamin–and solving the world’s problems. Where proximity to Chicago and the university had infused the bars of Madison with an ironic blue collar sophistication (brilliant Matt Damon types), Bloomington, on the other hand, really was a cultural backwater, no irony to it. At IU, only the “townies” went to bars. The townies hated the students, perceiving them all to be spoiled rich kids, while they themselves had been consigned to a shitty life in a shitty part of Indiana where there were no jobs. Legend had it, the townies were dangerous. I just read and wrote, went to class, worked in a used bookstore and in 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). I often took my dogs to the lake and forest to look for geodes and salamanders (Indiana has giant ones, called “hellbenders”). I processed the papers of Charles C. Deam, the first forester of Indiana, and did some other volunteer work for the Lilly Library. The Lilly never had any paying job openings the whole time I was there. The summer I landed at IU, I had taken a course in “Rare Books and Manuscripts” from Joel Silver, Lilly Library Librarian, now Director–made an A, of course; but the only paying gig I could get in RBMS was with a dealer in town. There was a library school at IU which made professional library employment impossible, since they had an constant supply of practicum and work study students who would work in the library for free or on the government’s dime. 

While I felt cut off from the world in Bloomington, yearning to be in a city with opportunity and culture, 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 a career at the end of all this, since too few were studying it! 

With the encouragement of a professor in Classics, which was my minor, I began working on a directed study/ thesis on the Contemptus Mundi tradition in Western thought and literature from Augustine through the Renaissance. “This is really you!” Dr. Ian Thomson said with hearty enthusiasm as he read my /his proposal. He had a wonderful Scottish accent from St. Andrews–also loved golf, too, a true Scotsman. Under his direction, I  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, he was right, 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. This was a dissertation in the making! Nobody had written a book on this yet. 

After a year or more, the History department hired a professor from the Toronto school, a beautiful pre-Raphaelite-looking woman, thin with long auburn 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 distinctly remember wondering when I met with her in her office how could she 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. Why is this person even teaching? I wondered to myself. It was all so irresponsible. I didn’t care about anorexic saints or lesbian nuns (nothing against lesbians or nuns. . . ), or anything Carolyn Bynum was into. 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 had opted for History instead, which I believed had more integrity.

I sort of told her so, politely, on day one of her graduate seminar, when she was having us accept at face value that history is just “storytelling,” a form of personal narrative. In her opinion, there is no escaping subjectivity, so one might as well embrace it. This was her justification for doing “Herstory.” But I refused to accept the premise of her argument.

“Good scholarship is always objective, or strives to be,” I asserted. I reiterated what a wise philosophy professor had 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 or measurable or capable of being known, does not mean it isn’t still worth striving for.”

Her insistence on calling the Church “patriarchy” every chance she got was also cringeworthy to me. I found myself . . . offended.

Eventually, I told her, and then the Chair, and then finally The Chronicle of Higher Education when they called to interview me, that what she was doing was not History at all–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 have compromised just a little bit and let me count Dr. 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 and patriarchy and trans Jesus (Jesus as Mother) is “History”? So what, Dr. Spade was in “Philosophy.” His specialty was the intellectual history of the High Middle Ages, which is philosophy. Everyone knows that, and everyone in the medieval world knew Dr. Spade. She didn’t have a PhD in Medieval History, either, but in Medieval Studies. Why is she a fit judge of what is or isn’t History? The Department Chair said she would approve something interdisciplinary only if it had to do with the study of women. Why was that OK? It is a department of History, not of Women’s History.

After the CHE rung up the Chair to confirm my allegations for their article, which was not about objectivity at all, but about bias against Christian students in higher education, something much more inflammatory and I suppose 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, it is all taken out of context. I never felt as if I were exercising my own religious freedom in any way. I was just trying to objectively 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., as the case may be). But my own religious beliefs had absolutely nothing to do with it. Objectivity was the point I was making, the practice of not imposing one’s own religious or political views on the past, which is why History is a “discipline.”

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 another year or two in Bloomington learning French, or worse, 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, typically written by men, which should count for something! But I had to be supervised in the department by someone who could read Latin, and he had already gone Emeritus.

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 into their fold), thinking it was the quickest path to a master’s so I could leave IU with a degree in hand. I would simply flip the major.

People do that all the time, it’s really no big deal; but once again, my family didn’t understand. Why was I changing majors, again? 

But, as I discovered when it was time to register for classes, Classics didn’t have enough faculty left to support full-time graduate studies either, due to the same early retirement package which had decimated the History department. It would take me years to get through a Classics MA taking only one or two grad-level classes a semester, all that could be offered. At that point, I longed again to attend a Catholic university, like, well, “Catholic University,” where the faculty were abundant and 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 simply out of the question! 

No, I am sure they would not tell me that at Catholic University, 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. How would I? There was still no Internet yet. At my father’s encouragement, I drove to D.C. from Bloomington for two days to check out Catholic U and locate a place to live; he said he would pay for it, not to worry. And a city like D.C. with all its museums and historic collections would provide me with ample work opportunities in RBMS/Special Collections, or for nonprofits, or government agencies, or archives or in the arts, so I could perhaps support myself. 

Washington D.C. is one of the few cities where librarians are always in demand, even today. But my father had vetoed it once before. He did again, most unexpectedly, after I drove out there at his encouragement. While initially when we discussed it, he said, “Follow your dreams!” the cost of the tiniest apartment in D.C. was too much and there were no scholarships, stipends or housing assistance from CU for master’s students. I tried. No possibility for a loan, either, when one is studying Liberal Arts at the graduate level at a private Catholic University. 

To be honest, I think my eldest sister and the girlfriend also had something to do with it. They were always pouring poison in my father’s ear. “You kept changing your major, and then you wanted to change schools! You weren’t focused!” I heard that f-word from both of them on two separate occasions, justifying their scorn and derision even years after the fact, perhaps warranting being ex communicated from the family, which apparently, I already was. And whatever “my problem” was which kept me from progressing, it might rub off on other, younger and impressionable family members, who were being raised to be successful in the world, and not removed from it, Contemptus Mundi-style.  

My family was like that, though, if you were not successful, something was wrong with you, and you were written off. Like what they did to my Cousin Maddy, a school teacher, when I was in third grade. Family members just disappeared, aunts and uncles both, one by one, excised from my childhood, as my parents became well-to-do. I never knew all these years I had an aunt, my mother’s sister, living in Houston! That’s really weird. Especially as my grandmother was nearby–who knew her other daughter, my aunt, was also in town? How did I grow up in Houston completely unaware of my aunt? Our family does that, writes off family members if they do not measure up. To me, that seems to bely the very concept of “family.” 

They also did it to my sister–the middle sister–my sister, the doctor–for a short while, but not over money or choice of career. My parents pretended my sister was dead when I was in high school and she was in medical school, engaged to a surgeon. They liked him well enough until he opened his mouth, saying that my mother was an alcoholic. Mom was likely drunk that afternoon saying hurtful or insensitive things to my sister. Her fiancé was probably simply coming to my sister’s defense. Then my father stepped in to defend my mother. I remember a lot of yelling and name calling (“Jackass!”) that afternoon. It stands out in my mind because I also had a potential new friend over, a girl into “Ag” from a small Texas town who had the misfortune of now attending my affluent urban high school where she was ostracized for her manner of dress. In my bedroom, she pulled a hunting knife out from a secret compartment in the boots she always wore to school. “You have to protect yourself,” she warned. I wanted boots like that, with a dagger inside! I reassured her there was no threat of threat of violence at my house, and that this yelling was not the norm.

After this, my parents pretended my sister was dead, even though I didn’t go along with the charade, which seemed in large part based on a movie, Fiddler on the Roof, no less, which made it even dumber. In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye was depicted as a flawed character, at times 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) based on some great “tradition” of pretending a daughter is dead if the parents objected to the daughter’s choice of husband. I knew even back then that in that movie, it was intended to be dramatic irony, not actually condoning the practice! My parents not only mistreated my sister by pretending she was dead and cutting her off, but they also misunderstood Fiddler on the Roof. I mean, no one watching was on Tevye’s side in the matter, were they? Certainly not on his side after his credibility was tarnished by his arranging a match between his daughter and the old lecherous butcher, his repulsive drinking buddy. On the other hand, she wouldn’t starve, except emotionally.

I speak to everyone in the family, what few are left of it, although I am aware that certain people are not speaking with other people, nursing old grudges. Maybe I am a weak person or have a short memory, or maybe I am unusually needy–all of the above are probably true–but I try to look for the good and forget the bad. The most important lesson my father imparted to me was to “always look for things you like, not the things you don’t like.” He applied this everything, to people too, explaining that, you might find a small percent of a person likeable or attractive, and that is OK. You do not need to like everything about a person for them to be a friend. 

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, pretending she was dead and cutting her off just like in Fiddler, 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.” She chuckled about it. 

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

But he wasn’t there, and there was no home for me in Houston.

By then, too much time and resources had been squandered by me in pursuit of a second MA so I could get an academic library job, so I could afford to pay for another degree, so I could either teach at the college level or become a curator of rare books and special collections. 

I was like the old woman who swallowed a fly. I was beginning to wonder why I 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 had kept changing my major, why wanted to change schools, why I was pursuing a second MA and not a doctorate. “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. I didn’t seem serious, when in fact, the opposite was true; if anything, I was too serious. Thing is, by then I had racked up a bunch of grad courses in History (A’s) and Classics (A’s), and English Lit (mostly As) before that, 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. I couldn’t just enroll at UH and “finish up,” as they were expecting me to do. No, you must matriculate there, taking all of your courses from their faculty. If you leave whatever university you were attending for grad school, it is game over, especially back then, before online classes. You cannot jump around.

And while degrees are forever, the credits toward a graduate degree generally expire after five years, which seems to be a contradiction, since degrees are made up of courses. If a degree never expires, classes taken toward the degree or credit hours should not expire, either.

It is not logical.

Again, 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 voluntarily retired. The History Department at IU was only hiring Adjuncts, and Adjuncts cannot teach the graduate students. That is the way it works in higher education, like a pyramid scheme. It had also become apparent to me that, even if they did replace tenured faculty, I wasn’t going to be able to get the degree I wanted, nor study the with the sort of brilliant people I admired and wanted to study with. I really had to be at a Catholic institution to get what I wanted out of graduate school. 

I had explained the situation to my father, even sending home copies of the course offerings at IU each semester so he could see for himself, not just take my word for it that nothing was offered–or only one class in something awful, like “The History of Death and Disease.” I was doing the best I could. Regardless, my family was somehow just expecting me to “make it work.” Make it work! You’re smart, make it work! Just get a degree, any degree, since I was already there. But I could not. The courses just were not offered; I went above the Chair to the Academic Dean to complain, still nothing. I vied for an interdisciplinary degree, but the Dean would not force the hand of the Chair. (It’s a funny thing, a few years after I left IU they began such an interdisciplinary program!) I was really suffering in Indiana, except I got heavily into Augustine and the Contemptus Mundi tradition, the makings of a dissertation. 

But I had no money or assets of my own to be able to leave Bloomington, to control my own destiny, and go to another university–my preference, once I saw the reality on the ground there, and no job prospects in Bloomington either, living on pittances from the library and bookstore and what small sums my father would begrudgingly dole out. It was just enough to live on, according to a budget. I was miserable and in the prime of my life, marooned in Bloomington until I got a degree. He didn’t care, he was busy with his girlfriend and new life with her, and did not want to be bothered by me anymore.

The years wore on. 

Around this same time, I got fined by the city for not mowing the lawn. My 800sf cinderblock home–it was my father’s, not mine, so I couldn’t sell it–had become a rabbit sanctuary, at least in my mind and in the minds of the rabbits who lived there. The double lot with trees was now returned to pristine wilderness, which made it really expensive to mow. By really expensive, I mean $100, as opposed to say, $40. 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 and their young. “You handle it,” Dad said disdainfully, not giving me any practical way to actually solve the problem; for I hadn’t thought to put lawncare into the budget, and there were now baby rabbits to consider. Also, I mentioned in the same conversation, the (failing) septic tank needed to be pumped again, something to do with the clay soil or a shift in an underground river–my toilet wasn’t flushing and I kept having to pay the septic guy to pump it out after it rained. My father said in frustration, “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 (also part of Indiana University) cataloging gay porn, Centurions catalogs and disgusting S&M materials which consisted in part of people really torturing others, which the Kinsey collected in order to document sexual perversions in America. The images stayed with me, people being humiliated, abused, hurt and mutilated for the entertainment of others, like some sick parody of hell poisoning my brain.

If I have one regret in life, it is choosing that school in that midwestern college town to waste years of my life in a nonexistent graduate program. Indiana was seemingly inescapable, like the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest. Although Cary Grant survived Indiana and made his way back to the Plaza Hotel, I cannot say I ever fully recovered. There, many others like me with surprisingly similar interests in medievalism, had come from far away places with same expectations, misled by IU’s reputation and extensive catalog of course offerings no longer being taught, and by the illustrious faculty whose names were still, on paper, associated with IU; and also by their promise of a interdisciplinary degree programs, which for some inexplicable reason, was able to be approved only if you wanted to study women, death, morbidity, or the deviant sexual practices of medieval clerics–because that’s what their History department now specialized in under the direction of the new Chair.

“Medieval scholasticism, is so passe,” I was told by the Chair. They would never tell me that had I gone where I wanted to go!

I had even thought to sue the university using a pro bono lawyer, at least to recover my tuition and be able to leave and go somewhere more aligned with my values and interests. I had an excellent case. They lied, stating in a printed bulletin that they had faculty there who were teaching courses which were not being taught. They had advertised a Medieval / Early European History program that didn’t actually exist. My letter of intent had certainly been very intentional: here is what I am coming there to study, why and with whom. The Department Chair had strung me along, promising things would get better, but they hadn’t. Obviously, I am an A student! But nothing could be done about it. “The university is paying my salary,” the lawyer added. He worked in a free legal clinic on campus. “But I can tell you only this. They have never been successfully sued. It’s because they have sovereign immunity.” The university was bullet proof. 

However, I also observed this downsizing trend, offering financial inducements for the old guard to retire, was happening everywhere, as schools in the 90’s sought to expand their growing Nursing, Business and Engineering “real world” programs at the expense of the Humanities and other academic programs. I’d read all about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Classics departments were closing due to lack of enrollments and their irrelevance to the needs of business, but also being accused by liberals of promoting Euro-centrism and “whiteness.” Even Classic’s association with gays could not redeem Classics from Leftist critiques which astonishingly also appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. English departments everywhere were losing to students to “Communications,” a more real world program. To be “academic” was now a bad thing, even within “the academy.”

Therefore, in the future, there would be fewer jobs in the Humanities, and fewer jobs led to more downsizing, circling the drain.

Maybe it was time to do something else, but what?

I’d had academic achievements in my brief career, an article on Elizabeth Eisenstein’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 to 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. There were also chartulary hands for legal documents and titles, a world unto itself.  

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 from flourishing at UT. “There is one Medievalist now,” Dr. Blockley offered; but I couldn’t afford to move to Austin to help her start up this program if I could not get paid. 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. In my own way, I had made a name for myself.

When I finally left Bloomington, I had wanted to bring my beautiful mission oak furniture, collection of rare books, glass curio cabinets and ornate Gothic-revival church pew with me, finds I’d scooped up from 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, an old Mazda 626, didn’t have a tow hitch or tow capacity. Having worked in a used/ rare bookstore, also serving as a book scout over the years, I had acquired many treasures. My father refused to pay for movers or a truck, saying that 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, as I rolled into Texarkana listening to the Indigo Girls, tall pine trees lining winding asphalt roads, glad because I would have family again and also be in a big city. It was a fresh start. There had to be abundant opportunities for me in the sprawling metropolis of Houston! My whole future was before me and I was no longer limited to just Bloomington, Indiana. 

By that time, Dad no longer lived in Houston, but in the nearby town of Brookshire, which is like a very far out suburb with large parcels of ranch land, oil derricks and truck stops, the air and water often smelling of sulfur.

At that time, he was always elsewhere, in Europe I think, traveling the world, just a disembodied voice, a voicemail message which said in a terse monotone, “I-am-not-available. Please leave a message.” Indeed, he was not available, at least not to me, not anymore, and it pretty much remained that way for a very long time after he remarried. If I ever did manage to make contact with him, he immediately put down the phone and made me speak to the my age girlfriend, now his wife, effectively 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 I suppose he had some things to feel guilty about. 

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

Everyone 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 that I bore a strong resemblance to my eldest sister, who was ten years older than me. “You come from a good family,” I was told by a man in black tie 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. “Em, why don’t you go ask your daddy for some money?” suggested an older acquaintance, a sycophantic astrologer / artist friend who’d been to my father’s ranch for his annual July 4th party. “You don’t look so good.” Lots of people in Houston adored my father. But 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, infested with fire ants that would stream out from under the baseboards like a jet whenever I set down dog food and swarming all over me in bed at night. I didn’t ask, because I already knew the answer. I had to make my own way in the world. And I really wanted to, but Houston was all oil and gas, hardhats, industrial processes, extended crew cabs and things I just couldn’t relate to. Houston was too new for Special Collections. I continued to apply for library and other jobs, but there were hardly any to apply for. In Houston, Rice and UH required a second MA for library employment. Oil companies were closing down their libraries–there was suddenly a glut of unemployed librarians on the market. To be a school librarian, one needed a teaching credential and two years in the classroom first; and school librarians were being replaced as districts were going to centralized ordering and processing. It seemed bleak.

That apartment allowed me to keep my two dogs just a while longer, until I no longer could, where all other apartments in Houston imposed a strict “two dog-two bedroom” rule, requiring one bedroom for each 15lb of dog. Even with fire ants nesting in the walls of the apartment, Hidden Village said with so many vacancies, they could not release me from my contractual obligations. My father had promised 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!). Without his help, the $450/ month apartment I leased was not doable. The office lady drawled: Well darlin’, I don’t see your daddy’s name on the lease, we just see your name. . . .

A VA nurse I’d met at Cafe Express on Kirby, a new friend, explained how animal shelters in Houston actually worked, especially that one on Almeda, a notorious killing shelter. I had sent Annie to the gas chambers all because she had been stress barking, digging up the carpet and having anxiety diarrhea while I was at work; and also because I couldn’t rent an affordable one bedroom with two dogs in Houston per some housing rule or city ordinance. 

When I went back to the shelter days later to rescue Annie, she was not there. She was an escape artist, capable of climbing chain link fences–I know this for a fact, for the very day I put a small cyclone pen in on the side of the house in Bloomington, she scaled it and was gone, while my other one, the purebred, just jumped straight up and down, up and down, like a pogo stick, never figuring out Annie’s footwork even after seeing it a few times. In the field around the shelter, I thought had I caught a glimpse, maybe she got free, or maybe it was like the pony in “Wildfire.” I imagined her running through the vacant wooded field doing Zoomies, happy at last–no more fences, no more kennels, no more walls. Don’t hate me, Annie. I’m sorry. . . They refused to tell me if she had been adopted out or put down, per the pink paper I had signed in duress. It wasn’t just my dogs who had been suffering from intense anxiety since moving to Houston; I too was having night-time panic attacks–my new VA nurse friend nailed it–which I had initially assumed was congenital heart failure, like what my father had. I would die in my bed and they would eventually find me covered in ants, like some grotesque Dali painting. I didn’t believe it when she suggested it. “That’s ridiculous,” I said to my VA nurse friend. “How can it be a panic attack if it wakes me up each night at 2am? I’m not even thinking then, I’m asleep!”

And then a new turn of events. I was having trouble dating in Houston. Men who asked me out flashed large bills on a first date, probably sensing I had fallen into a class beneath them. I think I must have been very attractive back then, at least cute, 5’0, 95lbs, size 0-2, long chestnut hair with natural waves, 27, lively, a good conversationalist. I read The New York Times every Sunday morning, frequenting a cafe in the Rice Village which that subscribed to the paper, although many who frequented the Cafe Brioche also brought in their own copies to read so they didn’t need to share the communal paper. The Lutheran minister I met there was starting a new study group. He was shocked and a bit frightened that I could speak so knowledgeably about Philip Melanchthon, just off the top of my head. (I didn’t dare speak in Latin, for that would have really frightened him.) I suppose people don’t expect girls who hang out in coffee shops who looked like me, sporting velveteen catsuits, to know all about 16th century Lutheran theologians and reformers. Because I still looked like child well into adulthood, people often underestimated me. A partner at Coopers & Lybrand with monogrammed shirts said, “C’mon, every woman has her price!” while slow motion tossing hundred dollar bills down on the corner table of the Rainbow Lodge, as if this were my lucky day! I guess I was supposed to say “when.” This wouldn’t be so remarkable if it weren’t a pattern of men in Houston thinking I was for sale, even though I never did anything like that. Mr. “J.L.” didn’t even wait until after dinner. In a rare instance of thinking on my feet, I took a hundred off the top and with it, took a cab home. Afterwards, I shared the story with two of my closest girlfriends, both older women artists. They said I had been stupid, I should have taken the money. “Oh, grow up!” said my friend Angel, an older woman with dyed pixie-cut hair who drove a vintage red Alfa Romeo convertible. “How do you think I can afford to keep this thing going?” It was always in the shop. 

I was soon forced by necessity to give away my other sweet dog, break my lease, and move to a tiny studio apartment in the Montrose area for $325/month, all bills paid, 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, intellectuals and creative types anyway, who lived in the area; or else the Avalon diner crowd, the upper Kirby crowd, grown-up trust fund kids of lawyers or real estate moguls who had inherited “just enough” to live on to not need to work, but not enough to marry and support a family. Wastrel alcoholics, most of them. I never saw my father and he never called me unless he needed a favor. It was like that for a long time. I painted a lot on weekends, when I wasn’t driving to Klein for a stressfully boring library job, where I babysat a parallel processor in a freezing cold trailer for centralized library services. I never spoke to anyone all day. It was horrible there, like being in solitary confinement for 9 hours inside of a compound with a 40 minute commute each way. Although I was trained on how to operate a parallel processor (it was much like Unix), I was not paid much. One day, to pass the time, I carried in stacks of Architectural Digests which I purchased from the Blue Bird thrift shop for 25 cents each. If I had to just sit there in a hideous fake wood-paneled trailer, at least I could see the interior of David Copperfield’s and Barbara Streisand’s home. My boss, who only came around every now and then, caught me reading magazines and flipped out, since she wanted me to look busy just in case her boss, the superintendent, stopped by, which she never did. Not permitted to read or do anything productive–this is before the Internet could get one through a work day–I developed severe insomnia, dreading going to work the next day and having to sit there for hours doing nothing in that icebox next to the (fault-tolerant) computer, which was unlikely to go down or any experience issues because–hello–it is fault-tolerant! 

On the weekends, my artistic friends would come over to my studio, sit on the floor and paint with me, one advantage of having no furniture. I began frequenting Mark Larsen’s Artery, loving the brilliant glittering performance art events in his backyard, mirror shards glinting from the trees, and the life drawing (drink and draw) classes in his house. I became friends with a classically-trained (Cooper Union) mural painter of some repute who shared with me one of his secret palettes for skin tones–I would never have thought of adding a touch of viridian instead of using Mars black! Indeed, grey is not a good look for skin; green is better for skin shadows. I liked his life drawing classes in the evenings at his place. He served wine and played music.

Then, for about a year, I began dating an intellectual man, a doctor in his early 50s, who took me to the opera, New York and to medical conferences; although, because of his nasty divorce, I had to pay my own way and sit in coach while he flew first class. That man was a real Svengali. For weeks, he represented himself to me as a victim of an overbearing man-hating wife who left him, draining his bank accounts, cleaning him out of everything he owned, hiring PIs to spy on him, and even turning his children against him! She had rediscovered Judaism, got fat and basically “turned into a man,” he told me, imitating the exaggerated way she would light the candles, covering her eyes and peering at the candles through her fingers.” Oh, give me a break!” he said, rolling his eyes at her presumed hypocrisy. But his career wasn’t going so well. He’d lost his admitting privileges at hospitals. And on top of all this, his medical license was about to be yanked! The poor man! His life was in shambles! Naturally, I felt sorry for him, which is what drew me to him, and not the fact that he drove a beautiful Jaguar XJS convertible and had fantastic opera tickets, or that he had donated so much money to the opera and symphony that his name appeared in the playbills. He told me all the money had come from his wife, and he only donated the money to get back at her for leaving him and turning his children against him. Initially, however, he took me to an almost empty house near the Museum of Fine Arts where the power had been turned off–oh my goodness, the poor doctor, he can’t even afford to pay his utility bills! There was no hot water. “Oh no!” he said. “I’m so sorry. My secretary must have forgotten to pay the bill.” He was living in an empty house without power! He said he had come home one day and the house was like that, emptied. When he took me out, we always split meals. While he was usually upbeat, one night he confided to me that he feared going broke. He feared that more than anything. I reassured him that I didn’t care about money, we don’t need to go to expensive restaurants, we could just hang out at his place from now on. We could live simply and be happy. 

But I soon became aware that he had another house right on River Oaks Boulevard, Houston’s most expensive street, a Georgian-style mansion, with power and furniture, and that he himself had made millions that year serving as an expert witness testifying against surgeons, the real reason surgeons all hated him and he had lost admitting privileges. I was sitting in my cafe one Sunday morning and, like a revelation, I read all about him in the communal Sunday NYT. About the other house, he said, “Uh, oh, well, you know that house isn’t actually mine. I didn’t lie to you about the house. It belongs to my ex-wife. She makes good money as a computer programmer. I told you that. It is really her house, she is just letting me live there for now. . . so I didn’t feel right bringing you over there for that reason. That wouldn’t be right, would it?”  

But he said he trusted me now, he said there would be no more secrets between us. He felt completely comfortable with me, a statement which completely disarmed me–I had passed his test. He was into Hermes and Roche Bobois, modern art, French philosophy and the finer things in life, a charming Libra. He was affable, eye for beauty (male and female), extremely well read, funny. Initially, our relationship was a love song. He turned me on Philip Glass (we saw La Belle et la Bête) and German opera–four or five hours flew by–I didn’t even know I liked opera so well until he took me, sitting close enough to the stage I could see everything. I could discuss Heidegger’s Being and Time with him and phenomenology. He studied philosophy for a while at Princeton and was closely related to a famous French existential philosopher, Emanuel Levinas, who studied with Husserl and Heidegger. (Levinas is credited for introducing phenomenology into Jewish philosophy. Who knew?) Together, in the beginning, we were like something out of a Woody Allen movie. We read E.L. Doctorow, Iris Murdoch and Martin Amis. Every Sunday morning at sun up, the NYT. He said he could talk to me, where he could not talk to other women. I was willing to overlook the fact that he had money, where I might have rejected him out of hand as some rich asshole who just used people like me, my natural instinct. I liked him for him, obviously, since he never spent a dime on me. Our relationship was pure in that regard.

After many months, friends began calling me to report that they had seen him out with other women, some notable River Oaks divorcees, the ex-wives of surgeons. Then some young manservant moved into his house who was polishing his shoes and washing his car. Now it was getting too weird, even for me. I demanded extra precautions be taken and for a clarification of his intentions. He begged me to be patient with him until his divorce was finalized, reiterating that he was serious about me, to please “wait for him.” Like his Daisy, I hosted great parties at the mansion and edited his research papers, preparing them for publication. Increasingly, our social circles converged, like a Ven diagram, around the Houston art scene. It wasn’t like he was hiding me. Everyone knew about us. He paraded me into the Green Room at the Wortham and brought me to the Houstonian, where we went every Sunday afternoon. Before then, I had started a better job, a museum job, special collections and curatorship, and things were fine. My career finally appeared to be taking flight. I got a subpoena to appear in his divorce proceedings where I was grilled about how much he had spent on me in the last year. “Nothing, except for opera tickets. I always paid my own way.” It was true, I didn’t need to lie. Even on my birthday, I received nothing from him. However, when I appeared in court, there was many other women who had been summoned to appear, I observed. I was one among many whom he had traveled with in that year. The list of names were long, and some of the names were not unfamiliar to me. 

After the divorce was finalized, he only wanted me for my fertile eggs to be implanted in his “fiancée”– just as there had been another “house,” the fact that there was a fiancée came as complete shock. I really didn’t see that coming . . . I had imagined all this time, for a year, that I was his fiancée. But my father did try to warn me, “Emmy, no man is having dinner with his CPA on Friday night.” When we were together the morning before his trip to the medical conference in Australia, he mentioned to me that he had “finally met the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.” When he said that, I thought he was referring to me! I found out it wasn’t me only when I went to pick him up from the airport returning from the trip.

She was no slouch, either, an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year and a self-made millionaire, a very attractive 42-year-old blonde Mercedes-driving widow, who loved the doctor so much she was willing to be implanted with my fertilized eggs in order to marry him! 

How did he do it? I liked him because of his intellect and charm, his breezy and urbane New Yorker persona, the fact that he knew all about Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. But to be honest, he was not much to look at by the standards of most people. . . short and bald, with squinty eyes. And why not marry me, if he thought so highly of my mind, my body and my genetic material? He initially asked me to be a surrogate and I flat out refused–I’m not going to carry our baby and hand it over to you guys to raise! “Don’t be so narrow-minded,” he said. “I’m disappointed in you. Frankly, I thought you were more open minded than that.” He left me sitting there at Cafe Adobe, just up and walked out, abandoning me to my frozen margarita. Days later, he came back and made another pass. My doctor friend explained to me the advantages of such an arrangement. She knew how to raise successful children, she had a proven track record, as she had gone to Wharton and her children had gotten into Princeton. Successful children, a legacy, was his new objective in life, since his own children–one was only 14, and a wonderful boy–I met him a few times–were such profound disappointments to him (that boy is now a senior staff writer for the The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times, a very successful journalist!). Surprisingly, I liked her and she liked me. We became a threesome for a while, going to counseling together, since it was required of egg donors.

When the day came, she was implanted with three fertilized embryos, with three on reserve. She drove me home afterwards and then, once inside my studio apartment, she started to cry. I thought maybe it was from sudden pangs of guilt; I mean, I wasn’t getting paid or anything for all the doctor visits and injecting myself with “fertile mare serum,” giving up my relationship with the doctor, not able to seriously date anyone for many months in my state of hyperfertility, and donating what might have been my best eggs to them! After this day, I would never see her or him again, or my babies, per the “no contact” agreement I had signed. 

She was crying, crumpled on the floor, because she was now uncertain about him because he had lied to her time and again. “He is completely selfish.” He’d stuck her with the total bill for the IVF! You don’t know the half of it, I wanted to say. I wanted to reveal the whole story, tell her the truth about him, that I had figured out he was scamming his patients, diagnosing them with fake illness from their breast implants, treating them with snake oil (hemoglobin IVs) to make them feel better, defrauding insurance companies, giving false testimony against surgeons in depositions, and also what I’d found in the wine cellar carrying on with that manservant–it was so disturbing!–but I kept my mouth shut, for the sake of my babies. Instead I said, fine time to think about that! You’re pregnant! Per their agreement, they were married right away. Thankfully, they disappeared up to her affluent suburb up north, to her home in Champion Forest, outside of my social orbit. I really didn’t want to run into them and my baby at Whole Foods or art openings. I feared that more than anything in the world, seeing my baby (or babies) with them. I felt suddenly alone in the world again, but it was some small consolation that my children were out there, somewhere, with two crazy millionaire parents. Or only one rich parent, as I rightly surmised that his days of high earnings were over. Now that his license was going to be yanked, he desperately needed a wealthy woman to support him in the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. I knew that, intellectually, rationally, but it still hurt my feelings. 

I guess I could check “having children” off my to-do list now. 

One evening around this same time, 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, especially as my doctor-friend always liked to compare me to Dorothy Parker, which is a nicer way of saying the same thing. 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 isolation in a supportive community. To be honest, I fit right in at UST, no conflicts with anyone or with any of my professors, which was refreshing, and their career center helped me to land a good job, which unfortunately also put my academic career on a hold. My professors were all 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–the diamond necklace–for a fraction of its value to pay for tuition another semester at UST (Why didn’t you auction it 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. A Catholic university valued the same things I did, tended to perceive and interpret the way I did. I was in my element.

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 in the face. “A dancer? No, I’m the daughter. These were my mother‘s.” Oh, I’m so sorry, he said, looking down through the loop at a large diamond he had just popped right out of its setting to weigh it. It bounced onto the scale like a gumball. Why had she been in there? 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 at the time I was pleased with the outcome. The Contemporary Art class and others I took with the money were excellent. Truly, 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, printing history, expanding upon my knowledge of rare books, historic documents and antiquarian prints, as well as contemporary art, so it made sense at the time. I’m not sure the MA still does at my age, and those credits, as with all my others, have surely expired by now.

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

In the end, there was nothing left of his estate but an empty apartment, a couch, a bed and a small wooden chest of drawers. He went blind and had kidney failure after the heart transplant, so he had no use for nice things. The close to my age girlfriend / wife wasn’t sticking around to nurse him; Cindy, who sometimes went by SinDee, her dancer name, never did stay with him for long anyway, even when he wasn’t sick, in the hospital and/or blind. She left town to go back to her house to be with her boyfriend after Dad went into the hospital. The only reason he survived was because of her dogs. I had heard the story over and over, like the buffalo hunt in Dances with Wolves. They were at a veterinarian’s office when he hit the floor, so an oxygen mask was available, or else he would have died. His brain made it, but the rest of him (eyes, kidneys, etc.) didn’t fare so well–he had no choice but to wait in the hospital indefinitely for a new heart, connected to machinery resembling a frozen daiquiri machine. I cannot stand the sight of spinning slushie machines.

I don’t blame her for leaving, though. She was 33 years younger than he, practically my age, 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 to be honest, my father and new wife really didn’t have to run through it all in the way that they did, right before my eyes, right in front of me, squandering it on a bunch of stupid stuff. I witnessed the steady montage of cars and homes for her, and second homes and condos in resort areas all for her, trips for her, jewelry for her and luxury clothes for her. Tours of Europe . . . horse barn with heated floors so their hooves wouldn’t get cold . . . homes in resort areas. It was constant weird spending. I was invited to hold the bags. Seriously, who in their right mind buys Prada, Versace, Hermes or Dolce & Gabbana–$500 jeans–including, by the way, 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 all for what? My father would occasionally call me broken-hearted, to come and get her leftovers, couture she could not cram into her overstuffed bags to take with her back home to her house in another state he was paying for, after a week-long shopping spree with his credit cards at the Galleria. Her remaining clothes had to go, right now! I had to drop whatever I was doing to come get them if I wanted them, or else he would give them to someone else.

But wait, it gets even better. Eventually, I surmised the great urgency to come and get her leftovers was because another young girl was about to come fill the void of his empty life. That one couldn’t very well be allowed to see another girl’s clothes hanging in his closets, could she? The pattern would repeat itself, my being summoned to pick up the crumbs of their self-indulgent lifestyle. During all this, I never suspected my mother might have left me anything when she died, let alone 3M. That is what the will said, yes indeed it did. 

In fact, years prior, I was alone with my mother for that entire weekend when she was in bed on morphine (I snapped open the glass ampules and mixed the powder with the saline solution myself, pulling them into the syringe just as the nurse had shown me), but she never said anything to me upon waking but one time, “Forgive me!” For what, I do not know, for that is more a general disclaimer than an apology. There was such distance between us, a silent void, I blamed myself, as children often do. I wasn’t loveable. It happens in nature. Like the defective chick the mama decides is no good, even if we cannot discern anything wrong with it, but she knows, intuitively that something just isn’t right with it. Therefore, she won’t feed it or teach it to fly or hunt, or bother to protect it, so predators will pick at it, pick at it, until the chick dies. I didn’t die, of course, but I was sure something was wrong with me. But then again, maybe it was all her fault, her depression, the same thing that made her not play the piano, ever, despite supposedly being able to play Rachmaninoff. Your mother plays beautifully, I was told by my father. She loves Russian composers. Her favorite is–yeah yeah. But I never heard her play, not once, although we had a piano and a bench with sheet music in it. My sisters who also played heard her play, but not me. You would think one time she would have played. Who she was, I never found out, she shared little of herself. A wise priest at Saint Thomas once told me–well, he told the class, not me personally–depression is nothing more than a form of selfishness, the inability for one to turn one’s “inner eye outward.” I spent the weekend with her when she was sick, but I could not get her to turn her inner eye to me, the point of my being there according to my father, who unexpectedly dumped me off at the house for the weekend to babysit her when I flew into town to spend time with him. “This may be your last chance to build a relationship with your mother! She’s dying!” It didn’t work, she didn’t talk to me, except to ask that I forgive her. She just slept. Therefore, after she died, no one ever told me I was entitled to anything or that I was in her will, nor did I suspect I had received anything more from her than the necklace. Despite the great affluence they all enjoyed after the death of my mother, it was easy for me to believe that there was nothing for me except the necklace, which I pawned to take some classes at The University of St. Thomas to try to get my second MA so I could obtain employment as an academic librarian. 

Many years later, my husband found a will on file at Harris County, long after everyone and everything was already gone. Of course, when that day came, my family blamed the my-age girlfriend for their being no assets.

One time, after they had been married a few years but were living apart, I heard that the 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 in the first place, totally stupid, let alone leaving it on a plane? No woman 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, like Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer) in Scarface trying to get away from Tony Montana; or was it Sharon Stone trying to get away from Robert DeNiro in Casino–isn’t it the exact same storyline, just a different setting? But maybe I’m giving her too much credit. Maybe she was a complete ditz who simply left her jewelry bag in the overhead bin on Southwest airlines. I could never figure it out.

During the late 90s, I always got some trickle down cash by consigning her leftovers (unfortunately for me, one cannot return or exchange “couture” for cash . . . ) however I could through River Oaks consignment boutiques. The small checks, residuals, randomly coming in the mail or waiting for me at “Twice New” or “The Guild Shop” really brightened my day. While we were very close to the same size, she never bought anything I would want to wear. But seeing the price tags, how much was spent on her strumpet costumes, which she didn’t even bother to take with her when she left town, made me physically ill. I tried to suppress my feelings of resentment and rage, and not succumb to envy or desire, like a Catholic saint. Contemptus mundi. Contemptus mundi. It was all Vanity, right? Be spiritual. Rise above. Detach yourself, like St. Jerome. He was always my favorite saint, since he was an ascetic, is the patron saint of librarians, encyclopedists and Latin, 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 to achieve that out of body experience or spiritual detachment from the world.

In the years that they were living the high life traveling around Europe and buying vacation condos and homes–the 1990s–they were clueless or unconcerned about how I was living. For my birthday one year, she sent me Dead Sea bath salts from Neiman’s. She meant well. I didn’t have a bathtub, only a shower stall. That weekend, I tried to return it to Neiman’s for exchange, and was looking forward to having the opportunity to get a Chanel lipstick or something for myself, but the salesgirl said the bath salts 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. Actually, no, I think they sent one to everyone in the family, it just showed up around my birthday at the end of November. . . Not really something a young woman living in a 600 sf. studio apartment would want necessarily, but at least I was still in their thoughts. I gave it to my friend Anthony, an Adjunct at the University of St. Thomas, who had nephews coming to his house for Christmas. They would enjoy using the nutcracker, making its mouth crack open nuts by pulling down the lever on its back and making a nut mess on the floor.

To fill the gaps in his life between her arrivals and departures, my father had other women whose rents he was paying. He could afford that, but not. . . for me?

Despite the stoic way I had been raised–I was like the son he never had (high praise)–to not need a relationship to be happy, I observed that Dad really couldn’t stand being alone, being without an audience, especially as he aged, so he acquired down-on-their-luck women. I met a few of his girlfriends, a privilege afforded to me and to no one else in the family.

Not sure why he wanted for me to meet them, or for them to meet me, but they were always my age or even younger. One of them, a nice fresh-faced small town girl from Lubbock or Tyler, or some such place, I learned he had been supporting in a luxury high rise apartment at Westheimer and Bammel Lane, a rather shocking discovery, given my own circumstances. I met her twice at dinner, many weeks apart. She said she was a physical therapist, but judging by the size of her breasts relative to the size of her waist, I thought it possible that she might have been something else. I didn’t want to embarrass her or myself by asking.

One day, she tried to commit suicide after he suddenly broke it off with her. “She’s crazy, who would do such a thing?” my father said to me incredulously, as if he had nothing at all to do with it. He told her he didn’t want to talk to her and was refusing to take her calls (I had an idea why–the other my age girlfriend/ wife was back with him), so he sent me to go talk to her after the almost successful suicide. She was in the hospital. I told her, “I’m sorry, my father is not a good man. He did the same thing to me–twice–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 for a combination of reasons, but what featured prominently in my mind was his neglect of his Labrador retriever puppy. When we pulled up in the driveway, there the dog would be staring through the iron bars with pleading eyes and multiple tennis balls in his mouth, wanting to be loved. And yet, despite this, he believed the dog was “just an animal,” and that a yard, food and dog house was all the dog needed. What’s wrong with you? I thought he was the animal, and puppy neglect is a form of abuse–just not the kind I could report him for. He had a nice two story house right by Rice University and collected vintage Land Rovers. On my birthday, he demanded to know if the gift he had bought me “met my expectations.” I had already sufficiently thanked him for the Victoria Secret wonder-bra and panty set, 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. I began to feel annoyed by this persistent discussion about the gift and if it met my expectations, if he’d spent enough–what he was really getting at. As an engineer, maybe he was just trying to comprehend the mechanics of the relationship, or the power dynamics at play. However, I have always tried to resist reducing my relationships with the opposite sex to financial transactions. I realize other women are not this way, and that I may be more complicated in this regard. 

One of my closest girlfriends also dated a Shell guy, a tax accountant, and right off the bat she gave him a list of suitable gifts for each occasion: flowers and chocolates on Valentines Day, a piece of good jewelry for birthday, etc. I was astonished, but to be honest, it worked very well for both of them. There was clarity, certainty, that a gift would be found acceptable. I myself am the complete opposite. I do not want any sort of quid quo pro. That seems to bely the very concept of a “gift.” I do not want to be obligated by gifts, nor do I wish to obligate others through them. 

But to be completely honest, as much as I aspire to be spiritually detached from the material 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 most likely why I try to avoid having them now. 

What kind of father says to his impoverished 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 there! Come live with us! Go see the house, I’ll have the agent show it to you. . . . They were both so happy that I had agreed to the arrangement for my own good, even though it meant a longer commute for me, as by then I was employed as a Curator and Assistant Director of an art and history printing museum down in the Montrose area.

But 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.” What? Why? He had backed out at the last minute because she had left town again, breaking his heart. “I feel like a yo-yo!” he cried on the phone, expecting sympathy 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. And 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. Unbelievable. I was working, making 28K, but it was Sunday afternoon, and my $325/mo apartment had been leased. Incidentally, this came right after the egg donation. 

That afternoon I moved in with a stranger, a man I’d met at a museum singles art opening who had given me his number. It was still on a crumpled cocktail napkin in my purse. I may have rung up others first, but no one was picking up on that Sunday afternoon in 1996. 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.” I instinctively knew I could not impose on my courtesan artist girlfriends. Generally speaking, women do not ask gallantry of their girlfriends, for that violates an unspoken rule of girlfriends. We do not ask our girlfriends for money, to help us to move, to drive us to the airport, to take us downtown (anywhere where they might be expected to parallel park), or if we can sleep on their couches. My knight turned out to be a retired judge, so it seemed safe enough, and it would only be for a few days until I located another apartment. He wanted me to stay. Six years later, a blip in time I hardly remember, I met my current husband and fell in love, a feeling 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 me 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. He asked, could I be there “to help her load the car”? 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. Dad had already set fires in the microwave trying to cook frozen dinners (blindness does make cook times difficult) and the apartment complex wanted him out. “This isn’t an assisted living!” the office staff informed me. No one was looking in on him, and as I discovered, no home would take an old broke blind man on dialysis; I tried to find a place for him. His personality wasn’t so good either by then, although he could still tell some pretty funny dirty jokes, recalled from his childhood growing up on the streets of New York. What friends he had, business associates, died or 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 within five minutes of my arrival. “Dad, I see no one in the family. No one talks to me, either.” 

There I was, like Cordelia in King Lear. We went to see him off and help put his things in the car. She said she wanted to take his chest of drawers “to stage houses,” since it was small enough to fit in her car. I thought it a bit ominous–wouldn’t he be needing his dresser? No, he would not.

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 the credit card number directly to the desk clerk. Within a few weeks he was dead, since she killed him. 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 Dewar’s with a blurry profile of teenage me smiling in the foreground. I didn’t feel any warm fuzzies, only a 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, professionally decorated. 

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. And I have a house, which certainly makes the study of interior design more interesting.

I can do this! And better, much better, I immediately realized, than my young classmates, who had no house nor knowledge of the past, whereas 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 wind was filling them up! I was sailing into the warm waters of a new career. 

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, mauve, 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 who like to travel would undoubtedly 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.” Not very helpful criticism.

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 modern, architecturally-inspired ID program at HCC, opposed to her spare ethos and ideology of “sustainability” and “eco-friendliness,” which I associate 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 in my Interior Design text. 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 paradoxically 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 restore the middle class (I taught ELA in public school for a short while; but when I started, the district 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 . . . I personally don’t think prayer would have gone over well with that rough crowd, unless maybe if the prayer were turned into a group project where each table were assigned to come up with their own prayer to share with the class, which is exactly how modern “education” works these days. . . ). In addition to the literary canon, I would like to restore a lot of things, like leather, as in shoes and handbags. Americans eat so many burgers, where are the hides all going? Not to China, or places where shoes are made, obviously. 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. It takes a big bead and breaks into smaller beads, but that is all.

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 memo samples, even before pursuing ID. Fabric makes me feel happy, as if they were postcards from old friends in nice places saying, “Wish you were here.” Each one has a personality, expresses a different mood, conjures different feelings and emotions. 

But, in my own defense, I have also recovered a few antique chairs at my house, am in the process of selecting draperies (for real now, not just pretend), and wallpapering a bathroom (that may be just pretend; I do not know how to hang wallpaper except in a dollhouse), so it is not completely impractical or irrational for me to have so many samples and swatches. I’ve even mounted some of them on scrapbook paper so you can see what they might look like with different wall colors. As I look through then, I imagine an imaginary friend sitting next to me enjoying them as much as I do, which I know sounds pathetic. I tried to get my husband to look at them, but he refuses. 

I’ve been studying designer fabrics for so long, it is a pastime; 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 looking forlorn in the bedding section of JCPenney’s, worn paint chip pulled out of my wallet for each of the boy’s bedrooms. I’ve learned to buy the comforter or shower curtain and repaint the room. It saves time.

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. Who doesn’t? 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, of the soul. I like oil-based 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, detestable lights. LED 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 simply cannot paint under LEDS. They have incredibly 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 and productive 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 or might I say, has become something else, barely recognizable to me as librarianship. It has become diminished, collectionless, preserving nothing of the past and nothing for the future. At this point, a library is more or less the “tail-end of a publisher-aggregator supply chain” and everyone knows it. The academic library I knew and loved and devoted a large portion of my life to is practically gone now, and what is left doesn’t seem to need librarians, or at least as many of them as it once did, because it lacks collections in any format. The public library is not much better, as lately it sees its value as a place to go for those who have no other place to go, or a place to print for those who lack a printer. That’s not all that compelling to those who have places to be in the middle of a work day and have printers of their own. The idea of “maintaining an informed citizenry” is no longer even a thing. Even the newspapers are gone . . . go online, read it online, meh! But the modern rendition of the academic library is really absolutely horrifying beyond measure, destroyed by architectural build-design firms who know nothing of what a library could or should be in this digital age beyond functioning as a collaborative work space.

I believe it could be so much more! I do have ideas for how to reclaim it.

The academic library to me and most scholars was once a beautiful thing, the work of many hands, a cathedral to learning, a sublime experience, almost religious, a sanctum sanctorum, its collections themselves a forming the perceptible outlines of knowledge itself–and to me, personally, a daytime cocktail party with interesting, self-actualized people coming and going throughout the day (at least when I was working the desk and managing the collection, which I actually did for a few years, 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! 

The library showcased titles educated people ought / would want to know to become and remain educated. It was the essence of goodness and truth, something pure, a celebration of human intellectual and cultural achievement over time, the thing that justified and legitimized the university (now the tables are turned, and they expect us to justify ourselves to them, difficult to do without a collection), a unique experience which renewed the academic commitments of scholars and kept research interests from fizzling out. It was inspiring, worthy of time and devotion, of self-sacrifice and the mediocre pay, in part because it was also permanent, an edifice, or at least enduring, so much love and care had gone into it. It was a foundation upon which new knowledge would grow organically, like a reef. 

But now, because of progress, it is not that at all anymore, but something else entirely, colorless and unimaginative space, an intellectual wasteland, a proprietary search engine on subscription content, and the very values which once defined our very professional practice are gone, or regarded as vestigial and irrelevant to the wider world, in large part because we have made it so. Commitment to collections and to life-long learning are gone from academic librarianship, a luxury we can no longer afford.

What constitutes an academic library today is a digital concession stand, a commodity, an aggregation of proprietary commercial subscription content prefixed by a search box and some citation management tools to write papers and get assignments done and an empty space, a tool or app. And, while we might say we are all about lifelong learning, the day after graduation one is ex communicado, access to library resources turned off per our license agreements.

How does that model foster lifelong learning?

“Why would anyone want to access scholarly databases after he graduates?” someone asked me when I was going on about scholarly access. 

I got this a lot, especially with SSO, now that the IT department is managing “access services” for the library. 

Of course, with this new, more limited IT and vendor-driven library service model, people also ask, “We have databases and search engines now, so why do we need libraries or librarians?”

Indeed, people always ask me that. . . it is pointless to answer them. Whatever a librarian says regarding librarianship is always suspect anyway. 

Despite my pursuit of Classical languages, I myself am no technophobe or Luddite. I studied computer programming, too, in another past life when I ran the technical services for the library. 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 to these days in Houston, where the poverty rate is now among the highest in the country, another reason I am keen on pursuing yet another credential, even though I am, arguably, close to retirement, which may or may not happen for me since I have no savings. 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 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 mid tone colors to enhance the experience of the art, just as 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.

Truly, 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 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, along with a coat of arms), Harry Potter incantations, 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, especially anything to do with a child. 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 to stand in line with all the other teachers) 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 Art and Architecture 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 in the Registrar’s Office. 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 immediately 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. 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.

Now, I do know a thing or two about letterpresses and traditional printing techniques, and also philosophy. Did I mention I am a former Curator of a printing museum? I didn’t know “who he was” until my boss said, “Emily, do you know who that is you were chatting with all evening?” 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 party, a scruffy nobody 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. They shop at Target. It’s a something they do, a form of humility. 

After the Great Recession of 2008, 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, which we were, 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 on GreatSchools.net. 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 that, moving from one Bay Area to another. 

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 impressive camera, but on that day, he forget to angle the flash upward, rendering the images overexposed with flash marks, 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 being town down.

We vowed to one day return with a truck after we had a home of our own to bring these treasures back. 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, to photograph it. Too many homeless were there that day, it was like a zombie apocalypse to get to the front doors. As I walked toward the doors with their ornate knockers, but people 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. All I knew was, there was a crowd of homeless people walking toward me as I approached the church doors. I fled from the church back to the sanctity of the Ford Explorer. While in Berkeley, and on that same day, we swung by Serendipity Books, a famous used and rare book store, only to discover it was closing for good. I came in time to witness the last week it was open.

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), or just “Geist” (Spirit) for short. This force, incidentally, is also the same thing as Adam Smith’s invisible hand, or where he got the idea from. Also, Karl Marx’s dialectic, the same Idea with the capital i, which is the secularized translation of Geist. It applies to libraries, too. Through collections, organization and display. 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. (It is not discernable from a single thing, or even often in its own time.) Has the Spirit gone online or is it dead? 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 and myopic view of our professional practice. 

And presumably, these days, no one is needed to organize anything for anyone else because we have search engines. 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 best 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, so I didn’t have to sit there to go through them all in their reading room. 

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. 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.

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 for drawing inspiration, 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 style. 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, composed, published, created or designed ca. 1890 to 1925. I collect illustrated books from that time period as well–decadent Bodley Head books, which are in the Beardsley tradition. 

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 really is 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 might potentially 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?” 

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 since 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 opaque glass and copper. The palette was green, charcoal and copper with some tan and ivory 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 program figures it all out for them.

I asked my professor, but she did not respond to my emails 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 in time. 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!

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 reason or excuse for driving four hours to go there just to look at fabrics and rugs 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 closing locations and liquidating their rug gallery), an overlooked source for Arts and Crafts / Revival rugs. 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 the 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.

Recently, I discovered that Schumacher, a famous design firm, also produces some of its wallpaper and textiles much in this same way, as it was done over 100 years ago:

Traditional printing (silkscreen) techniques creates a beautiful textured surface with some dimension.

Maybe one day, one day, I could represent Bradbury & Bradbury or Morris & Co. or Schumacher, 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? That was completely unexpected. I could see a business in my my mind: 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 in their stores, becoming a neighborhood design center, 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, 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 from a purely business standpoint. Rugs, lamps, accessories and artwork are low-hanging fruit. The Amish are missing out on potential sales by insisting on being so plain. (Historically, you know the Amish had nothing to do with the Arts and Crafts style! It’s almost a contradiction in styles. Plainness and Shaker style was always their thing, not Arts and Crafts. It is inauthentic. 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 a yard . . . that puts you squarely into Mulberry brand range. Beautiful. 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? 

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

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

Houston has no shortage of lux showrooms now, 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. I do not mean to use the word “slum” pejoratively, even though I am aware it has an ugly ring to it. I am just being objective. People above a certain age refer to what was once here as “Old Houston,” a euphemism for old money. I know that there are still some nice areas, as if I didn’t know about Bellaire, West U or River Oaks. But that is a tiny microcosm within the macrocosm of the fourth largest city in the US. Here is one person’s 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.” My neighborhood looks solidly middle class, but people are constantly begging for food and necessities on our Nextdoor Neighborhood Network, which is telling, with other people telling them, get a job! I used frequent garage sales in hoity-toity Bay Oaks, but despite the grand facade of affluence, but they were always selling the worst garbage, crushed shoes and pilled sweaters. I wondered what the inside of their homes were like. 

I read recently that Houston has more newly poor neighborhoods than all of Detroit. We hit the list again in Sept. 2025, 1 in 5 families in poverty. Real poverty, as the government counts it, which is much worse than how most people count it.

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! Really, I would love to help others select and acquire just the right hard-to-source fabric, light fixtures, rugs, etc.–but especially fabric. While I’d love to be vendor neutral, ideally, for health insurance and a steady paycheck, I’d work for a vendor like Kravet. Some do have “Resource Librarians.” It would be better, there would be more opportunity, if I were in Dallas, since that from what I have heard, there is an entire design district, not just a design center.

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

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

“Oh, I see where you were going!” anyone would say looking at my resume, as if all this time I had complete control over my destiny and my career trajectory this entire time, 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 and our inability to buy a home in California, at least anywhere where the public schools were above a 2.

In our area, 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, CCISD is still considered “good” by some objective measure set forth by the TEA, where I myself would give it an F for failing to properly 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 simple math problems. 

For the record, I believe in Kravet and their family of brands, not so much in “Holland and Sherry.” I realize, though, when placed in certain contexts, almost any fabric–even that emerald green brocade couch with blue flowers we had a long time ago–can look outstanding with right accessories. It just has to make sense in the context of the room, in meaningful conversation with the pieces around it. Context is everything. And ideally, I want to talk to people in my next job, not sit in an empty room of bins stuffing envelopes. . . but maybe if they offered me a good discount on fabric, it might be alright for a while. . . 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 just 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, since people do tend to work on commission.

Sherwin Williams already has store locations where the 99% live. I think I know well the product lines of designers 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, another favorite, not Lee Jofa, not Mulberry, not GP&J Baker. I may be wrong, but I doubt people around here are spending over 4K for two custom draperies by Carole, whose books you will find at Ethan Allan under the EA brand–and one other place I know, a spritely widow who runs a 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.” Didn’t seem a good move to me. 

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 thought. 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, talk, 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 and memo samples strewn about for inspiration. It would also be, in part, an art museum, a gallery of fabrics. I would be open Saturday and Sunday both, 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. I would be open on weekends, but would not waste my own time or offend my customers by insisting on coming into their house to measure the window for draperies. That’s dumb. I would trust that they could use a tape measure, not require me to go inside their home, unless of course, they wanted me to. My strength would be the ability to source hard to source products they could not find anywhere else, even by Googling.

AI could not replace me.

Getting back to price points. I 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 slow moving 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 from us, and the area is now seedy, 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, dank opium den of interior fabric bolts and cut away to your heart’s content; 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. 

While fabric is really more my thing, due to an unfortunate accident with an upstairs toilet at our house, I can also tell you all the very best tile showrooms in town. If you have already visited Floor & Decor, everyone’s starting point, then the Daltile and the Emser showrooms on Fuque–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. The smaller tile makes the room look bigger. Everyone knows that, and has known that for centuries.

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? On the high end is Pomogranite, which has great artisan tile. If you do want a stone listello for your bathroom or mosaic tile backsplash, that is the place (They carry New Ravenna!). Great stuff. 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. You’ll pay the same price at Lowe’s for fiberglass. 

And I know this workroom, a place 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, although to be honest, most are upholstery fabrics of lines I’ve never heard of. 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!” he said with an arm wave, but I don’t believe him. Jo puts her name on everything. 

Calico does the same thing, white labeling with their own names and numbers, to keep you from buying the fabric from “Fabric Guru” or “Fabric Carolina” or some other online discount outlet and making drapes yourself, or taking the fabric to a workroom like to that guy above, which is exactly what I would do, because even as a design student and member of AISD, I am still not a “member of the trade,” unable to buy direct from wholesalers; but I can almost always figure Calico’s designers 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–zebras and arrows. You can spot Ralph Lauren a mile away, still looking so 80s country club–with a maroon, navy, beige and gold palette. But there are always good things at Calico. Their buyer does a great job curating the store. 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: what if I get into a car wreck and the samples get ruined? (It actually happened to me one time with library books from Rice University, each of the five books in my crumpled trunk from having been rear-ended in the rain costing me $125 each; Geico would not pay for them). But I was really looking forward to seeing what such fine fabrics would do for my demode home. They looked much better in the store, and frankly, what a relief to have my desire for expensive fabric thoroughly extinguished; couldn’t afford it anyway.

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 excited. I went to see the Kast showroom in Pasadena, because I wanted to find out if they had even more books I had not seen at the workroom and if they actually designed their own fabric. 

Kast used to be across from Metro Retro Joe’s furniture warehouse, in another gritty, razor-wired, industrial part of town, which is most of Houston. 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, which was killing their business, since their fabric is made in China and they couldn’t get their containers into the ports in LA, where they are trucked all the 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. 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 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?) and 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 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. Update your library! I promise you, you will sell more paint. Then, branch out into widow coverings! Offer a samples /design resource library. Make this area over here 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, halal fried chicken, Asian massage, smoke shops, stores that do cell phone unlocking or buy gold, boat storage places, all of which I imagine are negatively impacting my home value. 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, toward the remaining wallpaper books, 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, making 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 . . . God, what happened to Jaguar? They all 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 58-year old librarian and former medievalist, Arts and Crafts revivalist and Anglophile, taking interior design classes at a community college–and who is really in it just for the love of textiles, patterns and prints–can only do just so much to keep our visual, intellectual and material culture from completely. . .  slipping . . .  away.