Dr. Metablog

I

It's not a very good picture, but then, I'm not a very good photographer. It's a Tibetan rug, monochromatic and undramatic, but in my opinion, extremely handsome. Sometime during the 1970s, a store selling Tibetan antiques opened in Boulder, stayed with us for a very few months, and then closed. I fell deeply and passionately in love with this rug, all the more so because its price was greatly reduced during the closing fire-sale. 

The rug is supposed to be "old" and it certainly wasn't recently knotted. It was represented to me as being made of yak hair, but MP, our rug expert, fingered it and said, "No, that's wool." MP wouldn't hazard a guess about its age, but he did enlighten me about the symbolism: the three cranes in the center panel signify longevity; the four corner figures are "happy bats," and happiness is also figured by the four very small, almost unnoticeable, swastikas. So it's a joyful rug. There are also many snakes and a number of figures that MP couldn't identify. It's remotely possible that this rug was originally some sort of monastic bench cover and that each of the crane figures represented a place to sit. I doubt this theory because the sitters would have had to be very small monks with tiny tushies.

When we moved to Manhattan, in 1965, for a first real job, we had hardly a stick of furniture. We thought we needed, in addition to a bed and a kitchen table, a bench for an entrance hall. Wandering around Greenwich Village (Althea was very big with child), we stumbled into an antique store, one of scores that populated the area in those pre-Ebay days. Pisces Antiques, it was called and it was owned by a young English woman named Kim Sylvester. (Isn't it astonishing that I remember these details?) This bench (properly a settle) caught our eye, not the least because it cost half as much as a functional bland modern equivalent at Macy's or Wanamaker. "What is it?, I asked. Kim said, "English, Jacobean, about 1650." And so it was. A surprise.

I've since learned a bit about seventeenth-century English furniture and I'm convinced that the large back panel is genuine. It's late medieval in style and exhibits all three of the kinds of carving that are typical of the age. The four central panels (stylized poppy on the outsides, stylized thistle on the insides) are called "recessed ground." Separating the flowered panels are pieces that are "gouge" carved. The crosspiece at the top is "incised." As for the body of the settle, I suspect it's not very ancient, but instead assembled from old wood by a furniture maker who had respect for the carved back and wanted to re-use or re-purpose it. When was this reconstruction accomplished? It might have been anytime before 1965, but most probably during the long 19th century. Possibly during the so-called gothic revival period in the 1880s and 1890s.

I've admired this settle for 55 years. Nowadays It sits proudly just to the right of our entrance door. I like it that our guests pile their coats and bags on the Jacobean settle when they enter our home, not noticing that this discreet piece of furniture is old and rare and singular. No one asks about it and I don't tell. It's my secret.

This unassuming object played, and continues to play, a consequential part in my life. It's a plain brass bell, unadorned, maker and age unknown. It's not musical but when properly agitated it can make a helluva loud noise. It was given to my mother in 1947 by her mother, my grandmother, Sonia Green. How my grandmother came into possession of the bell, I don't know and can't imagine. A mystery.

I begged it sometime in the late 1960s and have owned it ever since,

My family spent the summers of 1947-48-49 at Makamah Beach on the north shore of Long Island. It was the high point of my childhood; I've written about those glorious summers right here. The function of the bell was to call me and my two brothers in for lunch or dinner. The clang traveled well even against the whoosh of the wind and the rhythm of the surf. There I'd be, all alone, studying shells or snails somewhere along the shore or on a sandbar, hungry, and I'd hear the insistent jangle and hurry home. My brother Jon says that to this day he can't hear the peculiar noise of this bell without salivating. 

The bell was equally useful, a generation later, when my own independent, wild children wandered freely around our Hackett Hill property. It rang, they returned. I wonder if they associate its sound with corn-on-the-cob and hamburgers. They have ample reason to do so.

And even now, of summers, when it's the hour for food, or just time to call the day to a close, out comes the bell, and children, grandchildren, and guests respond to its harsh but historic call.

For me, the summer and autumn of 2010 was a bad period, even though it led to the only moment of prayer and reverence in my entire life. Readers and fans of this blague know that I have more than once reported that I was born into a purely, even aggressively, atheistic family and that have remained an unquestioning atheist to this day. So what happened, you ask, in 2010 to cause me to lapse once and only once from a lifelong want of belief?

It began with a ruptured disc, which is, as fellow-sufferers know so well, an extremely painful condition. Surgery was recommended, but by every statistical measure, surgery works only half the time, and therefore I was reluctant and frightened to be cut, and instead figured that if I could just wait out the pain, perhaps the affliction would heal itself, as, I was assured, it usually does. So I lay on my back, crawled to the bathroom once a day, and started taking drugs. Powerful drugs: oxycodons every four hours, those big 600 mg ibuprofens several times a day, lots of valium to deal with the agitation, steroids (some by mouth and some injected directly into my back), and because of the insomnia, more ambien than was absolutely necessary along with some other miscellaneous pills and tablets, the names of which I can't quite recall. It was my fault, in part — I had too many doctors and no one was in charge, so various medical people prescribed various pills, and because I was in such pain, I gobbled them all. 

After two months, I was still in acute debilitating pain and I had to face the fact that my plan wasn't working and that something had to be done. I submitted to surgery at the end of August down there at the Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Lebanon. Relief was instantaneous — why had I waited so long? But I was now faced with the problem of drug withdrawal. Not having good medical advice, I became the coldest of turkeys. 

My digestive system went completely out of whack. For days, perhaps two or three weeks, I could tolerate only the blandest foods. I survived on baked potatoes and very little else. My heartbeat was very high and settled to an even 110 for six weeks. I was agitated and nervous.I suffered from dramatic night sweats — two or three times I woke up with nightclothes soaked and dripping. Muscle cramps.

And also severe constipation which led to badly bleeding hemorrhoids. For six weeks, whenever I had to "honor a call of nature," I'd look into the pot — bright bright red. Day after day. "O no! When is this going to end?" And then one blessed day — and here at last comes the moment of pure religion — I hesitantly inspected the bowl, and miracle of miracles– no blood. And I cried out, spontaneously, without forethought, these words: "Glory be to God." 

What god? I wasn't in a theological frame of mind, but in retrospect, it may have been Cloacina, the Roman goddess of sewers, to whom I directed my fervent thanks. Or possibly Sterquilinus, although he was more a god of manure and fertilizer than of the toilet bowl.

The good old Romans — a god for all occasions! Even for me.

This sugar and creamer are the only objecs I own that deserve to be in a museum. They were made by Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain at her Pond Farm studio in Guerneville, California, near the Russian River, sometime around 1972. I don't think that the picture captures the strength or beauty of the workmanship. They're beautifully thrown, beautifully glazed. To eye or hand they convey almost magical power.

My charismatic, chaotic sister (technically sister-in-law) Phyllis brought these to us from Guerneville, where she studied pottery for three or four summers with "Marguerite." We sent her some cash to buy pots by the artist but these were the only ones that we actually received. Phyllis bought many but she couldn't bear to part with them. And then one by one her treasured possessions would slip out of her hand or be knocked off the shelf by her cats or otherwise wind up as shards. For many years after Phyl's untimely death I preserved in a shoebox the shattered bits of one of Marguerite's most magnificent creations — a landscape pot which depicted  a dozen or so cavorting animals. Where is that shoebox now?

I rarely use these works of art — they're too magnificent to put at risk. 

On the bottom of the creamer, still visible next to the words "Pond Farm," Marguerite has pencilled a price: $12.50. But it's priceless.

Althea bought this rug at an auction in Warren, New Hampshire in 1968 — and it is the first rug we ever owned — the first of many. I was startled when she bid on it because we were in the market for crockery and glasses and chairs, not for decorative objects, but she saw and appreciated its beauty. It's a rug for a wall because it's too old and fragile to be tread upon by the shod. Rug expert MP says that it's from the Caucasus — specifically it's a Konaghend Kuba — from the late nineteenth century. Of course we didn't have the faintest idea of its provenance but we knew that it was very appealing. In fact, I was so inattentive that I owned and admired the rug for forty years before I noticed that it was a prayer rug — the mihrab is not much pronounced. Nor did I appreciate the abrash; the indigo blue ground disappears two thirds of the way down. It's probable that the woman who wove it ran out of wool from a particular dye lot, but it's also possible that the weaver was nomadic. 

When Althea lived in Washington for a year in the 1990s, she took this rug with her — the only personal possession (aside from clothes, of course) that she brought. And then many years later when she entered the Alzheimer's institution, I hung it on the wall facing her bed. I thought it would be a comfort to her — but alas she did not remember or recognize it. When she died I  brought it back home where it belongs.

This appealing pitcher and vase set were thrown by Ben Owen II, a potter who lived and worked in Seagrove, North Carolina. In September of 1966, we visited Tom and Margaret in Chapel Hill and they took us on an excursion to Seagrove, where we bought these fine works of art. Ben Owen was very much a traditionalist, sticking closely to tried-and-true shapes and glazes. He was "old-fashioned," and I am equally so. Lots of weird things have been done with clay during the last sixty years, but these shapes are more pleasing to my eye than modernistic distortions and abstractions.

The glaze is called "frogspit" but "frogskin" would make more sense.

When I moved to a new home in 2009, the Ben Owen pots disappeared. I thought they had been lost in the move, but after a couple of years of searching, I located them. In fact, I had packed them so carefully and securely that they were virtually buried. But I persevered.

These splendid objects have now (except when they went AWOL) been on prominent display wherever I've lived for more than half a century. It's curious, and a fact, that not one guest has ever asked a single question about them. They've not been noticed. Are my friends unobservant?

I think that the pitcher and the vase are so discreetly beautiful that they don't demand attention, a fact which makes me love them all the more. 

I bought these water glasses (sometimes called tumblers) about 35 years at a long defunct antique shop in Lafayette, Colorado. They fall into the large category known as Depression Glass in the trade and they were probably manufactured in the 1940's or 50's — but that's just an unsupported speculation on my part. I don't know the name of the manufacturer so they are works of art without provenance. I love the clean lines — straight at the base and then slightly flared at the top — and also the way the glasses fit so elegantly into the human hand. The tumblers are entirely unadorned and if they have a style other than vernacular I suppose they might be called Art Deco. I once had a few more of these tumblers — perhaps as many as eight, but because they are in constant use there have been losses. There's no saying how long these beauties will survive — the rims are a bit fragile and vulnerable in the dishwasher. Although they have no monetary value, they are in my opinion both classy and classic.

I stand, like most in my cohort who have lived ordinary, conventional lives, at the midpoint of a continuum stretching from grandparents to grandchildren — at an imaginary apex looking backward and forward, Janus-like. I remember my grandparents, though only at the end of their long lives, and I know my grandchildren, though only at the beginnings of theirs. Two generations back, two generations forward and with 81-year-old me at the fulcrum.

It's been a long eventful tramp from there to here. My grandfather Isaiah was born in 1863, a hundred and sixty seven long years ago, and my youngest grandchildren, the twins Caleb and Asher, joined us just five years ago, in 2015. Although it was only an instant in geological terms, nevertheless, the interval from my grandfather's birth to this moment has seen glaciers melt, rivers change their course, cities arise, plants and animals go extinct, governments and empires grow and decline, wars and epidemics rattle the planet. He lived in a world of serfs and rabbis and pogroms; the grandchildren live in a world of nuclear proliferation, global warming, threats to democracy.

There have also been tectonic shifts in the microcosm of my own family. My Ukrainian-born grandparents would not recognize my third-generation American-born grandchildren, and my grandchildren would have an even more impossible task to understand or appreciate the lives of the great-great-grandparents. It's a long leap from StaryConstantine, old Constantine, in the nineteenth century, where my family originated in backward village Ukraine to Washington DC or northern California or Boulder Colorado in the twenty-first. Rural to urban, agricultural to technical, provincial to worldly, religious to secular, inbred to genetically various. My grandparents were born into a world of carts and horses; my grandchildren play with computers in their cribs. Yet here we are.

We're the same, but different. According to family legend, my grandfather Isaiah left StaryConstantine and his family of origin because of a dispute about religion. They, his father and family, were devout but he was a non-believer. In this regard, Isaiah was a true patriarch, because he established an enduring family template. Over the generations, we remain hostile or sometimes only indifferent to religion — and in its place we embrace the evidence of the senses and the primacy of reason. Looking backward and forward from my pinnacle, I cannot identify a single lapsed atheist or backslider in the family landscape. I know that my father never attended a house of worship except for a rare funeral or wedding. For him, the sabbath was sacred only to his roses and azaleas. I once asked him if his father, Isaiah, had ever visited a synagogue. He said, "I can't swear about what happened in the Ukraine, but I know that once he got here he never did." For Isaiah, atheism would have been a revolutionary fracturing; for subsequent generations, not even slightly stressful. The precious gift of atheism I once called it.

What has replaced religion? Our extended family remains a people of the book. Among my grandfather's forty-seven direct descendant, thirty-five of whom are alive, six have written books, another is a journalist, and five others have earned law degrees, where not unlike the older generations of Talmudists, they can engage in disputations over nice sharp quillets of the law. There are no rabbis, but I can count at least ten teachers of one secular subject or another. My grandfather had no official schooling, but every one of his great grandchildren is a college graduate and many of them have post-graduate degrees.

There are some families that can boast of painters or violinists or actors in their old world heritage; not ours. Nor have we become creative or imaginative in the new world. I count no poets, no musicians, no actors, and except for my outlier brother who once wrote a novel and now makes bricolage sculptures, no artists. If we make anything, it's useful. Furniture or pottery — not paintings. But then, no criminals or alcoholics or wastrels either. We're substantial reliable citizens — firmly nouveau bourgeois. We may be conventional and dull, but we are what my father used to call, without irony and with great pride, solid, tax-paying citizens. 

The last time, a decade ago, that I needed a rug pad, I went hunting at various malls and shops that might stock such an item. After a few exhausting hours, I located an appropriate-size rug pad at one of those large import stores — it may have been Pier 1 or WorldMarket. The quality wasn't quite right, and the pad was too large and too costly, but it was there –  and I do possess a utility knife with a very sharp blade. So I bought it, struggled with it, but — it worked, and it's still there, doing its job, padding the Heriz. 

This time, covid-time, I'm not allowed to search around town, and I don't want to, so instead I did some internet sleuthing for "rug pad."

It's a revelation — there are many, many vendors very anxious to satisfy my rug pad needs: RugPad USA, Mr.RugPad, RugPads 'R Us, Rugpad-orama, eSaleRugPads, RugPadStock, RugPadHome, RugPadSolutions, Dr. Pad, RugPad World, Royal-T RugPads, Underfoot-Inc, and My Rug Pad, among others. Costco sells a "Mohawk" rug pad made of "100% post industrial recycled synthetic fibers with all natural rubber with SBR latex backing," whatever that is, not cut to exact size, and you have to buy a shrink-wrapped package of four.

I choose RugPadUSA not only for patriotic reasons but because its site featured a lengthy explanatory essay on the potential disasters, hazards and glories of various species of rug pads. Are you not shocked to learn that that some inferior rug pad manufacturers pad out their fiber with clay?  

RugPad USA is a company that takes its rug pads very seriously. I am now up to snuff on Grip, Cushion, Longevity, Sustainability, Safety, and Made-in-America-ness. And also on materials: rubber, jute, felt, Pure Wool, hemp, and memory foam, in their various forms and combinations (and prices).

I went with an "eco friendly Nature's Grip 100% natural rubber and plant jute." It arrived in four days, cut to exact measure. Perfect. This rug pad is so beautiful, let me tell you, that I'm thinking of laying it on top and putting the old tribal Turkish Varamin tent rug underneath. Well, maybe I'm getting too enthusiastic about my glorious new rug pad.

Advantages to internet shopping: it lets your fingers do the walking, there are an infinity of choices, and after a while the item appears miraculously outside your door. Disadvantages: you can't see or feel the product before making a decision; it's a pain to return mistakes; your cash goes to an absentee merchant (RugPad USA is located in Connecticut); local shops suffer, and also, slightly delayed gratification. But the electronic mall is definitely the way we shop now.