When I was a child, I had this old metal white painted bed that the paint was starting to chip off of. I just remember slowly chipping away at it with my finger nail - kind of like when you have a sunburn and you’re peeling away at the skin!
I was chastised and told to stop it, but couldn’t help myself. My parents kept saying they were going to repaint it, but never got around to it. It’s just one of those weird things one remembers that doesn’t really mean much of anything.
A photo memory from Board member Phyllis McGrath:
I have a black and white photo of my sister and me, taken at camp, probably in the early 1950’s. My father was a track coach at DeWitt Clinton H.S., in the Bronx. Like many phys ed teachers, he worked in summer camps as well. I was in camp from the time I was three months old. At some point, my parents bought Camp Tamarac, in Becket, Massachusetts, the Berkshires. I spent every summer there, as a camper, then as a counselor, until I was about 18. I was a shy kid, the daughter of an athlete but not an athlete myself. Camp Tamarac had a huge impact on me — although I’m still not a great athlete! Lifetime friendships were formed there.
We have this green three-seater sofa at home. We bought it when we lived in England but it has traveled around the world with us, in two homes in Singapore and now back in India. It has been the spot where I cuddled with my first boyfriend, where my sister and her friends practiced headstands, and where my dog makes himself at home when he feels cold, despite not being allowed on sofas. It has become such a part of our family, that one year, my dad bought my mom a painting from a local gallery because it depicted a family lounging on a green sofa, which you can see as you sit on our green sofa. When I was younger, I used to always ask that if we moved around so much, then which place was actually home. And my mom would tell me that home is where the family is. Which is true, but even more so when we’re all together again, lounging in the living room, watching tv, fighting for a spot on the old and crummy green sofa.
Photographic memories from Long Wharf Board member, George O’Brien:
These are photos of my father in World War II. He was in Naples for a year, including the last time Vesuvius erupted, but I assume these were taken in Rome. They’re not particularly memorable for me, since I don’t remember seeing them as a kid, but they’re timely with the Ken Burns documentary on PBS.
My parents, brother, sister and me on Easter Sunday 1956, in front of my grandparent’s house in South Hadley Falls, MA. My brother and I are wearing new, reversible jackets that I still remember. There are no signs of global warming.
The grouping of O’Brien males taken around 1924 consists of the grandfather I never met and his 7 sons in descending order of age. My father is the youngest, at the far left. I’m not sure who marked the names. We found it like that.
Last year I drove by my late aunt’s house, where her adult son still lives. My last memory of visiting the house was 25 years ago when she was dying of lung cancer. I was stunned to see her old car still parked in the driveway – the light blue buick, circa 1970, was so uniquely hers. All of her negative energy toward me came flooding back, like a punch in the gut.
I have many small replicas and photographs of the spire atop the Chrysler Building in New York. The replicas and photographs are a reminder of my father, who worked in the building in the late 1940’s when I was a young child. His office was on the 69th floor, in one of the “fins”. I know that I was inspired to commute to work in New York City in the 80’s, by my father’s daily commute to his office in New York. For me the Chrysler Building spire represents his aspirations and my own as well. It is also very beautiful.
A few years ago I was the last overnight visitor to a house that’d been in my family for a few hundred years… my relatives were born and died in those old beds, rooms. In the attic were trunks filled with old civil war uniforms, flapper dresses, old lace….. and the old house was rotting, sad… but I could still feel all the life that had happened there, when the world was a very different place. My aunt gave me many of the oil studies that my namesake, Katherine, painted in the 1880s; she also played the guitar, and died at my age, of T.B. I have her tambourine, her ornamental hair comb. I was the twelfth bride to wear the family dress, fifth generation. I love the funny old things I have from that house more than anything, they connect me to a past I was never part of, but is in my DNA, somewhere. It is so bitter, the reminder of mortality, of Time moving on… but comforting because I can lean against those who came before me.
“With used furniture you cannot be emotional”—says Gregory Solomon a couple of times in The Price. The research of time lost, made famous by Marcel Proust, is, in fact, a completely emotion-driven affair. The objects and places of our past can encapsulate indelible moments, a mixture of pain and comfort, joy, continuity, endings, a sense of who we are today. The objects and places of our memories have a life of their own. We can be confronted with them materially—having to look at them again, deal with them, think about their future destination, or they simply live in our minds. But they are there. After all, “lives are lived through china dogs or well-thumbed books, families held together by a letter or a pipe, identities formed though pasts not forgotten.” (Material Things and Cultural Meanings: Notes on the Study of Early American Material Culture by Ann Smart Martin)
We’ve asked cast members of The Price, as well as members of the Long Wharf family, to share their memories of an object or place that speaks volumes (or just a nuance) about who they are today. Over the next few weeks, we’ll post their responses to rumen (Click on the Memory in Objects category for the full listing to date)…
