Friday, October 21, 2005
Closeted Doors
good gracious, he’s still on about furniture and furnishings? here’s PART IV of this self-indulgent exposition on the inanimate that animates our lives. plus, some photos at the end, in case you get bored!
The adoption happened faster than we expected. There was supposed to be three or four more months for us to paint the nursery, buy stuff, and get ourselves ready to be a family of three. No complaints, of course, but the accelerated timeline left us scrambling to pull all the odds and ends together while bonding and keeping all the necessary tasks sufficiently addressed – laundry, feeding, bathing, diapers, plus some things we had to do for the baby, too. It’s made for a full agenda most all of the time.
The house has slowly evolved to accommodate more of Zach and less of the superannuated junk that we kept stored in various cloistered corners and closets, out of sight and mind. For example, there’s the doors. Not the doors of perception, but rather the opposite – the doors of concealment. Maybe I should explain further. No, really, don’t try to stop me.
Our bedroom has a short hallway to the master bathroom. Both sides of this hallway are lined with long, shallow closets. At first, these closets were each accessed via two sliding doors, big wide panels of wood that rolled on runners and hid our various habiliments. Several years ago, though, one of my doors stopped rolling quite so smoothly. Turns out, one of the plastic wheels on which it rolled had shattered. Search though I might, I couldn’t find a replacement – the hardware probably dated to the 1950s, and it wasn’t generally available anymore. However, I was able to minimize the inconvenience of the broken roller by lifting out the whole damn door and stashing it in another closet where we kept a wonderous array of crap. Then I yanked the other sliding door and put it away too, and thus I obtained unfettered access to my entire collection of hanging clothes at all times. I could review all my sartorial options in a single glance, instead of having to run the doors back and forth. It seemed like such a positive step that Kel asked me to do the same for her – to remove her closet doors and stow them away in the cluttered junky storage closet in the spare room.
It made life so much easier, and, shall we say, more transparent. All was revealed. Our ownership of our own clothing was renewed, and, by extension, we renewed our utilization of some of our old forgotten duds. But more than that, the openness confronted us with - forced us to confront - that which we’d tried to hide. Untidy tailings of existence were thrust into our awareness from where we’d left them, apparently hoping they eventually somehow would evaporate for us. But they hadn’t, so we cleaned up what we’d uncovered, faced down those dusty unexamined corners of our most familiar hiding place, and went stalwartly forward. Our closets – the ones from which we fished out our clothes every day – held no more secrets from us, no more surprises for us, anymore.
That lasted a while, anyway. Then, so much later that it was recently, we found ourselves hustling to turn our utility room/yoga studio into a nursery, and therefore had to delve the depths of the storage closet. That’s where we rediscovered the old master closet doors, vast opaque faces soaking up darkness. I hauled everything out of the storage closet: cinderblocks, boxes of books and personal memorabilia, disfavored luggage, and four six-foot-tall wooden panels ranging from four to five and a half feet wide, dingy white and dustwebbed, still wearing that blank rolled-back stare that provided cover for so long for that which I have already forced myself to face down. I pulled them, too, out of the storage closet, into our long main hallway, where they leaned quietly against a featureless wall and very nearly blended right in. They weren’t garbage – they weren’t even mine. The landlady would want them back, eventually. I didn’t know what to do with them, so they just stayed there, quietly, unobtrusively, hiding their own shadows and their own secrets, for several months.
Well, we just finally took the last step: we shlepped them doors on downstairs and out under the airshaft steps behind the garbage cans in the garage. The doors are now hidden in the landlady’s well-packed realms of unexamined surplussage, instead of in my own. I don’t have to think about them anymore. Or, more to the point, I don’t get to ignore what’s behind them ever again.
and for those who care, there are some more photos in the extended entry. sorry, none of them are of the closet doors.
first, some pix of golden gate park, generally, from when we visited with the out-of-towners:
here’s a dude and his ‘doo. (btw, it is not me. this town has plenty of bald weirdos.)
at Stow lake, we saw many lovely birds but none as multitudinous as the pigeons:
... but even with mere ducks as a counterpoint, it is a very lovely lake.
on the way home we stopped by the opening celebrations for the new De Young museum - where the party was hopping and the speech was stilted:
... which brings us to the museum, which was open from saturday morning through sunday evening, non-stop. kel tried to go at 9 pm on saturday but the line was 2 hours long. I hear it didn’t get much better till very very late. I went at 7 in the morning on sunday and waltzed right in, though. timing is everything. Here’s some of what I saw there:
As it turns out, the new De Young is a very nice museum on the inside, my misgivings about the outside notwithstanding. I’m glad I went and I’ll definitely go again, since, after all, it’s closer to my home than the grocery store. Now, I’ll leave you with a parting shot, for those of you who bothered to let me know that you liked the photo of us all up on top of twin peaks - and with this, I’ll leave you to your own devices for a little while. Have a tabernacular sukkot!
