My literary hero Ray Bradbury famously adorned his writing desk and the surrounding office with endless piles of books, toys, tchotchkes, and papers, enough to almost make me feel like my natural inclinations aren’t so broken for an aspiring writer. When he died in 2012, many people expected his LA home of five decades to be bought by a fan, someone who would love to absorb the accumulated residue of creative genius in the walls. Instead, three years later, they tore it down.
And yet, despite all the accumulated piles and mess so recently cleaned, I’ve lived in this house we bought last summer an uncharacteristic 13 months without driving a nail into the wall of my office. I have propped a couple pictures around, leaning a framed Ichiro picture and Winnie-the-Pooh painting into the built-in bookshelf that stands as my real-life Zoom background for meetings the 2 days a week (2.5 in summer) I work from home. A couple other old favorites topped other bookcases (there are seven full freestanding cases in this office/library, six of books and one of board games). But nothing was attached to the wall by so much as a strip of double-stick. Until tonight.
The hard part of putting up wall decor feels like it should be the putting up. But that’s a misperception. Yes, if one is particularly worried about recouping a rental deposit (something that’s been in the back of my mind for twenty years of prior addresses), then it’s easy to be a bit precious about the method of attachment. But once one has committed to an approach, the only tough thing is having enough to put on the walls. Which twenty years of decorating walls will help fix.
It took me fifteen nails and less than an hour.
Before:
After:
A few things might jump out at you right away. I’m not too worried about whether something is framed or not. That Seattle poster has been on most of my office walls since I picked it up in my last visit there (Summer 2009) and still hangs in the clear plastic sheath it was bought in, a choice made so convenient by it having a little plastic hook attached to said sheath. I prefer a generally akimbo approach to perfect centering or symmetry, though the far left column of the full wall did come out particularly aligned. I’m into a bit of white space these days, though I’ve definitely previously had posters especially with no margin at all, chockablock and tiled like a mosaic. And of course a new picture, actually framed and gifted by Alex’s mom, has taken center stage.
Also, I meant to put the clock somewhere. But of course it’s still sitting propped in the window, even though it’s designed to be a perfect wall clock. I think I’d just gotten too accustomed to where it was to realize this was the time for a change. I might be able to sneak it into the left-hand corner near its current location, below the rabbit and to the right of the printer. But right now, Graham is asleep in the room directly above, so I’m not taking any chances with a sixteenth nail.
Will I feel more inspired and motivated in this space now? It certainly can’t hurt. It’s helpful to look up and have little reassurances and reminders of people and images and memories that I love. To evoke the best parts of the past when I lean back or zoom out. It makes me sad, at times, but these days everything makes me sad. I wake up now with a feeling of foreboding at least, of the knowledge that something is wrong even if I can’t quite identify what. When I remember, it’s like it’s happened anew all over again. I often have to say aloud to myself “My dad is dead. My dad is dead.” But the articulation rarely serves its intended purpose. It doesn’t make it more real, but more absurd. As my mom points out every time we talk, he was so alive, so vibrant, so full of life. She calls 74 young and we can debate about that, but there’s no question that he was young at heart. Or perhaps we need a better turn of phrase.
The worry of putting holes in the walls to make them more vibrant is that one day the holes will have to be filled in, and perhaps the walls repainted. This is a stressful extra chore in the moving out process, to go with boxing up everything, cleaning the rooms, making sure that nothing gets lost. Buying a house provides the illusion that this isn’t such a concern, but ultimately either I will die in this house or I will have to worry about. The main thing you’re getting with a purchase is longevity: time between spackle acquisitions and putty knife scrapes against the plaster. Maybe you get fifty years, maybe twenty, maybe five. Given all the hours spent in the shadow of what the holes hold in, it seems a petty price to pay. Why are we so haunted by trying to make things lightly damaged whole again? Isn’t it better for us to find what we love and swing away?
This is the 16th post in the One Thing series.
Last Five
#15: Old Friends
#14: Mailing it in
#13: Get Organized
#12: That Escalated Quickly
#11: Pulling Hen’s Teeth
Introduction & First Four
#4: Forgive, Don’t Forget
#3: Call Your Mother
#2: In the Land of Make-Believe
#1: Wistful Wisteria
Introduction: Announcement and Rules
