I recently decided to update my tabulation of my wealth; after all, it is the end of the third fiscal quarter of this volatile year. Sitting in my favorite chair in my living room and glancing around the room, the first asset I noticed was a painting of Maya, our last Boxer.
Maya’s passing triggered a long-suppressed desire in my wife, the desire to try her hand at painting. She collected all of Maya’s photographs we could find, procured a set of acrylic paints, and proceeded to produce a series of very credible portraits of this dog. This led to two decades of painting and several hundred excellent paintings. Each one is a treasure.
Maya’s portrait is propped up next to the two bottom shelves of our built-in bookshelves, which are filled with many more treasures – photographs of our three children and our five grandchildren. No man was ever blessed with a more wonderful family.
Close by is a table on which is a framed photograph of me and my five sons taken at my Retirement Banquet a year and a half ago. John and I are joined by my four ”honorary” sons – Jeremy, Letuan, Kevin, and Amodeo, former students with whom I have forged a special, long-term relationship.
My academic career was incredibly rewarding to me. The opportunity of rubbing elbows with the world-class academicians in the Civil Engineering Department at Pitt and the joy of watching fifteen hundred young men and women mature into constructive adults was unparalleled.
Similarly, three tiny Chinese figures on the mantel above the fireplace symbolize my working career (thirty-eight years) with the Dravo Corporation. In the late 1970s I visited Taiwan to participate in the startup and commissioning of a plant we built there.
One Sunday we rented a car and driver and drove out into the country. In a shop in a tiny village I found these figures, which I purchased for a pittance. They are the Sanxing, the three Star Gods – Fu, Lu, and Shou. On EBay they might bring $25; to me as a symbol of my Dravo career they are priceless. I was fortunate to be part of an organization of remarkable people who achieved remarkable things.
On the table beside the banquet photograph is a coaster made from the stainless-steel roof of the Civic Arena when it was demolished. Nan was a passionate Penguins fan and purchased season tickets for us for many years, through feast and famine. Our seats in the Arena were in Section F-15, directly over “the goal on which the Penguins shoot twice”. My memories of the hundreds of games we saw there together are golden.
The focal point of our living room is the wall above the mantel over our fireplace. It currently is graced with a gift from my daughter Elizabeth, a wood block print by Hiroshige. I regularly rotate the work of art in this space. Next up is a black-and-white photograph of a train on the trestle of the Georgetown Loop Railroad, that Sara gave us as a reminder of a trip we took on the railroad with her family years ago. In addition to being a neat work of art on its own, this picture brings back memories of many visits to Sara and her family, and of the magnificent Colorado scenery.
Another fine framed photograph is on the wall next to the mantel. It depicts the torii at the Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima Island in Japan. A classic “photo op”, the torii has been photographed millions of times, none of them any more appealing than this picture which I took in 1955. My two best friends at the time, Farris Farha and Don Wise, and I took advantage of a two week pass to leave our Army life behind and tour western Japan. I am proud of the photograph and grateful for the comradeship the three of us had during our sixteen months in Japan, defending the free world against the Communist threat.
Another treasure, a small primitive carving of a wolf, is sitting on the bay window at the front of the living room. When we acquired our cottage at Conneaut Lake, I became interested in wood carving, mostly focusing on decoys and shorebirds. This eventually paid off with a blue ribbon at the Waterfowl Festival at Linesville one autumn, for an upland plover.
After seeing a primitive Nativity Scene at a Navajo shop on “the Big Res”, I decided to take that on as a carving project. The first year was easy, a manger with the Babe in it. We produced about ten of them and gave them to members of our family as Christmas gifts. Next year came the Mother, followed by Joseph, three Magi, an angel, and, finally, a shepherd holding a lamb. The total effect wasn’t bad, for a primitive.
My next project was to replicate the tableaux in Edwards Hicks famous painting “The Peaceable Kingdom”. The wolf came first, followed by the lamb. I think I got as far as the lion before I finally gave up. My remaining wolf is a treasure to me as a reminder of many happy hours on the deck at our cottage, with me whittling and Nan painting.
An outsider visiting my living room would be appalled by its squalor. Books and magazines piled on the furniture, the whole room in desperate need of a deep cleaning, upholstered chairs tattered by cats using them as scratching posts – added up, it looks like the kind of habitat we read about in newspaper articles about some ancient hermit being found in his decrepit apartment.
To me, however, my living room is a treasure house filled with tangible artifacts, each of which is symbolic of wonderful experiences from my life. There isn’t anything here worth enough to put in a garage sale. Nonetheless, my evaluation of the bundle of them adds up to somewhere between priceless and infinite.