Detritus
These items were part of my life in one way or another, but with
the passage of time they have degenerated.
They still provide a prod to my memories as
well as self-accusations of poor stewardship, as
improper storage conditions and the
unnoticed passage of time take their toll on wood, metal, glue, and paint.
Prints in this series are all 16 x 24 inches (22 x 30 inches framed), printed on Moab Entrada Rag.
Click on image for larger view
An example of business furniture of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, it was solidly built of oak with many pegged joints, bought by my father from a used furniture store in New York City while I was a very small child. Built-in discomfort denied napping on the job by the unfortunate Gilded Age office clerk who had the misfortune to land in this chair, and my father attempted to thwart this with a series of thick cushions over the years. Were it equipped with a rolling base I might have allocated some scarce indoor storage base to it and it might have survived, but by the time that I retrieved it from under a protective tarpaulin, the Adirondack climate had reduced it to such state of rot that I was compelled to hot-glue strategic joints to hold it upright for photography; as I carried it off the set, it fell into dozens of discrete pieces, all at once, like the Deacon’s Wonderful One Horse Shay in William Dean Howell’s poem.
I spent a winter building it when I was fourteen or fifteen years old and this turned out to be my final model aircraft. This control-line stunt plane was large, fast, and a national champion-level design for aerobatics. Its large engine had sufficient power for anything I wanted to do: Inside and outside loops, horizontal and vertical figure eights, and inverted flight. I haven’t had the heart to throw it into the trash.
This Royal Model HH was mine from my sophomore year in high school and I continued to use it through college and for years afterward, abandoning it only when my early Mac’s word processing software became practical. It shared a tarpaulin with my father’s office chair and the Adirondack climate overwhelmed it.
The oldest of these artifacts that is mine, I recall sitting on it while being pulled through the snow by my mother. Later, when I became large enough to pull it uphill by myself, I rocketed down the hill behind my home and, at the very last moment, steered hard to the right onto the front lawn to avoid fatal collisions with automobiles on the street. I’ve recently seen that this design is still being produced, but I noted fragile metal stampings for running gear.
I was bedridden for long stretches of time between ages eight to ten, and I had to entertain myself without television (yet to arrive at our home in the McCarthy era). Using scissors and LaPage’s mucilage glue, I made large flotillas of such boats from discarded packaging cardboard and sailed them over my bed’s blankets.
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