Grandfather Weasel's Cabinet of Curiosities
My Stuff
July 18, 2006
The dude in the bowtie, socks and sandals is Grandfather Weasel, my favorite dead ancestor.
This is his study (after my father inherited it, we always called it The Den, though it completely filled two big rooms and one small one — walls, floor and ceiling). It was the most grandiose amassment of treasure, junk and old dead animals I have ever seen. And I've seen a few.
I have a better picture of Grandfather's museum around here somewhere, showing the scale of the thing. Grandmother can just me made out in the lower left-hand corner; a small, disconsolate object in a sea of knick-knacks. Her hands aren't visible, but I wouldn't be surprised if she had a fistful of straw. Cabinet of Curiosities is a very old term for a gentleman's collection of natural history artifacts. A personal museum would also include souvenirs of his travels, historical whatnots and delightfully repulsive objects suspended in jars of particle-flecked formaldehyde. Many an old private collection has formed the kernel of a great modern museum. A few have survived as smaller museums and kept some of their original intimate quirkiness. Two of my favorites are in London: the Horniman and the Cumin. The Cumin in particular has come down to us as a bunch of junk stored over a local library and so kept the flavor of "weird stuff that appealed to some old rich guy." One wall of this wonderful collection consists of small objects dredged out of the river Thames, including a medieval dentist's hat (sewn all over with extracted molars, as advertisement) and the gold cap of an ancient wizard's staff.
London. Wizard's staff. For real.
Grandfather Weasel dropped out of school at 14 when his father died. He read a lot, which made up for it some, but that only takes you so far. He thought Grandmother's family looked down on him (probably true. They were hoity toity). He had some good instincts and some bad instincts. He would buy a fine piece of bronze statuary in an estate sale, and convert it into a lamp. Like that.
He wanted to be a writer or a painter, but failed to rise above bank president. Honestly, that wasn't his first choice. Or even his second choice. Next to Grampa's left elbow is his Underwood typewriter. It had a purple ribbon. He typed a lot of bad prose on that thing (and so did I, come to that). He self-published a book written entirely in painful hillbilly dialect which, I was astonished to discover, is on a number of online rare book lists. We built forts out of them when I was a kid, but now I can't find my copy. This raises the horrifying prospect that I might have to buy the damn thing.
At a collector's price.
Anyhow, I'm not prepared to vouch for the authenticity of all of his stuff. I have an idea grandad may have been a bit...gullible. Some of it was undoubtedly real. Maybe most of it was real. Maybe all of it was real. I couldn't say.
One whole wall of the room was covered top to bottom with trophy animal heads, nearly all of which were killed by my father or grandfather. Deer, boar, bobcat, rattlesnake. Birds. A whole wall of shiny, reproachful glass eyeballs. Facing the door. Ah...come in, little girl. Come in. We've been expecting you. We're dead and your daddy killed us. Just thought we'd mention that.
And there was a bunch of colonial stuff — spinning wheels and wooden buckets and yokes that looked like someone had chewed them out of oak logs. That sort of thing. Meant nothing to me. Neither did the indian artifacts made out of moose sinew and birch bark. It was the curiosities for me: the fossils and odd minerals and artifacts dredged out of the muddy river of history. We had clothing and papers that had belonged to ancestral Weasels of centuries past (the best was a 150-year-old note about a debt that began, "please destroy this as soon as you have read it." My father would always rattle the letter and say, "never put anything on paper you wouldn't want the whole world to read!").
Grandfather died when I was a baby (the infant in the picture is probably my brother), and Grandmother couldn't get rid of the stuff fast enough. Poor Grandmother. She got her sofa back at last.
My father took it in and began adding to it. Busily. Mightily. It became the sort of thing local Scout troops came out to see. The local paper saved us for slow news days.
Papa Weasel added musical instruments... He loved mechanical things. Like the Reginaphone, a wind-up instrument which played big brass discs with holes. It boomed and crashed and turned the whole room into a giant music box. There were several Victrolas and Edison cylinder players. Many cylinders and records to go with. A player piano (seriously out of tune — my piano teacher considered this instrument a personal insult to the profession) for which Papa sometimes hand-cut piano rolls, sitting at the kitchen table with a long roll of paper and a razorblade. It had a switch you could throw to make it "rinky tink." He loved to buy old pipe organs from mountain churches and install vacuum cleaners inside so you wouldn't have to pump them with your feet. You'd hit the switch and it was, like, ReeeeeeNearerMyGodReeeeetoTheeReeeeeee. He built a small pipe organ from old lead pipes and scrap wood. I helped: I carefully pasted foil stars to each pipe before he screwed the lid on.
We also had the second oldest banjo known to history. I dunno. It looked like a chewed stick to me. And artifacts taken from state mental institutions...
Papa oversaw the demolition of several wretched old nuthouses and boobyhatches. He salvaged a barred door and a lockchair, which was a large oak chair with iron leg braces and wooden tray that locked across the middle, like an outsized, sinister baby's highchair. It had a series of drainage holes cut in the seat, so I imagine the poor bastards were intended to live in it for long periods at a time. I had a large, strong big brother, so I sometimes lived in it for long periods at a time, too, when my parents were out of earshot. There was a canvas straight jacket, a tear-gas baton ("stick your nose in this and inhale," says my brother. That stuff hurts like fuck, I tell you what) and many ingenious weapons built by inmates out of toilet articles and bits of junk.
A fully articulated skeleton, that he had wired up all by himself...
Dug it up himself, too. We used to live on an ancient indian burial ground. I know, I know...but no-one thought anything of it in 1960. (Please don't send my father to prison; he's very old). He recovered all the bones but the skull, so he had to buy one of those (which, in those days, was very likely to come from the other kind of Indian. The kind from India). The skull was white, though, and the other bones were decayed and brown, so he wiped it down with brown shoe polish until it matched. Then he shellacked the whole thing. It was shiny. So very, very shiny. It looked like a big brown delicious caramel-covered skeleton. On special occasions, it was moved around the house and left in various poses.
Mother contributed, too. She had a small but choice baculum collection.
The baculum AKA os penis AKA pecker bone AKA Texas toothpick is an anatomical peculiarity shared by several species, including possums, bears, seals and whales. Mother had a pair of earrings made out of raccoon penis bones, for example. Astonished country boys would ask her if she knew what they were, and she'd usually answer, "no, but I was told I'd look fine between two of them." Depending on the species (and hence the size), they can be made into everything from walking sticks to dog sleds. She always claimed she didn't collect them on purpose; people just sent them to her. I don't know why she thought that sounded better.
So! That was my grandfather's study. It was dark and creepy and weird and huge and it smelled of decay and paper and old rabbitskin glue. It was my favorite place in the whole world. It was magic. It was home.
The year I was nine, we came back from a Summer vacation to find that the ceiling had collapsed in the main room of the collection. My parents were smack in the middle of a moderately acrimonious divorce and nobody was quite sure how to store all that stuff, anyway. My dad threw up his hands and donated the lot to a small university museum.
I forgave him eventually. Pretty much. Almost completely, in fact. Any day now. I'm sure of it.
All this is by way of explaining my housekeeping. My decor. The sort of setting I feel happiest in. To wit: surrounded on all sides by crap.
I couldn't replicate Grandfather Weasel's study. But I've done my best to accrete musical instruments and scientific instruments and many great, tottery piles of books. I have one Victrola and several hundred choice Victrola records. I managed to acquire, and eventually get rid of, my own fully articulated human skeleton (long story. My first self-conscious act of getting-rid-of-things). I've got busted radios and perfectly functional computer doohickies that are useless antiques, by computer doohicky standards. I have a hundred bottles of ink and a thousand pencils. Art supplies of the most arcane sort (ox gall, gum arabic, damar crystals, siccatives, friskit, burins, gravers, mezzotint rockers, pouncers and stretching frames and one big, scary bottle of nitric acid. Damn. What am I going to do with my bottle of acid?). Stacks of paper — rice paper, sketch paper, bristol board, newsprint, marbled paper, pastel paper, and the kind of rough, thick watercolor paper that costs $10 a sheet. I never painted anything decent on a $10 watercolor paper.
I had to stop buying old picture frames, because they were no use to me. I couldn't bear to part with the photos in them. Maybe I don't know who that slack-faced old cow with the hat might be, but that snapshot might be the last trace of her left on this earth and I couldn't be the one to throw it away. No-thank-you to that karmic burden!
Recently, I've had some success breaking myself of holding on to the frankly pointless: cracked plates and coffee cans. Empty jars. Shopping bags. Lightly used paper towels. (No, I'm damn well not kidding). I've made inroads throwing out clothing which is out of style, falling to bits and in any case will never fit me again. Some junk is harder to part with — like the carpetbag my mother carried me around in when I was an infant. And I am forever the helpless slave of the empty cardboard box. I mean, how can you ever safely throw away a cardboard box? What happens if you need one tomorrow in exactly that size?
I'm not far off having that pathological hoarding thing. My uncle (on the OTHER side of the family) got it bad in his last years. His upstairs bathtub was entirely full and mounded over with old, empty prescription bottles when he died. When my aunt told me that, I was horrified. I had a small pile of old, empty prescription bottles. I dashed downstairs and swept the lot into the trash as soon as I hung up the phone. Always trying to sneak up on me, the crazy.
I even have a few bits of my grandfather's original stash. A couple of pieces of statuary. Some furniture. I'm particularly pleased to have my grandparents' dresser, a big old walnut Regency chest of drawers with burn marks on his side where he rested his cigarettes while he dressed (I say good morning to his burn marks when I grab my socks).
I think I can bear to whittle all this accumulated treasure down to my best banjo and two favorite microscopes. But what am I going to do with the rest of it? It's too eccentric to sell easily, too worthless to be worth the effort, and too precious for the trash. I'd rather poke out an eye than have a yard sale. Much of it isn't easily eBayable (anybody with a truck on the east coast need a six foot tall motorized photographic enlarger?). I've figured out why people in my family have children: so they'll have someone to foist their junk on. I knew there had to be a reason. I thought Mother was crazy when she bundled all her furniture on a van and sent it to me twenty years ago. Now I know what that was about. Crafty old stoat.
Okay, you realize "The Year of Suck" is just a metaphor, right? Poetic license. Figure of speech. I'm thinking we're looking at the 26 Months of Suck at least. The Suck Era. We're going to have saw this bastard in half and count the rings before I'm all done with the suckitude inherent in casting off my worldly possessions.
Well. It's not like I want my nieces and nephews going through it over my dead body, is it?
And, in closing, a bit more of Grandpa's inventory off the top of my head...a medieval breastplate and helmet...a complete set of Samurai armor...a fossilized three-toed dinosaur footprint (helpfully outlined in red paint by Grandfather)...a stuffed 'possum playing the fiddle (visible in the upper right corner of the snapshot at the top)...an exceptionally large, fine coprolite (fossilized dinosaur poop)...Jesse James' six shooter (dug up from the foundations after his house burned. Who knows? It was scorched)...a rusted lump of metal purported to be a sword from the Battle of Hastings...gallery tickets to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson...a medieval pike (I used to have a small lateral scar across the belly inflicted by this object. I was really sad when it healed)...a thick glass vial with a speck of radium in it that I often held up to my eye in a dark closet (some day that eye is going to go rogue on me. I just know it)...my great-great grandfather's dress sword, with which I used to scythe dandelions in the back yard when my father was away on business...a crooked vase from Hiroshima that supposedly shattered and instamelted back together when the bomb hit...an ostrich egg (every cabinet of curiosities has to have an ostrich egg)...I'm sure I'll think of more as I drift off tonight and dream my dreamy weasel dreams of dust and spider webs...
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