Back around the turn of the millennium, I worked for the
Kelton House Museum as their events coordinator, and on slow days I would nose
around the parts of the house that weren't open to the public, snooping into
the lives of a family that hadn’t lived in the house for 30 years. The house
museum then was a strange amalgam of Civil War and Underground Railroad history,
and decorative arts artifacts, the former honoring the original occupants of
the house, who were Columbus bigwigs and abolitionists and FOHA (Friends of
Honest Abe); the latter was because Grace Kelton, the last occupant to live
there, was a nationally known interior decorator, and friend of everybody who
was anybody.
The people who ran the house didn’t know much about the
history part—they were mostly Junior Leaguers who cared more about the
decorative arts side and the income potential from wedding receptions and
business off-sites. I remember finding a box of very old books stuffed in a
back closet, and discovering that one of them had once been owned by John Adams
( yes, the guy from the musical 1776).
His book-plate was on the inside cover, and his notes and comments were written
all through the book. But it had been stashed away, because, no doubt the
jacket cover didn’t match the drapes of the front parlor.
Anyway, one day, when business was slow, and I didn’t feel
like following my usual practice of sneaking into a museum bedroom and catching
a nap on one of the 200 year old four-posters, I found a box that contained,
among other things, a large scrapbook that had been put together by old Grace.
It was full of notes from lifelong friends, snippets from magazines and
newspapers, unlabeled locks of hair and bits of ribbons whose significance died
the same day as Grace--and one remarkable series of Christmas cards.
These Christmas cards were from a single WASPy and
well-tended family, and were the postcard kind, the covers of which were carefully
posed group portraits. There was no name on the photos, and since Grace had
taped each one securely to the pages, I couldn’t turn them over to read the message
from the family, or even give a name to them. There were at least 20 of these
cards…20 years of poses, of matching Christmas sweaters and and those shiny,
tinsel-ridden background settings that looked like every Andy Williams
Christmas special ever aired. They seemed to have begun in mid 50s, and
presumably stopped with Grace’s death in the mid 70s.
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| The Kelton House pictures were nothing like this one... |
They begin with young parents, flanking a small boy and a
toddler. As the years roll by, the positioning of the parents doesn’t change,
but a few more kids are added between them. The kids grow older and taller, the
parents grayer and somehow smaller, and then the oldest boy’s wife appears.
Within a few years there are a few more spouses, then a new baby arrives, and
the family now covers a lot of ground in the photographer’s studio. A few more
babies arrive, the first babies of that new generation have hair now,
presumably the hair their young dads are beginning to lose. Then, a turn of the
page, and suddenly the father is missing from the group. I looked long into the
faces of the rest of the family, looking for some trace of sadness, some sense
of absence, but these sorts of photos are not journalism--there is very little
that is real about them. The smiles on the faces are just as bright as they’ve
always been, just as shiny and disingenuous as the cottony snow at their feet,
or the plywood sleigh at their backs.
As the pages turn, a few spouses begin to disappear from the
group, replaced by new ones. Hairstyles grow long, sideburns bushy, and grandma
now wears turtlenecks. Then more absence, but unlike dad’s disappearance, these
new ones feel more like defections, more like the family is splitting off into
smaller family groups. I imagine there’s a guy in some other house museum looking
through a scrapbook full of Christmas postcards from these family splinter
groups. Then, a turn of the page, and the cards stop, presumably because Grace
died, and the scrapbook’s life ended with her.
I remember feeling a kind of nascent grief for the loss of
the father, and for the inevitable conclusion of the lives of these people. The
rest of the scrapbook was just blank pages, but I was sure I could see on them
the relentless march of life, the empty spaces for the mother, for the first
born sons, the inevitable transition from vitality to epilogue.
Most of the time our lives seem to flow on, and time is as
imperceptible as the rotation of the earth. Great changes, like death or divorce,
arrive seismically, spiking high above the normal progression of it all. But,
as arranged by Grace in her lace-trimmed scrapbook, time seems to be separated
from the emotion we attach to it. Time is simply a hard fact shared by us all, whether
it’s shaping us by the slow wind of passing generations, or when it’s dressed
up in this year’s sweater, and smiling at us from a shiny world full of tinsel
and ribbon and plastic firs .
