collections

1.

I tap purchase ticket with a flourish and declare, “something different,” to myself. My vocal cords strain against my feigned enthusiasm.

I don’t go to the Upper East Side of New York anymore. It’s not a rule that I don’t go; it’s a choice I make again and again. It’s hard to get there from where I live in Greenwich Village and the memories I associate it with transport me to a confusing and unpleasant emotional space; somewhere where nostalgia gives way to grief.

Parenting is taking me there, though. I am dropping my daughter, Gloria, off at her friend’s apartment on East 91st Street and Fifth Avenue. Without other plans for the day, I choose to make the most of my unusual uptown circumstance and visit the Guggenheim Museum, though I have reservations about going. I take my phone out of my back pocket and send a text to my friend Chelsea, inviting her to join. 

After I say goodbye to Gloria outside of her friend’s building, I squint into the sun as I turn to walk down Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile. I notice that the Callery pear trees lining the sidewalk are in bloom, and their tiny white blossoms cling to the branches, where not too long ago there was snow. Their petals tremble in the wind, stirring my spirit the way only early spring flowers do. Sunshine warms my face, and my camel coat keeps the unpredictable winds at bay. There are plenty of upper eastsiders doing Saturday afternoon things. A few people catch my eye. I mentally catalogue them to share later: 

1. a slender, old, white woman with a perfectly coiffed cloud of white hair—a cotton swab in Celine sunglasses—walking her small black poodle, smiling.
2. a group of white, gangly teenage girls, trying to hide what they don’t know with a full beat of make-up and an air of self-importance, all carrying the same designer handbag. Contents inside unknown.

I realize I like having this small collection of characters tucked away in the soft tissue folds of my brain. 

We all have collections—intentional ones like stamps, art, and figurines, or accidental ones like matchbooks in a junk drawer. I am curious, dear reader—what is in your collection? Not what you collect, but what ethereal, spiritual, emotional thing are you making concrete with these artifacts? What stories breathe life into your collection?

2.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is an iconic building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that sits across from Central Park, spanning an entire Fifth Avenue block. The central rotunda of the museum is what sets it apart from any other building in the city. It is six stories, cylindrical, and open in the middle. The main exhibition hangs in the rotunda, and visitors walk around a ramp that coils its way up along the walls. It is thought to be inspired by a nautilus shell. While I wait for Chelsea, I step back, look up, and admire the building as best I can from my vantage point. 

This is my second visit to the Guggenheim. Twenty-five years prior, I took the elevator to the top floor and walked my way down the spiraling ramp to take in a Claus Oldenberg retrospective. Oldenburg is famous for his tremendous, and sometimes soft, sculptures of everyday items. His retrospective made me feel like an ant in a well-curated shop. 

This time I’m at the Guggenheim to see a collection of works by Vassily Kandinsky, a nineteenth-century Russian painter. Chelsea and I take the elevator to the top floor so we can walk down the ramp. As I step out of the elevator, I wonder if museum security would let me in if I were wearing my roller skates or carrying a bag of marbles. 

Apparently, Vassily Kandinsky: Around the Circle starts at the bottom of the spiral, and viewers are to work their way up. The upwards trajectory takes you on a backwards walking tour of Kandinsky’s life from later works to early works. If you are confused reading this, please know that I was confused learning this.

“I should have brought my skates,” I say after Chelsea and I step off the elevator and admire the view from the top of the rotunda. We lean over the railing and look down. Chelsea jerks herself back with a start. 

“You’re afraid of heights. That’s right,” I remember. 

“Yeah,” she says with a big smile as her hand lightly pats her chest as quickly as a hummingbird flaps its wings. She peers over again. Chelsea collects thrilling experiences as well as decorative crosses and charmingly weird housewares that often have a produce motif.

I take some photographs from inside the rotunda that makes it look like the building contains shelves of people looking at art. We make our way toward the Kandinskys, and I realize that we are looking at the last painting of the show. Without thinking, I shrug my shoulders. 

“Apparently, the show starts at the bottom,” I say. “I don’t care.” Chelsea shrugs back. We elect to view the show in reverse. 

Kandinsky’s early work surprises me. I didn’t know he had a period before abstraction. His impressionist paintings invite me in, and his early abstracts are alluring and often playful. At the bottom of the circle, our end of the tour and the beginning for others, we find the late Kandinskys. These are the paintings I recognize from posters in dorm rooms in the 1990s and therapists’ waiting rooms. They don’t draw me in, and I don’t appreciate them. 

A plaque on the wall tells me that Kandinsky’s work is unified by the fact that he puts his spiritual expression into each one. I look at my feet when I realize that I don’t like his spiritual expression later in life. That feels different from not liking a painting.

Before we leave, we go to the gift shop. I don’t buy anything. I don’t want to be responsible for carrying anything that doesn’t fit in my purse, and I don’t want a postcard. 

3.

In whatever you collect, you will find magic and memories. They will be made by you and by others too. In fact, I would venture to say that even a stranger’s magic and memories are in your collection of plates, thimbles, knick-knacks, and spoons. They are in your collection of buttons, books, and baubles. In your collection of fine art and postcards, too. Their stories and intentions are woven into your rugs and socks, polished into your clocks, and tumbled into your rocks.

I can say this with confidence because this is true of all our collections. What we hold onto is someone’s artifact or our own.

4.

I don’t like the way I feel when I am out on the street uptown; I dread the inevitable overlay of grief that drapes itself across my moments uptown. But that is what comes with visiting the Upper East Side—where my grandmother used to live. I choose to lean into it.

I say to Chelsea, “I think I want to walk down Madison Avenue and go by my grandmother’s apartment. When I’m up here, I like to stand outside her old building and get all moody.”

She laughs at me in a way that feels nice. Our friendship is still pretty new. I take this as an acceptance of my weirdness.

I wish I had a snow globe featuring 45 East 66th Street. In New York, you can get snow globes with the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and One World Trade. But I want one of my grandmother’s building so that when the dome’s glitter settles, I could look at the fourth floor’s curved corner window, the one with the balustrade, and know that was where my grandmother lived.

We sold the apartment at 45 East 66th Street to a foreign banker about fifteen years ago. As far as I know, he never moved in. Today, I wistfully hope her home is full of life again.

My mother and grandfather-figure Ed asked me to arrange for an auction house to collect and sell items none of the three of us chose to keep. When my mother, uncle, Grandpa Stanley, and grandmother moved into this apartment in the 1950s, my grandmother said, “That’s it. They’ll have to carry me out in a bag.” She was then widowed, remarried, divorced, and partnered again and, true to her word, she never left until she was carried out in a body bag. We were faced with a lifetime of her things to sort through. 

Ed kept some practical and sentimental items to furnish the much smaller two-bedroom apartment he was moving to. He and many of those items were lost even before he passed away. 

My mother and I kept the silver and some art. I also took a small glass perfume bottle that I knew nothing about, a pewter alligator purchased as a souvenir from Charleston, South Carolina, a collection of Hermes scarves that still smell of my grandmother’s perfume sixteen years later, and her 1970s Aurora clock that she kept in the den on the bureau, just left of the corner window. 

I always try to be selective about what I keep, and yet, I still have so many small collections. One is of cat figurines, which I keep next to a green tin on a small white shelf that otherwise holds bowls of crystals representing every color of the chakra system in my office. The tin is sealed and contains my cat Flaquita’s ashes (I now find myself wondering what you think of me). 

Among the cat figurines are three small maneki-nekos—the Japanese cat figurines with a raised paw that beckons you. I purchased each with an intention that was prescribed by its maker and aligned with something I desired at the time—like a whispered request to the universe. I can no longer recall what it was that I wanted or if what I wanted was ever received. The maneki-nekos are still magic to me.

Marvelously, when I see my maneki-nekos, I don’t think about cats, past or present. I don’t know why, but I am without space and time, and with all the memories of all the times that my daughter and I stood together—her body leaning into mine as I held her wishes as my own. Those moments fold into one another and manifest love in my blood and bones.

While I packed up my new collection of some of Grandma Gloria’s magical things, the rest of her belongings were unceremoniously packed up by movers from Tepper Galleries for auction. 

5.

Twelve years ago, I sobbed in the eponymous shop, John Derian, as I handed over my debit card. My friend Martine had accompanied me, and she also cried. She gave me a big hug while the saleswoman hurried to ring me up. The clerk’s impassivity and quick movements broadcast that she wanted to get our tear-stained and snotty faces out of the shop. 

I spent $1,100 I didn’t have on my grandmother’s library ladder. John Derian bought it at auction for $300 three years prior and marked it up over three hundred fifty percent. I couldn’t believe it when I found it in some shop in the East Village, but it was most definitely my grandmother’s. The clerk shared proof of provenance with me. 

In an effort to help me calm down after I paid for the ladder, Martine ushered me around the corner to an almost empty hotel bar and bought me a dirty vodka martini and french fries. She assured me that it was fate, magic, or destiny that I found the ladder and that it was totally reasonable that I bought it back even though I most certainly did not have a library, the space, or that much spare cash lying around.

The salt and fat of the olives and french fries brought me back into my body while the icy vodka mellowed my visceral homecoming. I was shaking, and my hands would continue to tremor for days. It was shocking to stumble onto the one thing we sold of my grandmother’s that I regretted parting with. It was just sitting there in this shop, showcasing expensive linens also for sale. I decided Martine was right: the ladder was waiting for me.

The ladder now holds my collection of art books, the Aurora clock from Grandma Gloria’s den, and a couple of bud vases. Fairly open and made from a darker wood, it stands about five feet tall, three feet wide, and four feet deep, making it more stair-like than ladder-like. When I visited Grandma Gloria as a young girl, the stairs made for an excellent castle tower. Its height provided a view of the moat below and the forest that seemed to extend forever, or at least beyond her dining room. When I pretended to flee from potential captors, I discovered the mouth of a river in the foyer. Riding the current on my makeshift raft, I learned that the river led to an island, the shore of which was the low and deep corner windowsill in the den.

6.

Eleven years ago, I sat at the dining table paying bills while my four-year-old daughter Gloria was bustling around in costume and keeping busy pretending to be Snow White. 

“Are you going to make gooseberry pie,” I asked her, looking up from my computer. Her gaze met mine, and for a moment, I was breathless. She was ( is) perfect.

She examined all four sides of her Snow White pop-up cottage and found that there were no berry bushes printed on its nylon sides. 

“I don’t have any berries,” she said.

“Well, then you should head into the forest and pick some,” I replied.

“There isn’t a forest here,” Gloria replied with a sweep of her arm, gesturing at the room around us. Understandably, she was confused. 

I mirrored her confusion. “What!? No look, that is the mountains,” I said, pointing to the library ladder behind her, which sat empty in our new apartment like a stairway to nowhere. “And this here is a giant gooseberry bush,” I said, pointing to our Christmas tree. I got up and walked over to the tree-cum-gooseberry bush, picked a handful of imaginary gooseberries, put them in my imaginary berry-collecting basket, and handed it to Gloria. I then returned to my adult station at the dining table and continued to pay bills while she looked over at the mountains, smiled and picked some gooseberries for her gooseberry pie.

7

VASILY KANDINSKY

Colored Sticks (Bunte Stäbchen)

1928

Varnished tempera on paperboard

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,

Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection,

By gift 38.306

I didn’t notice the title of this painting until I got home, and I looked at the picture I snapped for reference. I guffawed. At the museum, I knew I would write about it later because when I saw it, all I saw were toys: Pick Up Sticks and Colorforms. I hadn’t even glanced at the label on the wall. 

Colored Sticks is a time machine that took me back to afternoons with Grandma Gloria. After she would take me to the Museum of Modern Art, FAO Schwartz, Woolworth’s, or Central Park, we would return to her home, and I would play on my own until dinner. Her apartment, with art-lined walls, deep and low windowsills, and a long hallway, was the ideal container and inspiration for my imaginary adventures. When I was done saving myself from storms, quicksand, and miscellaneous malcontents, I would sit and quietly play with Pick Up Sticks and Colorforms.

When I looked at Colored Sticks, a voice in my head told me to buy new sets of Pick Up Sticks and Colorforms, but my gut knew that I didn’t miss the toys; I missed the time.

8.

I opened the cigar box diorama and set it up in my office.

LAURA KHOUDARI

Small Objects of Importance

2008

Found Objects, Ink on Paper, Varnish

Laura Khoudari’s Personal Collection, New York

There are seven objects inside that you can pick up, handle, and interact with: 

001 – Le Carré Hermes, France: 1996. 

002 – Perfume bottle.

003 – Turtle figurine.

004 – Turtle figurine.

005 – Jean Evans, Alphabet. 

006 – Maneki-neko.

007 – Laura Khoudari, Body & Soul. 2000. 

Small Objects of Importance is one of the dioramas I made during a year-long period in which I made an art object every day. Sometimes I close it up and put it away. I have moved three times since I made it, but I always know where it is.

I set it up for the first time since we moved a year and a half ago. Then I picked up my phone, looked at the Guggenheim’s mobile site and decided that, yes, I would like to go to the museum. I tapped purchase ticket with a flourish and declared, “something different” to myself.

9.

Chelsea and I have lunch after the museum, and then we window shop our way down Madison Avenue. Extraordinarily expensive resort wear, gowns, and handbags call to me from each storefront. I have no need for any of these things, but I love looking at them, and I even enjoy longing for them. Sometimes we go into a store, touch things, and imagine taking them home.

Chelsea and I slow our pace but don’t stop as we approach Madison Ave and 66th Street. As soon as I can see the building, the sidewalk becomes quicksand—drawing me down—but there is a forward momentum that comes with walking with a new friend. I keep going because it is more important to remain connected with the living than with the dead. Part of me disagrees, though, and it keeps making words—many of which fall out of my mouth.

“That window on the rounded corner… the fourth floor with the decorative balustrade…that was my grandmother’s apartment.” 

“Oh wow,” Chelsea says. She keeps walking, so I keep walking. With Chelsea’s help, I save myself from the quicksand.

“Yeah, that was my mom’s room at one point.” I crane my neck as we walk on by and consider asking if we can stop. I ask myself, “Stop and what, though?” I realize I have all my memories. I have been with so many of them today. 

More words tumble out of my mouth: “I think it is hard for me to be up here because it’s confusing. It brings up wonderful childhood memories of my grandmother. She was tough on everyone but me. She thought I shat ice cream. And she made me feel so special. But then she got sick so suddenly… I came up here almost daily for a month to be with her while she died.” 

I was done spilling words. The air felt heavy. “And to eat sandwiches,” I continued. Chelsea chuckled, and I smiled back. “No, but seriously we ate so many sandwiches when she was sick and right after she died that I lost it at her shiva. I didn’t eat another sandwich for years.” 

We laughed. My gaze shifted downtown, and my thoughts turned to getting home. I caught the Q train from the station I used sixteen years ago for all those days in a row I visited with Grandma as bone cancer took her from us.

Once I’m home, it dawns on me that 45 East 66th Street rises from Madison Avenue like Grandma Gloria’s tombstone. 

Grandma Gloria’s actual cremains are in a niche in a columbarium at Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester. Columbariums are repositories for ashes. I had never heard of one before my mother told me that’s where Grandma was going. When we got there, I found it cold and sterile. It was like being with a collection of remains, not spirits. I couldn’t help but feel like we were putting her urn in a safety deposit box that we would lose the key to. Unlike a graveyard, there are no trees for me to look at in her indoor resting place. It isn’t vulnerable to the elements, so it doesn’t need much tending. I know some people don’t like cemeteries, but I do. They are places for the living to remember the dead.

There’s not enough life in the columbarium to feel like it’s a suitable place to connect to Grandma Gloria’s memory. She is on the Upper East Side. She is in Central Park, in modern art, and in some of my collections of things. I also found her in a shop in the East Village and brought her home with me.

I understand now that visiting 45 East 66th Street is the closest I get to visiting Grandma Gloria by her grave. It’s where I knew her to be alive and where I sat with her as she died.