Sunday Monday Blog 37 – May 22 2022
“What beautiful earrings!” my Hairdresser complimented me. This happens to me quite a lot now. Since my friend Lencie died earlier this year, her many many pretty things were divided up among her family and friends. So we are carrying her around, each and every day. Earrings, necklaces, rings, scarves, mugs. She did have exquisite taste.
Sometimes I think that all the wisdom of life is contained in E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End, which tackles money, death, friendship and class (among other things). When people compliment me on Lencie’s jewellery, I keep thinking about that scene after the main character Margaret Schlegel loses a friend from cancer. She is pictured at a metaphorical beach, where a “wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown.” I think of these objet d’arts of Lencie mysterious fragments of that transition – she was here and then, she is not here.
I’ve never been much of a collector of things, I worship de-cluttering. It always amuses me that I lumbered into a museum career three decades ago by accident, because I had computer skills (that was the 1980s, man). Objects really aren’t my thing, but their stories are interesting. I know some of the story of Lencie so her pretty things are interesting to me. I like that I can take her out and about and that others can admire her taste.
P.S. Sunday was canceled in a flurry of feeling ill and getting Covid tests. Yet again I convinced myself I had the dreaded lurgy, and I certainly did feel awful – but it is not The Covid. Anyhow, I didn’t surface all Sunday, or even for much of today, so the Sunday blog has become a Monday blog, and it’s still Sunday in America somewhere…