Goodnight Gallery (Babble)

I remember years ago telling my friend, Linda, how much I enjoyed reading Goodnight Moon to Aden from the same copy that was read to me.  Linda’s children are much older than my own, and she smiled as I talked, and then she said, “Oh, Goodnight Moon.  You never know while it’s happening when you are reading it for the last time.” 

That thought has stayed with me more powerfully than almost any quote I’ve ever come across.  It encapsulates so much of what it means to raise children.  There is so much joy and chaos and repetition and change, and just as you think some routine or quirk or circumstance will continue indefinitely, it ends, usually without fanfare or notice.  One day the baby is sucking his fingers incessantly, and the next he stops, and eventually it’s hard to remember it was ever a concern.  Despite thousands of digital photographs and home videos much of what is ending goes undocumented.  We often don’t get the benefit of acknowledging certain endings, because it just happens that one day you stop pulling Goodnight Moon off the shelf.

But some goodbyes are very clear and planned for.  This Valentine’s Day was one such ending for our family.  My parents owned and operated their own art gallery in a suburb of Detroit for nearly all of my life.  The Arnold Klein Gallery opened on Valentine’s Day in 1971, and 40 years to the day it officially closed its doors.  It was time, because my mom is ready to move on to other projects, and both my parents deserve more freedom in their schedules after so many years of running their own business, but their contribution to the area will be missed.

What the Arnold Klein Gallery managed to do was special, and a great inspiration to me and how I run my own store.  My parents were not good business people in the sense that they generated wealth.  Money is important and you need enough to support yourself and your family, but beyond that I don’t think it is the measure of success in a business.  My parents struggled along with everyone else in Detroit as fluctuations in the auto industry dragged all commerce up and down.  That my mom and dad kept an art gallery viable for 40 years is amazing. 

But what is more amazing is that they stayed in business that long while being honest and compassionate in a field that often isn’t.  My parents love art.  They care about conserving things that are beautiful and encouraging fellow artists to create.  Those ideals always meant more than money.  The Arnold Klein Gallery was a place where you could get trustworthy appraisals, a perfect archival framing job, and see some of the finest work currently being produced in the area alongside stunning prints from the past.  It was a place that cared about art and artists in a way I’ve never seen anyplace else.  It was unique, just like my parents.

All the preparations for the final show were a great deal of fun.  For a bittersweet occasion I have to say we laughed a lot.  Both my brothers and their families were there, along with my family and a couple of cousins and an aunt and uncle and the world’s cutest dog.  Everyone helped to hang things from the walls and ceiling and make decorations.

It looked great.  It was fun without being too silly.

This was the wall of gallery memorabilia, complete with announcements from past shows, photos, articles, and portraits of my parents done by Donella Vogel:

The final show of art was interesting.  My dad had in mind back when he first opened the gallery that one day when they closed he wanted to have a show of canceled prints and lithographs.  Back in the 1800’s when most of the etchings he had on display were made, artists would finish an edition by crossing it out and producing one more (usually unsigned) to prove it was concluded and to prevent others in the future from possibly trying to print additional copies and pass them off as part of the original set.  In my dad’s words he saw it as a show of, “Canceled etchings, canceled prints, canceled gallery.”

And then there was the big wall of Valentines.  There were hundreds of handmade Valentines so that anyone who wanted to could simply take one home with them to remember the gallery by.

The party on Valentine’s Day was a big success.  We couldn’t have asked for a nicer send off.  The place was packed with people there to say goodbye to the gallery and wish my parents well.  It was funny talking to so many people who still remember me at my children’s ages.  I played viola for background music.  My brother, Barrett, showed a 16 minute movie he made of interviews with my parents about their 40 years in business that was touching and funny.  My sister-in-law, Deepanjana, graciously served the wine all night.  The kids wove in and out through the crowds to help themselves to cookies and crackers.  The food was fabulous.  My mom baked cookies, but I couldn’t believe how many friends brought dishes to share.

In the end what makes things important is people.  I love that my parents worked in the gallery together.  I enjoyed playing in the gallery with my brothers growing up.  Watching my own children and their cousin running around that same space was extremely moving to me.  There was a lot of love and affection in the Arnold Klein Gallery.  Valentine’s Day could not have been a more perfect occasion to associate with it.  Here are some of the people I love best in the world who helped make the closing night of the Arnold Klein Gallery one I will always remember fondly:

 
 

Driving away the day after Valentine’s Day knowing I’d never step foot in the gallery again was surreal.  There is still a lot of hard work for my mom and my brother to do getting it closed down and cleared out, but for me it’s over.  The next time I go to Michigan the gallery won’t be there to visit.  From the moment I drove away it began an existence of pure memories.  And they are good ones.

  

Goodnight gallery.

Moving In, Moving On (Babble)

We have new neighbors.  They’re in our old house.  It’s nice to see it looking lively again because I didn’t like looking across the street at an empty place, but it’s also a little sad.  But also a little exciting.  But also a little weird.

The closing went well.  It takes a lot longer to sign so many papers when you have to add all of that extra power of attorney information to everything.  There was a brief moment of bureaucratic panic when someone noticed Ian’s signature on the power of attorney form didn’t match the printed version in some way, and I thought that was insane since they let me take out a mortgage and buy a house with that signature, so was it really a problem to let me sell one now?  But it all worked out.

The kids came along to the closing.  Mona made a beautiful card to welcome the buyers to the neighborhood.  Aden decorated the envelope, and Quinn helped me bake cookies for them.  We made sure the new neighbors had our number in case they ever need anything, and I gave them a folder of all the manuals I could find for things in their new house, like the washer and dryer and the sump pump.  The whole thing took over an hour, which got boring for everyone, but overall my kids were good.  By the end when we were just waiting for our check I got them all playing hangman with me on a pad of post it notes and that kept them happy and not roaming the halls.

The only unusual element to the event was handing over the keys.  I gave our new neighbors the two garage door openers and about a half dozen keys, and then I explained there was one more.  Aden got her very own house key from her dad as a gift when she was seven.  It’s attached to a large shoelace and even though she’s never used it, she loves it.  When I told her the day before that we had to give the key to the new owners of the house her eyes filled with tears and she said, “But, it’s from my daddy.”  So I let her bring it to the closing and I brought a mill file in my purse, and I told her if the buyers objected to her having a working key I would just file down one of the bumps on it so it wouldn’t work anymore.  She didn’t want me mutilating her key, but she agreed it was better than having to give it up entirely.  Of course the new neighbors not having hearts of stone said she could certainly keep her key from her deployed dad, and Aden promised she would keep it in a safe place.  (I’m sure by next week they’ll have changed the locks anyway, but I think it was important to be honest.)

The night before the closing I went through the house alone.  Ten years is a long time to live somewhere, and Ian and I worked so hard on that house.  I thought about how big it was when it was just the two of us.  It was still roomy when Aden came along.  It was decidedly not roomy after we brought Mona home.  And with five people and a violin making workshop it was officially cramped.

There are just two people there again, and I can easily imagine their excitement as they fill the house with all their things.  We primed some rooms for them before we left so they can get right to painting as soon as they choose colors.  I’m sure they’re already discussing what to change and what to keep.  It’s a house with many possibilities–as long as you’re not cramped.

While I was walking around it one last time I looked in the upstairs hallway at the stripes I painted there with the leftover colors from the living and dining rooms.  I thought about the crazy hundred year old wallpaper we uncovered while working on some of the walls downstairs.  We tore down fake wood paneling and re-plastered walls and built baseboards and ran wood through my bench top bandsaw on the living room floor to make our windowsills.  We were so young then, back in 2000, just after I graduated from violin making school, before deployments or children or health insurance.

I didn’t cry.  I expected to cry as I walked around with my camera and took some photos to show to Ian how the house looked on the last day it was ours.  But then as I was coming down the stairs I snapped one more picture while thinking about each of my babies learning to climb those steep steps, and the flash illuminated all the dirt in the carpeting.  Every infant and toddler atrocity that happened to that carpet came flooding back and instead of feeling sentimental I thought “Eeeww” and was glad to get back to my new house where I’m blissfully ignorant of whatever horrors have happened on those floors before we got there.

The kids didn’t want to go in.  Actually, Aden didn’t want to go in, and her siblings just tend to follow her lead.  Aden walked around the old house once with me a couple of weeks ago when I was checking on some work being done, and she was disturbed by how it looked empty.  She cried when we were standing in my old room (which was once her nursery) and said, “I can’t really remember it the way it was.”  I know that pain.  Not wanting to let go is not the same thing as not wanting to move ahead.
I sat on the porch steps before heading off with the kids to transfer ownership of the house to new people.  I finished painting that porch alone in time for Ian to admire it when he returned from his first deployment.  The view of our neighborhood is different from that side of the street.

It’s been fun watching the new people start unloading their stuff.  It’s obvious they are happy, and I’m happy for them.  As interesting as it is watching them moving in as we are moving on, it’s peculiar to be so close by.  There is comfort in seeing our first house right outside our windows because the memories are nearer.  We will never be surprised by driving past the old house and realizing we remembered it differently, because it’s right there.  But it’s strange to see things happening to it and not have it be any of our business.  I’ve unlatched the gate to the backyard a million times and now I’m not supposed to.  I can’t pick the peonies when they bloom there in early June, but I’ll see them from my bedroom.  The transition is incomplete somehow, even though it’s officially done, like breaking up with your roommate or giving your dog to the person next door.  The ghosts of habits will linger for longer than they might if we had moved away from our neighborhood entirely.  It will be awhile yet before the urge to turn left instead of right at our intersection fades from memory.

But it’s good and it’s right.  This house is now home, and we create more family history here every day.  Houses are like good violins in that we become chapters in their stories.  We are merely caretakers of certain things in our own lifetime.  I’m hoping the stories we make here with our lives will be passed down as neighborhood lore after we’re gone and it makes people smile.  I know I’m smiling already.