Uncle Ted's Museum
27/12/11 05:18
Susan and I are now officially “empty nesters.” It took us a bit longer than some of our peers because we had my mother living with us after our children grew up and moved out of our home. But now we have the house to ourselves. In one sense it it bigger than we need. However, with the process of having helped parents close our their homes, it is filled with furniture and other items that need to be distributed. Still, the house is ours to fix up any way that we want.
One of my projects has been to make myself a library. I have had a very nice office at work since I moved to Rapid City, but our home has been a bit short of a space for a study. In our first years in the house we used a small bedroom for a study. Later, the books were moved to the basement, then upstairs to another bedroom. But now I have a lovely room, with east-facing windows to greet the sunrise. It is the living room of what was designed to be a mother-in-law apartment at the daylight end of our basement. I started with some bookshelves that I had made when we lived in Boise and that have moved around this house. Then I started making more. I now have bookshelves on three walls of the room.
This fall, I brought home a library table that had belonged to our mother and had been in storage at my sister’s place in Oregon. The table has had an interesting life. It was purchased for the library at Rocky Mountain College, probably in the 1930’s. When the college built a new library in the early 1960’s, the furniture from the old library was distributed to dorm rooms. Subsequent constructions of new dorms and remodeling of old ones meant that a few of the library tables ended up in storage in the basement of a college building. When my parents put a new roofs on college buildings the lived in one of the old dorms and ended up purchasing the table to use in their living space. It is old and has been through a lot, but just right for the space.
We had an old library chair that unfolds into a small step stool that had been in Susan’s grandparents’ house and later in her parents’ home. It seems to fit right in my library. I put a mantle clock that has been in the family for four generations on one of the shelves and hung a somewhat newer clock on the wall.
The library is just right for my purposes.
Years ago, after my great uncle Ted passed away, mother collected some of his tools and inventions into a shed at the rear of her shop and dubbed the space “Uncle Ted’s Museum.” It was an interesting place to visit, with things that had been kept for sentimental reasons. There were several antique tools and other items. The idea was never fully developed, but the name hung around even after the space was used for other purposes.
As I looked around my new library, I realized that I had created an Uncle Ted’s Museum for a new generation. My great nieces and nephews and my grandchildren will marvel at the things I have here:
I have books, printed on paper, that you can pick up, hold in your hands and read. The children of today are growing up in a world a e-readers. Even when they have books, they are read and then passed on. The idea of keeping books to re-read and sometimes just to have to pull off the shelf for an occasional quote is quite outdated.
I have magazines, again, printed on paper. Yes, I have access to the digital database that contains all of the issues of the National Geographic Magazine, but I also have saved a few decades of the magazine, complete with indices to look up articles.
I have maps on paper. And an atlas with huge maps to study and dream over. Of course some of the political information on the map is now inaccurate, but for the most parts the names of cities in exotic places remain the same.
I have clocks with faces. Without a digital read-out, you have to know how to tell time for the clocks to be of any use. And they have to be wound. The mantle clock has to be wound every evening. The wall clock has to be wound once a week. They chime on the hours and one chimes every 15 minutes.
I have slides - real film with images on it. And I have a projector to show the slides.
Now I am not luddite. My library is filled with many state-of-the art items. As one who used to be the person to open the college library on early winter mornings, I think that a library should be dark at night. My library has no less than eight digital devices with glowing LEDs when I step into it. There are two printers, a large monitor, a slide scanner, and even a television set and a DVD player. Uncle Ted’s Museum has objects that younger members of the family will recognize, such as a computer. You can even use the computer to locate the books on the shelves.
But there is no game system. And, frankly, the television is used more to display images from the computer than it is to watch network programming. I don’t have cable TV in my home.
It is a very comfortable room for me and I feel fortunate to have such a space in my home. And others are always welcome to come into the room, though I don’t know whether or not they will find it to be as interesting as I do.
A blend of the old and new seems appropriate as we approach another new year’s holiday. We want to embrace the future with joy, but we don’t want to forget the past. We always stand in between the old and the new. It seems like a very comfortable place to be.
One of my projects has been to make myself a library. I have had a very nice office at work since I moved to Rapid City, but our home has been a bit short of a space for a study. In our first years in the house we used a small bedroom for a study. Later, the books were moved to the basement, then upstairs to another bedroom. But now I have a lovely room, with east-facing windows to greet the sunrise. It is the living room of what was designed to be a mother-in-law apartment at the daylight end of our basement. I started with some bookshelves that I had made when we lived in Boise and that have moved around this house. Then I started making more. I now have bookshelves on three walls of the room.
This fall, I brought home a library table that had belonged to our mother and had been in storage at my sister’s place in Oregon. The table has had an interesting life. It was purchased for the library at Rocky Mountain College, probably in the 1930’s. When the college built a new library in the early 1960’s, the furniture from the old library was distributed to dorm rooms. Subsequent constructions of new dorms and remodeling of old ones meant that a few of the library tables ended up in storage in the basement of a college building. When my parents put a new roofs on college buildings the lived in one of the old dorms and ended up purchasing the table to use in their living space. It is old and has been through a lot, but just right for the space.
We had an old library chair that unfolds into a small step stool that had been in Susan’s grandparents’ house and later in her parents’ home. It seems to fit right in my library. I put a mantle clock that has been in the family for four generations on one of the shelves and hung a somewhat newer clock on the wall.
The library is just right for my purposes.
Years ago, after my great uncle Ted passed away, mother collected some of his tools and inventions into a shed at the rear of her shop and dubbed the space “Uncle Ted’s Museum.” It was an interesting place to visit, with things that had been kept for sentimental reasons. There were several antique tools and other items. The idea was never fully developed, but the name hung around even after the space was used for other purposes.
As I looked around my new library, I realized that I had created an Uncle Ted’s Museum for a new generation. My great nieces and nephews and my grandchildren will marvel at the things I have here:
I have books, printed on paper, that you can pick up, hold in your hands and read. The children of today are growing up in a world a e-readers. Even when they have books, they are read and then passed on. The idea of keeping books to re-read and sometimes just to have to pull off the shelf for an occasional quote is quite outdated.
I have magazines, again, printed on paper. Yes, I have access to the digital database that contains all of the issues of the National Geographic Magazine, but I also have saved a few decades of the magazine, complete with indices to look up articles.
I have maps on paper. And an atlas with huge maps to study and dream over. Of course some of the political information on the map is now inaccurate, but for the most parts the names of cities in exotic places remain the same.
I have clocks with faces. Without a digital read-out, you have to know how to tell time for the clocks to be of any use. And they have to be wound. The mantle clock has to be wound every evening. The wall clock has to be wound once a week. They chime on the hours and one chimes every 15 minutes.
I have slides - real film with images on it. And I have a projector to show the slides.
Now I am not luddite. My library is filled with many state-of-the art items. As one who used to be the person to open the college library on early winter mornings, I think that a library should be dark at night. My library has no less than eight digital devices with glowing LEDs when I step into it. There are two printers, a large monitor, a slide scanner, and even a television set and a DVD player. Uncle Ted’s Museum has objects that younger members of the family will recognize, such as a computer. You can even use the computer to locate the books on the shelves.
But there is no game system. And, frankly, the television is used more to display images from the computer than it is to watch network programming. I don’t have cable TV in my home.
It is a very comfortable room for me and I feel fortunate to have such a space in my home. And others are always welcome to come into the room, though I don’t know whether or not they will find it to be as interesting as I do.
A blend of the old and new seems appropriate as we approach another new year’s holiday. We want to embrace the future with joy, but we don’t want to forget the past. We always stand in between the old and the new. It seems like a very comfortable place to be.