Home and Hearth and Books that Speak Volumes, Josh Green's at Contemporary Jewish Museum--Really!

The two-hour book buffet I have each morning around three o'clock (before my 5:00 wimp-out at the Stonestown Y) helps my neuro-diverse brain in gear, not exactly functioning normally, but focused and happy, nourished and ready for life.  I prepare a six-cup pot of tea and light the vertical log (a giant candle) in the fireplace.  Then I lean back into my recliner and read in a room with a tackiness I love.

My beautiful oak floor doesn't quite match the oak cabinet I had custom-built, so I put up a strip of tapa cloth to bring the shades of brown and tan and yellow/white together and then to use the space between the tapa cloth and cabinet, I put up a framed photo (surrounded by Tongan stamps) of the hut I lived in there in 1970 and 1971.  Then I thought of home and heart--all my past homes and the one I live in right now--and kept going, increasing my pleasure with every bit of tackiness.  I already had photos of my family, going back to my father's baby-hood, but I decided to mount these items of ancestor worship by putting them on pedestals of books--books that they loved or that, for some other reason, I associate with them.  More on that another day.

Getting back to the north wall, where my dark-oak cabinet stands, these are the books I have for Tonga:  a reprint of Mariner's description of Tonga from 1837, the Intensive Course in Tongan by Eric B. Shumway that came out in 1971 but whose lessons we used on Molokai in 1969 Peace Corps training, and the Tonga Pictorial by Donna Gerstle and Helen Rait published by the Tofua Press in San Diego but giving no date.  (I do remember meeting Donna Gersle and hearing that her parents had lamented that she had "traveled around the world to fall in love with a colored man."  She later dedicated a book to her parents for their love and understanding.)

To the left of the Tongan books I have Madrid as photographed in a National Geographics Magazine and represented in books Madrid as described by Lorenzo Lopez Sancho in 1970, the Prado Museum in 1970, with my address as Reyes Magos 4, and the Las Meninas, a play copyright 1972 from the Casa del libros 29, Madrid 13, but online listed as written in 1960 by Antonio Buero Vallejo

Whoops!  Better turn Madrid over right side up!  (Done!)

To the right of the Tonga books Algeria is shown through a photo of me at my home in Medea and my boyfriend's dog meeting a camel in Tamanrasset, and the books are L'Algerie Aujourd'hui (Today being around 1974, when Jean Hureau descirbed it for the series Jeune Afrique), a National Geographics article from 1973, the year before I left for two years in Algeria, and the Algerian novels Jours de Kabylie and Le Fils du pauvre by Mouloud Ferkoun and  Un ete africain by Mohammed Dib.

So you can see what I mean by tacky--even seeing only this little among so much more.  But I LOVE this room, and I need it to settle my sometimes windy neuro-diverse brain.

More photo and books tackiness coming soon!