separated at birth: fisherman; Schiaparelli or Fortuny?

 

Japan, Meiji period (ca. 1869-1912)

Fisherman with basket and net

Carved ivory okimono

Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Frederick Baekeland

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art

Cornell University

78.104.001

(gallery label, June 2022)

memories of my grandmother, inspired by Armistead Maupin

Armistead Maupin (Teddy, to his family) visited his grandmother at the nursing home and she did not recognize him. The long-past occurrence of reading his palm triggers her memory.

"I was making a gloomy retreat from Grannie's apartment when I had an idea. Returning to her chair, I thrust out my hand with the palm turned upward for her perusal. She seized it immediately and began reading the lines in rapt silence, like a book she'd laid down the night before and couldn't wait to return to.

Then, without even looking up, she said, very softly, 'Teddy.'

'Yes,' I said, laughing. 'Yes!'

'You're in your thirties now.'

'I am indeed.'

When her eyes finally moved up to my own, they were as open and lively as the sea. 'And you've written a novel, you say?'

'Yes. And you're in it.'

'Oh, dear.'

I laughed again. 'Not literally, but your spirit is there. Your loving, accepting spirit. She's a landlady in San Francisco, and she's a little ... spooky about things.'" [ellipsis in the text]

--Logical family: a memoir by Armistead Maupin (HarperCollins), page 276-277 in the paperback edition.

The last time I saw my grandmother (Gram, we called her) was at the nursing home. I had recently come back from my first trip to Italy (1985, I think). She didn't seem to recognize me but I had a stack of postcards and was showing them to her. When we got to a picture of the Rialto Bridge in Venice, she spoke of her father's stories of his "grand tour" to Europe in 1902. He had accompanied the art historian and professor O.P. Fairfield on the trip after an unusually hard year's work as acting president of Alfred University. His doctor said that the trip would do him more good than a year's medicine. This is paraphrased from the diary he kept on the trip.

My postcard of a famous bridge had penetrated my grandmother's aged fog and brought her memories of her father as it brought me a connection to the generations of my family. And confirmation of why I still love travel in general, Italy in particular, postcards, and probably even Palladio.

By Veronika.szappanos - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100527291

Some years later, in 2004, 102 years after my great grandfather's trip to Italy, I traveled to Venice with Sharon Chickanzeff, livening up my life narrative by breaking my arm at about midnight, with water on the plaza, under a full moon, while peering across the canal at Santa Maria della Salute.