Pack Creek Ranch, San Juan County, Utah
Finally some Winter – clouds, wind, snow flurries, 25 degrees – and then clear blue skies in the afternoon, and more clear skies . . . and more . . .
Written over several days at the winding down of January in 2012.

JUST LOOKING . . .

Last night I created a small museum.
When I say small I mean the exhibits fit into a cigar box.
It was an after-dinner present for my wife.
“Here, my love, it’s a Museum of the Pleasures of the Hand.
Take out one thing at a time and hold it in your fingers and palm.”

What was in the box?
Wait . . . I’ll tell you soon.
But first, this:

What comes to mind when you read the word museum?
Perhaps the great treasure-filled bank vault collections of art and history found in cities like Paris or New York or London or Vienna or Athens?
That’s where all the bigtime goodstuff is kept on view.
Go if you can.

The lesser museums of the world are also worthy attractions.
The ones in small towns – collections based on local pride and history.
The little roadside museums – accumulations of human squirrely-ness and single-minded eccentricity.

“Yep, that’s the biggest hairball ever cut out of a cat . . .”
“This really is the largest collection of two-headed lizards in the world. . .”
“The whole house is made of glass bottles and hockey pucks.”

There are unplanned, unintended museums, as well.
And there are the museums I create myself.
Plus the invisible museums in my mind.

But first, this perspective:

One of my favorite small museums is the Cam Wah Chung & Co. Museum in the town of John Day, Oregon.
Two Chinese immigrants – Ing Hay and Lung On - opened a store in 1887 in an abandoned military trading post to serve their countrymen who were working in the local gold mines and building the nearby railroads.
They offered basic supplies, plus Chinese herbal medicines, cultural and religious items, social contacts for the Chinese community, and a four-bed opium den in the back room.
For lack of Chinese customers, the store quietly closed in the late 1940’s.

A nephew of Ing Hay signed over the deed to the property to the town of John Day. But, apparently, the city fathers didn’t get the word until 1969.
When they finally opened the building they found that the cold dry climate had preserved the contents. Everything was still there - in place just as it was the day it was closed and boarded up.

Now it’s a museum – still unchanged – a place where time stopped.
A memorial to the real life of Chinese immigrant society of long ago.
Even the owner’s bedroom and kitchen are just as he left them.
And opium smoke still blackens the back room.
When you walk in the door you step back into 1887.
Amazing!

Hold the thought.

In Moab last month I had time on my hands waiting for my old Ford to be rehabbed, and to get its emissions inspection certificate.
Wandering uptown, midtown, and downtown – that’s six blocks in Moab.
I wondered what the Walker Drugstore, the Ace Hardware, the City Market, and the Moonflower organic store would be like as museums of the future.

Suppose, like Cam Wah Chung & Company, these modern emporiums would be closed, shuttered, and sealed – to be opened 100 years later.
As memorials to the life of people in the first decade of the 21st century.
Us.
Museums. Time capsules.
What would the citizens of the future think?

Usually when I go to these stores I have a list of things-to-get, and a focused mind. I’m on a re-supply mission – get in, get it, get out.
And, of course, I never look at the rest of the stuff on offer.
There are whole aisles I’ve never wandered down because I don’t need baby supplies or pet food or plumbing fixtures or finger nail polish.
With a couple of hours to spare, I spent my free time in Walker Drugstore, the Ace Hardware, the City Market, and the Moonflower organic store.
Just looking – not shopping to buy, just to look - aisle by aisle – as if the stores were museums.
Dumbfounding!

Try it some time and be amazed.
The constant refrain in my mind as I looked at products I had never noticed before and didn’t even know existed was:
“Holy cow, look at that! Who buys this stuff? Who needs this stuff? Who eats or uses this stuff? Where did it all come from?”

Just looking at two full aisles of screws and nuts and bolts in the Ace Hardware set me to thinking about the history of the screw, how they’re made now so cheaply, and how I would make even one screw by hand.
Good old Archimedes was really on to something when he conceived of the screw way back there in the 3rd century B.C.

That’s another dimension of seeing these stores as museums.
Almost every product has a social or scientific history.
There’s an inventive mind behind every part of what’s on display.

In the same spirit I’ve visited butcher shops in Vienna, bakeries in Munich, cheese shops in Paris, sausage stores in the Czech Republic, and a fish market on the island of Crete.
Not to buy – but just looking – seeing these places as museums of contemporary life and culture.
Seeing the present as past.

To do this means being in museum mode – walking slowly, thoughtfully, with curiosity and respect, as you would in any great museum.
Just looking . . .

So - about the museum I gave my wife last night . . .

The Museum of the Pleasures of the Hand.
The criteria for each item:
- it must have a small-scale tactile pleasure – nice to touch and handle.
- either be hand-made or a natural item that when picked up feels good.
- must be from my own collection of stuff I like to hold.
- no more than 10 objects - must fit together into a wooden cigar box.

She opened the cigar box lid and removed one item at a time:

- a small sculptural wooden form that looks like a dancing man – broken off the dead limb of a nearby juniper tree while out on a walk – brought home, shaped, sanded, polished with beeswax and lemon oil.

- a perfectly round golf-ball size rock from a beach on the island of Crete found on a glorious October day when we were shore-shopping.

- a fat, round, old amber bead about the same size as the beach rock – from a shop in Vienna - made from amber from the Baltic sea area – from fossilized tree sap maybe 30 million years old. When rubbed it smells of pine resin.

- the coiled beginning of an unfinished basket – cookie size – made by hand by my wife from yucca fiber and willow root – lovely just as it is - in its promise of the basket it is yet to become.

- a small, white, delicate ivory carving based on one of the imaginary figures in Bosch’s painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights – made by an immigrant Russian ivory carver for me from fossilized mammoth tusk ivory found in the frozen tundra of eastern Siberia.

- a small shiny palm-size abalone shell from I-don’t-know-where, but certainly made by a living creature of the deep blue salt sea.

- a black ebony carving of a small hand holding a resting ox – in the netsuke style from Japan (I was born in the Year of the Ox.)

- a flat, round, white marble disc - a stone – perfectly shaped by the work of ocean and sand – when you find this kind of rock, you pick it up, and as you walk along, you turn it over and over in your hand like a one-bead rosary.

- a polished, teak-wood carving of a partially opened shell – with the head of a shore bird peaking out from the inside – from the island of Bali.

- a rectangular baked-clay tablet incised with cuneiform writing – probably 3,000 years old or even more – bought in a backstreet shop in Istanbul.
An expert told me it was only an ancient shopping list.

As I said, all of these objects fit into the palm of a hand – all can be most appreciated with eyes closed and fingers doing the reporting.
My wife was pleased – and each object led to a conversation.
That’s the point of museums – to have the senses pleased and provoked.
To be spoken to by all the muses.

The museum in the cigar box was temporary – it’s closed now.
All of the objects went back into the larger collection I keep in the basement.

It’s not the first small, temporary museum I’ve created.
Or the last.

There was the Museum of Shades of Green – a spring collection of small samples of green things in as wide a range of colors I could find on an hour’s walk. Tiny green buds from plants, several chunks of moss, spears of grass, first leaves of trees – so many unique shades of green that I filled my hands and pockets and was home in half an hour, the green spread out on the kitchen table.
This museum closed the next day.
It had become the Museum of Shades of Brown . . .

The Museum of the Sidewalk’s Edge – small mystery objects picked from either side of a sidewalk in Seattle on an hour’s walk.

The Museum of the End of Fall – the last colored leaves from trees and plants and flowers before they went bare for winter.

The Museum of the Dry Wash – small sticks and stones and bones picked from a nearby dry wash where they had been tumbled down and shaped smooth by flood waters from rainstorms.

The Smell Museum In A Bag – items collected nearby my house in Utah. Placed in a paper bag – things that smell good – juniper bark, sage leaves, a sliver off a broken incense cedar branch, a chunk of pinon pine resin, and two distinctly different samples of fresh, damp dirt.

It’s a special spice mix.
Or an aphrodisiac pot-pouri that makes you love the world around you.

These small temporary museums come from Just Looking . . .
And collecting just enough samples to fill a hand or a pocket.
The exhibits are spread out on the kitchen table for a few days only.
Then the museum closes – and moves on to remain open only in memory.

And, finally, there’s the museum in my mind – invisible things that cannot be seen or touched or picked up – the Museum of Imagination, such as:

A shadow cast by a guardian angel.

The memory of the laugh that comes after a hiccup.

The end of a small rainbow.

A map a raven made when it flew across the sky.

The answer to the question of “Who knows where the time goes?”

The sweet smell of success.

The sound of summer rain on a tin roof.

Three wishes.

A ticket for a free ride back from the edge of the abyss.

A fragment of Alice’s Looking Glass.

The sound of silence.

The way clouds look when I am flying in my dreams.

The view of the other side when you walk across a bridge over troubled waters.

And Lady Luck’s cell phone number.

To be alive in the world is to inhabit an infinite museum.

Our homes, dresser tops, bathrooms, kitchen pantries, photo albums - and the collections of used wrapping paper and ribbon, old Christmas cards, the drawers of mysterious odds and ends, as well as the vast accumulations in our memory bank. All museums.

Even a teenager’s room may be seen not as a mess but a museum.
Imagine how you feel when you look in it now and how you would feel if you boarded it up and opened it 25 years from now. Instead of being appalled and angry as you may often be now, you’d probably go all sentimental and cry when you re-opened it. The past become present.

In a big-deal big-city museum a solemn serious atmosphere prevails – not unlike visiting a mausoleum or a cemetery. Shh…..
Never have I heard laughter in such a museum – the guards would ask you to calm down or leave.

But in the smaller museums of the real life of the rest of the world, comedy abounds. Check your own closet, your own shoe collection, your underwear drawer, your purse or wallet, or your kid’s backpacks . . .
Maybe you wouldn’t laugh, but the rest of us probably would.
(Think about your response to neighborhood garage sales.)

Take a look at all this stuff – it’s us – we are what we accumulate.
Not stuff meant to be bought or sold . . . just kept.
A Museum of History - yours, mine, ours.
It’s what you will notice if you are . . .
Just looking . . .