46. ✷ Home Furnishings

There would be many adventures in the years ahead, but finding time to write slipped away. That is the last journal entry I made for 35 years.

We didn’t have enough furniture for a house.

The Conants were going on sabbatical our first year as homeowners, and loaned us chairs, tables, even a bed their renter didn’t want. We screwed bookcases to the longest family room wall, filling the bottom shelves with toys and the top shelves with books. My parents sent four black metal panels depicting the four seasons, which we hung behind the couch. We bought a rocking chair at Meier and Frank, part of a chain that operated in the Northwest from 1857-2005. Its flagship store was a 15-story glazed terra cotta landmark across from Pioneer Square in downtown Portland. Its lower floors now house a Macy’s; its upper floors, a luxury hotel.

The rocker, originally a nubby orange fabric, was recovered later in mauve, and more recently, in rust and green.

In what ranks as my single worst home furnishing purchase, I found a day bed with an orange and black plaid fabric and two long, vinyl black bolster pillows for the empty family room. I bought a black beanbag chair to accompany it. The chair looked like a deformed creature from a science fiction movie crumpled in the corner, while the couch had the unfortunate effect of making it look as if we were celebrating Halloween every day.

Almost immediately, the enormous beanbag developed a tiny hole, and very slowly, little white pellets began to seep onto the orange wool rug, like dandruff. I tried to explain to Jim that they both had been on SALE, reduced many times! When I got them home, I realized why. It was another lesson. Don’t buy something JUST because it is on sale if it is not the right thing. It will only cost more to replace in the long run.

One of my graduate students at Chapman used to say glumly, “First I owned things, and now they own me.” It’s a variation on a famous Churchill quote, but his point is a good one. I have never forgotten the orange and black couch and offending chair, and the lesson they taught me.

We bought an unfinished dresser for baby clothes. I found an old school desk at a garage sale that needed refinishing. Working with wood, both new and old, was fun. Watching the grain emerge, smelling the wood shavings, and seeing the pieces come to life made me appreciate how hard our ancestors had worked to create homes long ago. We still have the desk but the dresser is gone, except for its dark brown stain color, which ended up on the work jeans I still wear. The jeans were new when I bought them for my sophomore class carwash in 1962. Today, they have a gaping hole in the knee that is very worrisome. After 47 years, I am considering replacing them — but not until I have to.

We’ve been through a lot together.

Anne O’Brien

Anne and Dave O’Brien lived diagonally across the street. The two Cal Berkeley graduates originally from Napa became lifelong friends. Unlike Judy, Anne worked outside the home, but she had many responsibilities at home as well. Her husband, a hard-working law school graduate who devoted his career to public interest government work, said about their parenting roles, “Yes, my ‘superwifemotheremployeevolunteer’ has tried to do everything. She did most of the child-rearing, took the kids on trips by herself (often when I was officiating), picnics, etc. I did most of the yard work (but she gardened), all the bill paying, most of the vacuuming, and a lot of the washing and drying (things a compulsive person would enjoy),” he said with his dry wit. He went on, “She did all the setting up, cooking, and cleaning up because I had neither the talent nor the patience for it, as well as all the shopping. She is a child of her time, of course, as am I.”

The daughter of a physician, Anne trained as a nurse. She held a series of increasingly responsible positions, eventually heading the nursing program at Lane Community College and later in Portland and Eugene with home health agencies. She also raised three children. I asked her recently if she had always been intent on a career in addition to homemaking. She thought about it carefully and replied, “Actually, no. My career evolved more by accident than design. I had an opportunity to get a master’s degree, which led to part-time jobs, which led to full-time jobs. But I always thought of myself as a mother first. I still think of myself that way.”

By the 1980’s and 1990’s, I knew more people who worked outside the home. Some of them had au pairs. One acquaintance, Barbara Elsberg, said she cooked every dinner for 15 years for her husband and two children with her coat on, because her au pairs would disappear to their own room when they heard the garage door going up as she returned at the end of the day. “If I took my coat off and sat down, I knew I would be too tired to get up,” she says wryly. The O’Briens were unique. I didn’t know any other wives who worked outside the home in 1972.

It was interesting living between Anne and Judy — two hard-working women creating different lives against the backdrop of society’s shifting social norms. It would fall to another generation of women to discover whether gender roles were simply the result of social conditioning or something more.

Through trial and error, I began tackling the twin challenges of homemaking and motherhood. It was as much an education as the university had been. I mastered the first; Geoff and Brad will be judges of the second. With only one car, I was at home most of the time. The days were busy with life’s practical demands. On December 5, 1972, I wrote in my journal:

“It has been too long since I have tried to express my inner thoughts in writing. I wonder how much is now tucked deep away in my subconscious, too far to reach? Motherhood is a joyful and frustrating time all at once. Seeing Geoffie, once nameless, now a real person, is a miracle. But on the other hand are the times when I feel alone, trapped in a world, albeit a comfortable one, from which there will be no escape for many a long year. I wonder if it is selfish of me to worry as much about my own growth and development as it is about Geoffie’s?

The sounds of the house seem mundane and musical all at once… the swish swish of the washing machine, the clanking of the dishwasher. The blessings of home are measured in small ways.”

There would be many adventures in the years ahead, but finding time to write slipped away. That is the last journal entry I made for 35 years.

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