Dear Diary: Framed and Hung
Nothing would have suited me more than a day spent at home, reading, writing, and making lists of all the things that I have to do. The bit about lists is not a complaint. I quite like making lists. I don’t know the first thing about them, but I like writing them down. You never know when you’re actually going to work your way through one.
But a day at home it was not to be. A print that I bought early last spring was scheduled to come back from the framer this evening. Why did it take so long to frame a picture? It just did. Quatorze was scheduled to hang the picture. I have become utterly dependent upon Quatorze’s picture-hanging skills, especially as my fused neck makes driving nails into the wall very awkward. Hanging the picture, moreover, would require re-hanging all the other pictures in the vicinity. What with chance and coincidence, the day grew a luxuriant schedule before it ever dawned.
I’ll spare you the itinerary. At day’s end, the storage unit was at least two orders of magnitude neater, emptier, and better organized than it was at the beginning. Quatorze and I had had a jolly lunch at the Baker Street Pub, where, frankly, I could happily spend whole days drinking Black & Tans and — well, “eating” is too crude a word for one’s engagement with their cottage fries, which are really pommes soufflées on rustic holiday. We had seen The Young Victoria, a film that, coming as it did on top of last night’s Messiah, left my tear ducts in sore wounded shape.  The new picture was hung, and all the pictures in the vicinity were rehung, except for a drawing of my mother that I made almost forty years ago, and that has lately struck me as in questionable taste. Questionable because I drew it with forty pencils and ninety erasers. Surely no drawing has ever been more overworked.
As for what didn’t get done, ha ha! Did you know that I’m planning to entertain about thirty guests at home on Sunday afternoon? I have not even fixed a menu, much less buttered a cake pan. But I’m not worried, because the theme of this year’s Christmas party is “No Ambition.”
Here’s a look at the new picture. I have had another print by the same artist for about twenty years. Now they face one another across the room I’m writing in. Where, tomorrow, I will spend the day reading, writing, and making lists.
Well, it’s pretty to think so.