Framing

Ever since I was a child I have had an affinity for paper.  Old prints, stamps, postcards and museum brochures.  Books, of course, follow not far behind, if not precede everything.  Old hotel luggage labels I especially like, as they often evoke a bygone era with kitschy art and humour.

About 20 years ago there was a Goodwill on Jarvis Street at Adelaide here in the city.  A condo has now taken up the space, but it was there among the books and furniture some decades ago that I espied what I knew to be a genuinely old print.  I guessed that it had probably been cut from a book and dated to sometime in the 1850s or so.  It was an English steel lithograph of the poet William Cowper.

The only problem was that in its bottom right hand corner was a large black blotch.  Knowing that the old paper making process involved cotton or rags woven into the pulp, I grabbed it.  For the princely sum of five dollars I brought it home.  The cotton fibres would keep the print in one piece as I bleached the stain out.  I filled the tub and poured the bleach.  Suitably framed in muted black oak, it currently occupies a spot in the living room.

In my first years of university I took full advantage of the libraries offered with my tuition and even ended up working at my university library one summer.  One day in winter I happened to stumble across a large volume on Bosch.  Tucked inside it was a gate-fold of his magnificent and terrifying triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights.  I spread this revelation across my carrel.  My eyes glowed.  I had seen it before, but decided then and there that nothing would complete my bedroom hovel more than Bosch's Earthly Delights.

I splurged.  I gathered up one hundred dollars (a lot for me then, being a poor student) and sent away to the New York Graphic Society.  A sturdy packing tube arrived at the farm some weeks later.  Quite strapped from the purchase, it would be some months before I was able to afford the frame needed to house my monster print.  It was fully a metre and a half across and some seventy-five centimetres high.  A ten centimetre white border couched the three panels on acid-free card about a millimetre thick.  In its tube, it rested above my head on a shelf before I was able to afford even the simplest frame.

I decided that I would put it into a very thin metal frame, faced with plexiglass.  I knew from where I had worked at the theatre downtown that a frame shop was close by.  For me, that shop seemed to have been there forever.  The window was always somewhat junky and full of an assortment of jumbled products.  Armed with my print, I went to the shop for consultations on how to best move forward.

Bells rang over my head as I pushed the door in.  The frizzy bouffant of an older woman floated among a sea of mattes and frame styles.  She was gluing a torn photo back together.  Across from her in this isosceles arrangement was a young man who was about my age at the time.  At the door myself, I completed the triangle.

There is a combination of features that, taken together, leave me smitten.  He had them.  Not only was he dark-haired and cleanly shaven with a pronounced beard line, he wore glasses.  He had beautiful soulful eyes and full lips.  He was in shorts, and hairy powerful legs belied the nerd touch of socks pulled up over his calves.  His cargo shorts were beige, which gave him the comical air of being ready for safari.

It was his hands, though, that caught my eye.  His hands were large, masculine, and exquisite, fine and unblemished.  He had the hands of a piano player, or a priest.  They were devotional, perfectly groomed, but not manicured.  As I drew closer I could see the free edges of his nails were symmetrical.  Each finger displayed clear white lunula.  This man was gorgeous, from his face down to the tips of his fingers.

Seemingly meticulously, he flitted over his work.  Cutting a matte, wrapping something, folding paper?  I can't quite recall.  She was talking to me, but I was stealing glances at him.  I decided on a simple frame and agreed that the print itself be affixed with glue to the backing cardboard for a small extra cost.  Dark beige aluminium frame with a half centimetre trim.

While she was speaking to me, she was also raising her voice to him - orders for this and that, making sure something was completed, packed, or mailed.  I sensed tension.  Was this boy her son, a hired relative, a new employee?  She seemed clearly unsatisfied and he seemed nervous.  His meek nervous state made him seem vulnerable to me, which made him even more attractive.  "Come with me," I thought, "and I will keep you safe."  This siren need in my head to protect him seemed odd to me, considering how he towered over me at probably 180 centimetres or more.  Height has always equalled presence to me, but his seemed sorely lacking.  He seemed to me the perfect sort of chap to sit under a tree with and read.  And do other things with.

I completed the arrangement and left.  I was told to return the following week and pick up my framed Bosch.  Aside from seeing my treasure suitably squared, I was also excited to return to the shop and see my Dark Percival.

Doubly excited, I returned the following week.  The frizzy bouffant turned to me in her swamp of mattes, recognised me, and without saying a word, departed to the back of the shop.  I looked around for my tall meek friend, but did not see him.  She returned with my monster, covered completely in craft paper.  I had to ask, "Where is .. ?"  I didn't even know his name.

"Him?!  Oh, he's gone."

"What?" I asked.  "Where?" 

"Oh, I don't know, just gone."

She said that one day he had simply not come.  And I suppose, having had the experience of decades, and having probably gone through a mill of shop boys, had not even the energy or care to inquire of an outcome.

I kept the print for the duration of my university years.  At the end of my degree, my life, like my tastes, changed.  I gave it to a concession shop and got a little over one hundred dollars for it when it was finally sold.  I was in acquaintance with the shop owner, and did see it one more time hanging on a far wall in the sunshine before it disappeared.  It did look very stately.