memoir

Hat’s Off

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: As I wake up on this pretty fall morning, the folks over here at WordPress told me that some of you are hard at work reading away. It is fun to see and thank you all as always for your dedicated reading and attention. It’s nice to know that you are out there and I hope you are enjoying your wander around the Pictorama world. Welcome today to all readers both new and longstanding. It pleases me to think that there are folks who want to read about cats, toys and my minor exploits.

I have an interesting little addition for this post, a postcard from the big buy a few weeks back, of a cat having chewed through a hat. Seems like an odd image to make a postcard of – have to wonder if the artist had a real incident on his mind. The cat is rather pleasantly benign for a chapeau eating demon. He is of the, aren’t I cute so you can’t possibly kill me school I guess. Why would he chew through a hat though? Must have been so pleasantly stinky.

This card appears to have been produced in Eastern Europe – ambitious felines there I guess. It is an embossed image, a very old, worn man’s hat with this sweet faced, long haired kit having munched through it. This card was mailed from Fort Scott, Kansas at 11 AM, on March 21, 1908.

Back of the card. Is actually a bit easier to read in this photo than in person.

The pencil writing on the back is very faded and a bit illiterate. The best I can make out is, 3-20-1908 avrr – all ok and a card from Pec. he did not say when he was coming back expect we wont come til Monday if you children are all well. love to all Mother. And it was addressed simply to: Carles J. Pierce, Appleton City Mo. Must have been a small town.

Ongoing readers know that my current gig at an animal hospital has set me contemplating things that pets ingest that they should not. (Foreign Object Friday anyone?) The favorite by far seems to be dogs eating ear buds (owner might even find out because they are gently pinging in the pooch), one of the worse is marijuana they pick up from discarded roaches on the street (very bad for animals, please dispose of thoughtfully), and while it is hard to choose most exotic might go to a corn cob which sort of startled me. Shoes, underwear and socks are not safe from your large pup, I’m telling you that right now.

Just for kicks and giggles – this photo from one of my very first posts. Someone named Dally Petit shown in true cat hat splendor.

However on the cat side, this image reminded me very much of a cat we had as a child, Zipper. I have told of his exploits as the swaggering sort of tabby cock-of-the-walk, feline ringleader in our old neighborhood.

I was quite small when for whatever reason one day Mom had to take Zips to the vet. Evidently she was short of a cat carrier and she enlisted me as well. (Later in life she always made sure she had more than enough to move all the cats if necessary, which it was during hurricane Sandy when she moved at least five.) On this occasion she placed Zipper in a rather picturesque antique straw picnic basket and somehow secured the top so he couldn’t bound out.

Zipper was not a cat easily cowed and he sent what we called war whoops and howls from the seat next to her in front (this was an old car and I believe the front seat was all one, not broken into separate seats like they are now), and I was plopped in the back, but of course watching this unfold. Well, Zipper was not to be contained and began systematically eating his way through the side of the basket. (In retrospect, whatever ailed him wasn’t that serious I guess.) It wasn’t long before he was thoroughly stuck, head out but unable to go back in. I can assure you he was a good deal more demonic looking than this puss. Mom, for her part, just kept driving.

I have no idea how we got him home, nor was I there when the vet must have cut him out and most likely asked mom what the heck she was thinking. I wish mom was still around to ask her about that part of the story. This card will always remind me of it however.

Sadly I cannot think of a single family photo that incorporates Zipper – he was a will o’ the wisp of a fellow, always on the move. Somehow he never quite got documented to my knowledge. I suspect it had to do with his aversion to being picked up. A true ally cat, he was very selective about who could touch him and how much. He lives now only in my memory and imagination.

A couple of rather wonderful items wandered in the door this week – a good week at the online auctions. This and that needs to be done before I can share them but some rather wonderful things coming up soon so stay tuned.

Tomasso Catto Singers

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Pam’s :Pictorama Post: Today’s post is an oddball card I picked up at the postcard sale recently. It portrays the never ending saga of cats atop a roof, singing their nightly woes and joyous howls. I have numerous entries in this bonanza of images although a favorite is an unusual panorama photo of cats on a fence (and dogs) shown below for a post that can be found here.

Pams-Pictorama.com collection

This is another of those postcards which is address and date by the sender but no evidence of mailing. On the back it says, For Beatie From Dad. Ramsgate. 24/3/07. Therefore this card is a bit older than maybe I would have guessed.

Cats on rooftops though is also a thing and I wonder about this. Blissfully, I have never found one of my cats, or a stray for that matter, on my roof. That might be because I lived in a very high two story house growing up, but even our more compact house in Jersey does not have rooftop kitties. I assume it is more of a function of houses and row or townhouses close together? How do they get up there and down again? Attics maybe? It must have been a thing because you see them portrayed on roofs as much as fences. Here it is a red tile roof, but definitely a roof nonetheless.

The artist has provided us with some cat diversity in this quartet, two marmalades, a dark gray and a white-ish tabby. Tails stick out handily for the composition on either side and peek up on either side of the Baritone and the Contralto, arguably somewhat strangely placed for the Baritone, sort of in front of him.

These musical felines clutch an advertisement sheet, with claw paws, that looks like it doubles for their music. It promises, Every Night Lessons in Howling by the Tomasso Catto Family Speciality Midnight Concerts/ Three Blind Mice Words by – Prowler Music by – Howler: Sung Nightly by the Mew Quartette. Their fluffy feet peer out below the paper. The orange on the end, Tenor, seems to look the most like a participant in and old-fashioned barbershop quartet. Meow!

(The post for this particularly good Louis Wain image below can be found here.)

Pams-Pictorama.com collection.

I don’t know about my Pictorama readers but I could never rest easy at night if I heard cat fights or howls in my yard. Although I know enough about cats to know the ruckus that can be raised, I admit to being glad that our colonies of strays is largely reduced enough that this is no longer a routine event here in Yorkville or in Fair Haven. A cat meowing outside will drive me nuts looking for it. Far from tossing a shoe at them I would of course be worrying about it. My mother was the same – hence the admission of Stormy and Gus into our family over time. They arrived at the back door with all paws on the ground however.

There were some good times for cats, even domestic ones, that managed to spend the occasional evening out with the fellas or gals as it may be. I have written out our cat Zipper who used to through parties in our garage for the local bunch after raiding a neighbor’s eel pail kept for chum. The price of domestication as I pointed out in a post last week where guest speaker Temple Grandin talked about a dog at the hospital that had eaten and entire shoe. For a quick look at that interesting talk see below. Our town in New Jersey seems to want to strictly restrict cat residents outdoors and the Jersey Five are all indoor cats. Needless to say, up on the 16th floor in Manhattan, so are Cookie and Blackie!

Posting About Postcards!

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today I am taking a moment to revel in my postcard purchases, but also to celebrate the postcard show itself. To anyone who has been to the current incarnation of this sale this might seem a bit extreme as it is in a small church in the West Village and made up of about nine dealers.

The first reference to this show in my life dates back to college when one of my professors, collage artist Maureen McCabe (her site here), mentioned in passing that she loved to go to a postcard show in Manhattan. She would pick up vintage cards which she would use in her collage boxes. (She mentioned getting vintage paper dolls there which I have never seen!) Frankly, in my naivete I had never heard of or considered such a thing. Antique stores and flea markets were a part of my childhood but shows of such things for sale had never really occurred to me. And postcards no less. It set my brain mulling.

The art of Maureen McCabe. “Fate and Magic”, 2013, copyright of the artist. That could be a vintage paperdoll right there…

Fast forward a number of decades and somehow or other it came to my attention that there was a vintage postcard show (the Metropolitan postcard show) at a (then) old and tatty hotel on the far west end of 57th Street. In my memory at the time it was a Howard Johnson, it appears to be called the Watson Hotel now. (Another sliver of memory is that in my 20’s my then boyfriend, Kevin, and I would get day passes just for swimming pool access in hotels in Manhattan in the hottest of summer. This was one of those somewhat cheesy hotels.)

Who would have thought a room with nothing but postcards for sale would be of so much interest? In those years there was probably twice as many dealers and maybe even some ephemera that was beyond postcards. (How big was it when Maureen went?) If memory serves there were a few people of some note signing or roaming the space. I bought fewer cards and spent most of my time and money at a high flying dealer table groaning with Louis Wain cards.

Sadly, with Covid like some many things it shutdown and although I was on their mailing list it seemed to be a number of years before I caught up with them again. Now I find them in the West Village and reduced in size.

Oddly, for me it is perhaps a bit more manageable and I seem to come away with increasingly large scores and yesterday proves the point. It was a miserably rainy day which may have depressed attendance although business seemed reasonably brisk to me. Kim was with me and settled into a pile of photos of early actors and actresses and even made a few purchases and you will probably see those over time too.

View while digging through a box labeled “Cat”.

Today’s card was purchased by me early in the show as I made my way through each dealer; it is Mainzer at his best. I have written about Mainzer before (which can be read here and here) who is sort of the later heir to the Louis Wain throne. Mainzer, as a card producer, picks up that ball in 1938 and runs with it, arguably until at least 2005 when taking the reprints of the cards into consideration. Prior to 1955 the production address was 118 East 28th Street here in New York. (On a whim I did a Google Search on the address and it is worth a look, the Kaime Arcade building with a very interesting facade.) After 1955 it is just noted as Long Island City and that is what is printed on this card. Eugen Hartung was the artist.

While mama cat, dressed for a day of shopping with stockinged legs, heels, hat, gloves and fur trimmed coat, chooses between two postcards, her offspring are tearing the place apart – including I might add, her poodle on a leash! In case you are wondering, yes, each of the postcards has a tiny cat drawing on it. (The other prints on the walls appear to be flowers however.) Allow me to note some oddities about the store. It seems to stock not only postcards, prints and fancy wrap boxes, but oddly globes adorn the shelf too. Cut off at the top seem to be some written labels I cannot quite make out and appear to be written in Hartung’s native Swiss German.

Another view of inside the church where the Metropolitan Postcard show now resides several times a year.

The well appointed shopkeepers are both in a uniform dress with matching necklaces. While the one with glasses focuses on Mrs. Cat, the other tries to contend with the kits. She has come running with a pen in hand, clearly interrupted in her clerical duties. The kittens, two boys and a girl, are well turned out but unlike mom and the salespeople do not wear shoes – bare paws all the better to climb with. Each magically has their tail come out from their clothing – including the little girls whose pantaloons we see. Mom’s tail, and that of the saleslady, appear from under their overclothes. (I’m always curious about how tails are worked into anthropomorphic cats.)

Several kinds of cat are represented for variety – Mrs. Cat is a tabby, the boys a tabby and a tuxie, little girls is a marmalade. The saleswomen are marmalade and lastly an odd mix like maybe she has some Siamese in her. One final curi-oddity is that the pooch, having opened the cabinet below, has released two large mice. No one, even the dog, is paying any attention to their escape. A pleasant mayhem is enjoyed by all.

Back of card – how did it find its way back to the US I wonder.

Someone has penned card b at the bottom right. An addition mystery about this card is the back which shows that this was evidently mailed to Japan from an indeterminate place in 1976 and has, obviously, made its way back to the United States to ultimately be sold to me. It says in a neat childish scrawl, Dear Jacob, the school is very good and close. all the children are kind to me. I am learning and getting better. I will see you in camp. Nathan. It was sent to: Jacob G. Cohen, 1-32-28 Ebisu-nishi, Shibuya-Ku, Tokyo, 150 Japan. (And for your information, a postcard to Japan in 1976 cost twenty-one cents.)

Lastly (because I have clearly droned on a bit) may I just say that curiously this store reminds me very much of one I used to go to in New Jersey, near the house we now have. I cannot remember the name but was a true old fashioned stationary store and carried not only cards and assorted writing materials, but the more esoteric things a stationary store carried before the internet, such as form contracts like leases, which is what my mother used to go there for. It was long and narrow with windows all along one side. There were similar blond cabinets and perhaps more of a dusty business-like feel but something about this card nags at my brain with that memory. It is sadly now a Dunkin’ Donuts, just a few feet from the post office and grocery store we walk to frequently.

So there you have it – the postcard show and our first edition of the acquisitions.

And Loving ‘Lite

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today is a companion piece to yesterday’s post about my love for all things opal in jewelry. However, the other side of that coin is opalite. Opalite is an opalescent manmade substance which is either glass or plastic. Like an opal it has the property of changing color based on light and the colors around it. Alternately called  argenon, sea opal, opal moonstone or living under a bunch of similar names, it delivers much of the bang without the buck so to speak.

Shown up close here it is about a one inch long stone.

While I have likely run into it before (as a shiny object, opal and moonstone loving person) it wasn’t until it crossed our paths in the form of delightful square lumps on a trip to Red Bank on summer day in New Jersey that it rose into prominence for us.

Kim and I had walked into town to peruse the comic book store and do a few other minor errands. We decided to have lunch at a pleasant outdoor cafe but were told we needed to wait about ten minutes for a table. We were in no rush so we gave them my cell number and decided to kill time in a store next door called Earth Spirit (online here if you are curious).

I like the way the whole store is just open to the street, alluring.

Unlike many establishments in Red Bank these days, this one has managed to hang on for quite a stint. It sells crystals and incense and well, stones. It wouldn’t be the one I would pick for longevity but somehow it has stuck around. They seem to specialize in different kinds of tarot card decks and part of a wall was devoted to those.

We had never been in and I was especially enamored of a sign advertising aura photographs and while I was investigating that Kim was picking through the glorious selection of “stones”. I wandered over to see what he was up to and I’m not sure which of us discovered the bowl of opalite first, but we immediately each grabbed one to purchase.

Our lunch reservation came up just as we were purchasing our stones. I never did get my aura photo taken but this was a good trade off.

Aura photos on display. $25 to take one and $40 if you want a reading.

It promised us enhanced creativity and AI tells us it also used to support people through life transitions, foster inner peace…and deepen spiritual connection, especially during meditation. I am not going to be the detractor to question these qualities from a manmade substance so while I wonder I will not, um, throw stones. I took mine to work and Kim has his prominently displayed on his desk, shown above. He has lovingly embraced it and its properties, real or imagined.

Variations on opalite above.

Opalite evidently has no single inventor but it appears to have come on the market in the 1980’s. There is a fair amount of variety to the “stones”.

Evidently Taylor Swift has a new song with opalite in the lyrics which will perhaps boost it into greater prominence. It interests me a bit why you’d have an opalite sky rather than an opal one but in another way it makes sense. Opalite in all its forms appears to be a more coherent glow, as opposed to the sparking bits of fire in the different kinds of opal gemstones. Meanwhile, there is plenty of room in our heart for both.

Rare Gem

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today I am veering off my cat course to write about a recent jewelry purchase. October, the witchy month of fall, is a perfect time to write about opals as it is the birthstone for those born this month. I must be an October baby at heart because I never seem to get enough of them.

I write today with some trepidation because I know I will not be able to photograph these gems properly to give you a sense of the glorious fire and snapping color they sport when you see them in person and moving in the light. In fact, when I bought the necklace above on an auction site recently, I was taking a bit of a chance as their photos were lousy too. I admit up front that none of these photos do the beauty of these glittering changeable gems any justice.

Pictorama readers may remember that I wrote about my love of opals quite extensively in posts that can be found here and here. Two opal rings were given to me as gifts, but I am not sure I can easily remember which was the first opal I purchased, although there are two necklaces I bought from my friend and jeweler (@murielchastanet_finejewelry) on the west coast many years ago. One is of opals from New Zealand and the other is made up of flat Ethiopian opals.

New Zealand opals cut in slices! This was the first necklace I purchased and I have never seen one like it since. This came to me via Muriel Chastanet’s store in Los Angeles.

The necklace I just purchased is the sibling to that one – in blues instead of oranges but I believe they are Ethiopian opals. Because I owned that one I recognized this one right away and took a closer look. They looked interesting however there was no way I would pay nearly as much from an online auction as I had paid to a trusted jeweler. I can say that these could easily look like a meh string of overpriced beads.

This necklace is the second opal I have bought from this auction site (I purchased a ring, shown below, more or less uncontested over the summer) and I think I keep looking because frankly opals don’t seem to sell well for them. Unlike strands of pearls and jewelry from contemporary designers opals, luckily for me, do not seem to be popular.

The yellow/orange beads came from the wonderful Muriel Chastanet establishment. I have tried to show them together although not a great pic!

So I gather that the premise of the auction house, called Everything but the House, is to essentially clean out houses and estates and sell every last thing of value via live auction on their site. A league of experts in different areas descend on you and voila – they put it all online and sell it. They had (have?) a television show devoted to it I saw a few years ago. I’m always curious what will turn up in such random slices of life and collections. However it never occurred to me to look at the auctions until good ole Instagram marketed it to me.

Yes, while other people are fretting about politics on social media, I am just spending money like a drunken sailor. It started during the pandemic and has burgeoned over time. Before that I largely confined myself to eBay and a few well known toy auctions. Not now – I’m making deals for things I spot in photos, have all sorts of obscure auctions on my calendar and the folks at Live Auctioneers totally have me in their clutches, emailing me reams of images daily they think I should see. (I seem to largely get outbid on that site as I am rarely there for the finish and true to their name a lot of action seems to happen in the final minutes.)

The other ring I bought from this auction house, shown in an antique ring box from my collection.

In the end I was not the only bidder on the necklace but I got it for very little. I did something I almost never do. When I saw an outbid email I went back and put another small increment on and won it.

My father’s mother went to auctions all the time and furnished her house and then some with her purchases. (For my dad it was estate auctions but more about that another time.) In her day those were of course in person and she would come into Manhattan from Westchester for them. She always said to set your limit and do not allow yourself to get chased above it. I’m sure she’d forgive me on this occasion however. (You can read more about Gertie, aka Tootsie, Butler here. I dearly wish I could have one afternoon as an adult talking to her about the auctions she went to!)

My orange “circus” beads in their original box.

Anyway, long story short I won the necklace and it arrived via Fedex the other day. Even at the price I paid (a true small fraction of what I paid for my other one) I was somewhat on pins and needles to see it. Oh man, I was not disappointed. It was sent unromantically but effectively wrapped in a bit of bubble wrap which I quickly sliced open.

A sort of side-by-side view.

I could see the changing color and fire in the stones immediately. Unlike my other necklace these are each faceted, unlike my other ones where are each smooth. The clasp and stringing is perhaps a bit inferior, although they still lay nicely on my neck where they have largely resided since I got them. It seems no matter what I wear they pick up the color and shoot it back differently! On the first day I wore a green top and it took on a slightly green blue hue, red makes them more blue as does black.

I always call my other strand my circus beads (oh to go to that carnival!) and now I have two. Lucky girl! I have not yet figured out if I can wear them together but I find them incredibly cheerful and intend to wear them often.

Everything’s Swell!

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: It’s impossible for me to see this card without hearing a certain sort of cartoon cat voice from my childhood – vaguely sarcastic, probably based on a motion picture idea of what a citified gangster sounded like. His friend and sidekick would reply, Yeah, right boss!

This is among the last of the cards I bought at the big postcard show over the summer. (Never fear, there’s another show coming in early October.) This card looks like it could have been drawn by one of those cartoon animators as a side gig. It has a pro feeling to it. The cat on the fence with the big orange sun setting – a glowing sunset behind the fence we realize when we really look. We get a peek at a yellow field and a house behind. It is as if the world is very beautiful glowing yellow and civilized just on the other side of the fence from where these three cats gather.

The two males on the fence seem to be tuning up for a night of caterwauling, while the girl cat belongs to someone who has place a bow around her neck. I guess she matriculates through both worlds. There is a garbage can which has overflowed – I guess that can be investigated and raided later if the boys need a snack.

Blackie and Cookie on the bed recently. They have only just reconciled with each other upon our return to the NYC apartment.

Not surprisingly it has me in mind of what we called alley cats when I was a kid and which occurs to me right now to be a term you don’t really hear any longer. (Do we no longer have alleys? Or are cats no longer their denizens?) Instead we talk about strays and feral cats – terms people seem to use interchangeably which arguably are not. Domestic cats that have been abandoned are now strays but they are not feral.

I have written about our first stray found when I was a small child, Zipper. (I wrote about him and other tabbies I have known in a post here. Zipper’s interest in our tropical fish can be found here.) He was a classic alley cat, a tabby with a broken tail where the tip was always at an angle. Mom rescued him outside the laundry one day (this was before we had our own washer and dryer – yes, we’re talking quite a long time ago) where some boys were abusing him.

Zipper was super scrappy though and grew into a beautiful cat. I suspect in retrospect that our rather prim but gentle domestic cat Snoopy was probably utterly shocked by him. He kept his streetwise wits about him and became a ringleader of the neighborhood cats of the time. (Our cats were of the indoor/outdoor variety at the time.) Zips would round up his buddies and make raids on an eel box kept for bait up the street. What pussycat parties those appeared to be! Puking for days after and a need to hose down the garage. These two on the card would have happily attended and then gotten into a few fights.

Mr. Miltie, our old, old timer. A long ago rescue from Newark.

Spending time outside our cats would get into scraps and occasionally come home with a gaping wound which would eventually abscess and require a trip to the vet. Once I remember my mother couldn’t find a cat carrier and stuffed Zipper into a picnic basket which he promptly chewed right through – head sticking out and therefore somewhat stuck, on our the way there.

All of this was brought back to me by a snippet on Instagram this morning about a British woman and her son finding a cat in the backyard and enticing him inside over a period of a couple of years. Reminds me of our Hobo in New Jersey who we never were able to get inside and who disappeared last year. They call him Boysie, another tabby, and it was a bad wound that finally made them urge him inside and to the vet.

Gus, on the bed. He came to the backdoor in NJ one winter. He can’t decide if he wants to be petted all the time or is afraid to at all.

Now we have dedicated people doing TNR (trap, neuter and release) of cat colonies which have mercifully cut down their numbers. Strays with docked ears show this has been done and our Stormy bears that evidence. Here in Manhattan strays are much less common than they once were even in my lifetime. Still, Stormy and Gus both came to the backyard at Mom’s and the other three were otherwise rescued, Beau and Miltie from Newark and Peaches from a basement in Long Branch. We know that shelters are full to overflowing and I am told that in the spring a never ending parade of kittens were dropped at our doors at work despite our not even being a shelter.

Recently an older friend lost her sister unexpectedly and the sister had just adopted a stray. I was very tempted to invite her to join the tribe although eight might truly be the tipping of that scale.

Peaches. I actually touched her for the first time recently. She was asleep on a chair and did not appreciate it. Peaches will generally only let me get within a foot or two of her. Still, she seems very happy. Stretches and rolls around. Just a no-touch kinda girl.

I think of our cat companions and how very special they are. Cookie is asleep atop a Chewy box surveying her kingdom as I write and Blackie is wondering if he looks longingly enough I will give him a Churu treat. (I am the soft touch for these and secretly am always trying to put a bit more weight on Blackie. He is a willing participant.) It makes me sad to think of those kitties that could have happy lives in homes but don’t get the chance. Here’s to finding them all their very best homes.

More Autumn in New York: Catching Up

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Yesterday I devoted my post to writing about work and specifically about the dog event fiesta that September has become. My job, which is on a fiscal year ending on December 31 (I do not recommend this), will increase in volume, stress and energy required, continuously increasing through our gala in early December and on through the last week of the calendar year until I fall over on New Year’s Day. However, returning from our summer weeks in New Jersey is more than adjusting to increasing work, it is the adjustment back into our lives here at the official location of Deitch Studio – a physically much smaller epicenter of our operation.

Cookie and Blackie are generally very relieved that we have once again returned them to their private abode here. While there is novelty with the twice yearly trips to the shore house, their discovery that other cats exist in the universe aside from them (not a welcome thought), they prefer the one room here where they rule unimpeded.

Blackie and Cookie in an uneasy bed truce yesterday.

For those readers who remember that Blackie was limping before we left (resulting in an emergency trip to work on Saturday) his limp has improved but not gone away. The trickiest jumps are a bit beyond him (the pedestal sink in the bathroom to his chagrin – he needs us to lift him in for a drink), but his jumping gradually improved in New Jersey. He and Cookie are 14 this year and perhaps this is a bit of age showing. If he didn’t hate the vet so I would take him to my friends in rehab and let them have a look or perhaps do some acupuncture on it.

Meanwhile, when we return they spend the first weeks hating each other like they never saw the other before. Blackie wasn’t allowing Cookie on the bed which annoyed her but she was so happy to return to her perch on the top of the couch by the windows she ignored it until it blew over in the last day or so.

I probably bought it because it is pretty but looking forward to reading it soon too.

Books! Despite leaving a pile in New Jersey, many seem to have found their way back here too. As much as I have embraced reading electronically where I can (all new novels and what I can find on my list for 19th and early 20th century writers) I must say somehow a stack of books has built up next to the bed. They are mostly one off old novels and volumes of short stories from the 1910’s. If I find any new leads into interesting writers I will let you know. The most recent Rosa Mulholland book acquisitions reside there, while several earlier volumes remained in New Jersey. (Earlier posts on her novels can be found here, here and here.)

I am enjoying a book of short stories, Nancy’s Country Christmas, 1904, by someone named Eleanor Holt which I purchased on one of our trips to the Antiques Annex. Unfortunately this volume seems to be her only published effort aside from a magazine serialization or two and the internet has yielded little. I would read more of her if there was more to read.

Very few of the books I buy still have their covers!

In the pile are: Natalie’s Chum by Anna Chapin Ray, 1905; Our Bessie by Rosa Nouchette Cary (nicely illustrated) with no publication date but a note on the flyleaf of 1896; and a later addition of Janet Hardy in Hollywood by Ruth Wheeler, a series book from 1935. To his credit I think Kim is reading his way through things largely purchased and left to pick back up in New York. His nose has been buried in The Education of Henry Adams for a while now since we got back – in an interesting horizontal paperback form designed to distribute to GI’s. He read reprints of the Superman saga during some of his vacation in New Jersey but luckily for our limited space, was able to leave them at the house there.

Kim’s reading.

I am a rather voracious reader when I get going and I have read a number of contemporary novels recently as well. I generally review them very briefly on Goodreads if you ever wonder what I am reading when I get into the 21st century. I am partial to books about time travel and for example highly recommend The Ministry of Time (here) and, slightly different, The Life Impossible (and here). I am a fast reader and the books pile up so I am glad they are largely electronic. Some are so splendid though I do miss having physical copies. I also miss the ability to hand my copy of an excellent book over to a friend.

Stack of books among those next to the bed right now.

Aside from digesting stuff and somehow sorting it into the apartment, there is so much to do as there is for all of us in this back-to-school time of year. I am struggling through the last of the paperwork for my mother’s estate (having saved the worst for last I am afraid; the transfer of retirement accounts is ferocious), the apartment here needs attention (plumber anyone? I can’t seem to get a call back and our toilet needs to be replaced), and soon the weather will inform me it is time to turn the closets over and a long delayed need to weed through them. I have made two fall clothing purchases and both are brown which is different for me – we’ll see how that works out. I will say we have very limited closet space and it is that moment when summer and fall clothes are cheek to jowl. My list for what needs doing is long!

Adjusting to our somewhat miniscule kitchen and away from my garden means a different kind of cooking – more just assembling than cooking really. It took a week or two but I seem to have reacquired the skill set. Kim and I have remembered the sort of dance required for both of us to be in there – let alone when the cats want to be with us! However, soup time is upon us and I am mentally gearing up to schedule in my weekly soup making. (Recipes for soups can be found in prior posts here and here.)

THE PORDENONE SILENT FILM FESTIVAL 2025 – 44TH EDITION: SPECIAL EVENTS AND RETROSPECTIVES

The super charged energy of fall will help – street festivals, dates to see friends, new exhibitions. Even for us early film fans there are options – a favorite, the Perdenone Silent Film Festival, is the first week in October and broadcast online with a subscription. (Information about the festival can be found here.) Next weekend I travel back to New Jersey for some appointments there. Mum season will have begun (I like a good couple of mums on the front steps – can’t compete with Park Avenue shown above though) and I will start to turn my thoughts to getting the garden ready for winter and the eventual holiday season there.

This ended up being longer than planned so thank you if you stayed with me to the end! Also a shout out to all of you as Pictorama crossed the 500 member line last week. Thank you!

Doggone, It’s Fall!

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: It is a couple of weeks that were here in Manhattan and for this animal hospital fundraiser September has been a captivatingly canine month already. As luck would have it, three out of my four dog events this month (the final one is on September 30 – our Woof &Wine for our young friends) were over the last ten days and as I looked at the photo feed on my phone it has been a bonanza of doggy days.

My less alliterative and punny colleagues groan a bit over my event monikers – Paws & Pints, Woof & Wine, Purrs & Pearls for starters. Pictorama readers know I cannot resist either in my scribbling and writing for work these days gives me ample opportunity to employ and explore both. (And more to come below!)

Paws & Pints participants above. Human and dog treats were supplied.

Fall days really are doggy here this year as I try to learn about fundraising for the animal hospital (um, quite different than jazz) and the community that supports it. I have realized that people (New Yorkers at least) really like to go to places with their dogs – to socialize with other dogs and their folks. As a committed cat companion of seven this has been a learning curve for me. After all, the cats make a strong statement of staying solely in their environment to the extent they can, don’t especially like other cats and, not all but most, show a decided preference for home and hearth. They are generally (at first at least) a bit leery even of house guests.

Not pups! Bow wow! They can’t wait to meet you, get their ears scratched and tummy rubbed, tails set a wagging. They greet each other, sometimes careful, other times enthused, and occasionally resulting in a stand off. I’m told I have been lucky and the worst we’ve had has been some barking – not sure we’ve even escalated to growling.

Last week we celebrated our second Paws & Pints event at a dog friendly establishment on the Upper Eastside, not far from Deitch Studio over here on 86th Street and Kim attended too. Happily crammed into a backyard here, we had about 30 guests and about 16 dog guests of every size and type. Beloved rescue mutts were cheek to jowl with bure bred pups. Nary a bark out of the group which has been commended by the establishment for its excellent behavior.

Somehow this image of a litho Kim did years ago always comes to mind when contemplating these events. This is called “Chaos at the Black and White Cat Show”.

I suspect I am tempting fate by writing this and that my day will come when we have all out chaos. Nonetheless, I press on and continue to experiment. I am not sure but I think that it is the preponderance of dogs, and a lot of dog specific treats, that calms the group. I suspect one or two dogs mixed with a lot of humans leads to more barking and seeking of attention.

This week saw two more events, a shopping evening at a store on 72nd Street and our second annual Canine Concert for dogs and their companions. Whatever I had imagined from the store event did not in the least prepare me for the overwhelming response from the local shopping community. I feel confident in stating that if you want to fill up your store, invite your folks to bring their dogs but watch out for the response.

Shopping event evening above which grew and grew!

I myself managed to shop. That said I am a very intrepid shopper and considering the store was doing this for the benefit of our hospital (10% of sales that evening supported our work). I thought it behooved me to pitch in and purchased a dress as a result. However, frankly with dogs of every size and type and people virtually falling out the door, I cannot say how much shopping did get done. Of course there were dog pup cup treats and even portraits being done at the back of the store. (A jeweler on Madison Avenue is having a holiday shopping evening for us in November which is where Purrs and Pearls will take place. I can only hope we have half as many people for that.)

Meanwhile, the canine concert (turn up sound for the snippet above) is not my brain child and is the thoughtful product of our education area and one of our board members. A string quartet from Julliard played off a puppy friendly playlist and a gorgeous September evening meant a meltingly beautiful occupation of a public square of canine and human camaraderie. The soothing repertoire was compiled by an auditory expert on the subject and certainly seemed to turn the trick on an exhausted Friday evening. One of my colleagues said that if you want your faith in humanity restored, man a table at a dog concert.

Canine Concert participants above.

I don’t think it is my imagination when I say people are generally in a better mood when they are with their dogs – arguably at their nicest. And being with the the dogs makes me and my staffers happy as well.

All this said I woke exhausted but satisfied this morning. Woof & Wine is still on the horizon where we will supply the puppies – dogs in training for the Guiding Eyes for the Blind foundation – rather than a bring your own. Purrs & Pearls is still a ways off and I am already planning for a Paws & Pints park edition for spring so stay tuned.

Bunny Snapshot

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: This was purchased in a small haul from the antiques annex in Red Bank, New Jersey recently. (Other treasures from that trip were recently posted about here and here.) I snatched it up for a few dollars because I liked the toy the kid is holding. It sat on a cabinet in NJ while we were there and I grabbed it up to bring it back so I could spend a bit more time studying it. It’s a tiny 2″x 3″ picture is the least expensive self-standing gold trimmed frame and I admit this is the first I have spent time looking at it.

There is a photo somewhere in the world (or was) of me very much like this, minus the nice toy and I think I was shaking the crib bars more like I was in prison. There are stories about my being anti-crib although despite that I have always been an excellent sleeper, even in the days when I was first brought home as a newborn. (As I write I am still a bit dazed and sleepy on this Saturday morning after a hard night’s sleep.) However, if I had one holding such a nice toy I could probably lay my hands on it.

While my older sister Loren made it into adulthood rarely sleeping more than 3-4 hours a night (as a small child she’d roam the house and when she got older we all got used to sleeping to her practicing the violin at all hours), always raring to go with energy, I slept through my first night home. This scared the heck out of my mother who however quickly adjusted and learned to enjoy it.

Of course it is a pretty typical photograph and likely there is a variation of most of us in our parent’s homes. (In the world of digital photos is this still true? Are there printed out pics from phones of this sort everywhere? I wonder.) I do like this nice big rabbit toy (I have a future post about a rabbit toy – a rare stepping out into a different species which I do occasionally) and this one wears a suit complete with sporty cap. I would have been pleased with such a toy no doubt.

Kim was the first to point out that maybe there is something pro about this photo. It is a bit perfectly posed. This morning while looking at it I had a hard time deciding if the hand holding the rabbit could really belong to the small child or if it was someone below and behind. Could that arm belong to that child? Seems long and maybe large? What do you think? Toys are piled in the crib and we can’t really see. On the other hand the composition is not so impressive and the contrast a bit low so it is hard to imagine a pro did it.

It is hard to pin a year to it – the stuffed rabbit is the only clue at all and I would say it could be anytime from the 1950’s forward a decade – or back a few years? Meanwhile, somehow it has now made its way to the Pictorama archive where toys are always appreciated in all forms.

Home again, home again

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: While New Jersey is also technically home, our many more months a year are spent in our tiny Manhattan apartment. Despite thinking, every time, that we are bringing less back than we brought there, we will spend today rather literally stuffing ourselves back into this space and place. Among other things (think books) we arrive laden with corn, tomatoes and herbs from the Garden State – the latter two from our garden.

Kim’s pile of pages, still covered in plastic against the possibility of ceiling leaks.

As far as I can tell, everyone who visits us here finds our ability to live in this one room (which I continue to stuff things into and Kim contributes artistic additions to daily, not to mention his book habit and mine) rather stunning. Mostly when you are doing it you forget about it. Having been away for five weeks I myself am marveling at how I produce meals in our miniscule kitchen – with cats and Kim in there with me! (We remodeled that kitchen back in the fall of ’19, just months before the pandemic. Find that post here.) Um, how have I prepared meals here?

Our kitchen post renovation – believe me, there’s lots more in it right now!

Kim is back at his beloved New York work table which is more generously proportioned than his one in NJ and has all his stuff – his full pile of lay outs and an always slowly growing pile of finished pages. Only a working kit of stuff goes to NJ in a box each time. Having said that I think he will miss the lovely open window he worked by. I have worked at that desk and on a good day you can see hummingbirds in the Rose of Sharon tree which they seem to adore.

Cookie (shown above) and Blackie are thrown back together and I report that they are finding the one room small as well. Blackie, on the defensive the whole time he’s in New Jersey, gets unfortunately aggressive with Cookie once we are back. The fighting has commenced and there is much hissing. Kim is mostly doing the mediating. Cookie has resumed a perch atop of the couch and, although Blackie slept on the bed, he is currently sleeping off the whole experience under it. (Do they think they have awoken from a long dream when they find themselves back here? Or have they assimilated that they now occasionally travel back and forth? I suspect they’d have a lot to say given the opportunity. Perhaps we are just as glad they cannot talk!)

Kim getting his NY desk set back up.

Several of the Rosa Mulholland books were left in Jersey after Kim read them, however two more arrived here in the meantime. (For my Rosa Mulholland posts and more about what I am reading you can go here and here.) Much of my reading is electronic these days but she has been hard to find and I keep purchasing the pretty volumes when I can. In addition, a few other volumes crept in via the antiques annex in Red Bank. (As for the comic book store I believe a couple of those volumes Kim purchased made it to New York as he had not read them yet.)

We are currently about half unpacked and I have a pile of clothes that need to either be cleaned or hung up. I wish I could move these summer dresses to our storage locker but the weather has turned hot again and I will regret it if I do I am afraid.

I only see one cat but our bivouac process in August.

For all of those things I do have my 25 minute walk to and from work coming up this week, rather than my long train ride from NJ. (Kim is going to try to do some of these mornings with me to keep up our walking together habit acquired on vacation. We’ll see if I can keep him away from his drawing table for a bit each morning for that.) The calendar is filling up with fall dates and New York is already in full fall swing, waiting for us to hop into the fray.

Pups from a prior Paws & Pints.

I have been back at the office since last week and again and again colleagues say that it is like a switch has been flipped and we are off to the races. We have a Paws & Pints gathering of owners and dogs this Wednesday at a dog friendly bar near home. It is followed by a new event for young supporters called Woof & Wine at the end of the month – that to support our fund which cares for seeing eye dogs for free. A supply of dogs and puppies from a seeing eye foundation will be the highlight, along with cocktails, food and a silent auction. And that is just September!

We are having one of our first truly rainy days in weeks so I have no excuse but to face the music and get the apartment in some sort of shape. Wish me luck and hopefully onto further acquisitions next week.