These are photos of things that either belong to or remind me of my father: the things he left behind. The stuffed animals we got him when he was sick. A dying bonsai named Bark Ruffalo. The column with his hand print. All these little things remind us of him and keep his soul present in the house.
He was a very sentimental person; he liked to write letters to us, or leave us random little notes. He even liked to write on or in the walls: whether it is our names and dates as a log of who has lived in this old house, or a tick mark to indicate my or my sister’s height that year.
My father was an architect. He fixed up the turret room about fifteen years ago, and never finished it. The trim work in the upstairs bathroom still needed to be finished, the lead paint on the old medicine cabinet needed to be stripped. He painted the ceiling deep blue and said that we could paint the stars and constellations on the ceiling one day.
My dad spent a lot of time in his office after work finishing up projects and listening to (blasting) his music (very often They Might Be Giants’ Apollo 18 or Kraftwerk’s Computer World). I have fond memories as a child coming upstairs to let my father know that dinner is ready, spending time in his office as he helps me with a history or science project for school, or asking him to turn the music down.
He was quite a collector of nothing in particular, but of random things that he kept in his office: architectural drawings, old subway posters, empty paint cans, antique clocks and radios, broken frames he found on the side of the street, and personal affects and sentiments like photos of me and my sister as little kids and things we made for him on Father’s Day years ago.
Our home is now a quiet museum of his life.