8. Dearly departed

We had Mother's Day dinner at my mom's, and conversation briefly turned to a Japanese-ish print hanging on the wall behind her kitchen table. It depicts a small group of houses with rooflines done in a recognizably Asian caligraphic swoosh, arranged in a series of rows to evoke in a convincing way a pre-modern hillside neighborhood or village of wood and paper structures. This print previously belonged to my dad's mother, but it came to her as a gift from my mom and dad the first year they were married, shortly after the print’s inscribed production date of 1963. My grandmother apparently really loved Japanese art, a love I'd love to know how she came by, Appalchian girl that she was raised and peri-Appalachian woman that she remained, with no international travel experience I'm aware of (plenty of domestic, though, as a volunteer with the Red Cross and as a nationally competitive bridge player). She loved this print, though not as much as another Asian one my mom and dad got her, which my mom now also has, of flowers whose vivid blue amidst otherwise muted blacks and tans projects a restrained but warm intensity not unlike what I remember of my grandmother herself.

But I say "Japanese-ish" because I can't speak to the cultural authenticity of the print we were talking about. It's not just that to assess its origin I have only my own limited exposure to art from Japan and the fact that the artist's name looked Japanese, but also because it emerged in our conversation that it was purchased from Kaufmann's department store in downtown Pittsburgh. That's not an obvious source for genuine art from abroad. Yet, according to my mom, Kaufmann's had a very good art department, one that sold real art of real quality by real artists. Strange as it initially seems, I actually don't doubt her in this, it's just hard to fathom today that such could exist in a mainstream regional department store in a mid-size rust-belt city. But I suppose if you have a century of economic growth and seemingly permanent prosperity, then having a ten or twelve story building filled with everything an upper or aspiring-upper class consumer suffused with that prosperity might want makes sense, and so it would be natural to have a real art department.

Probably one shouldn't get too nostalgic about departed department stores, since they were key elements in the global consumer economy of the day and a stage in the progression towards the form of that economy we now have, which is, of course, at the center of so many of our present (and future) ecological woes. But certain of these stores formed part of a distinct identity of the region where I grew up, not as important, to be sure, as steel mills or rivers or universities or sports teams, but still part of the common infrastructure that one moved around and sometimes in, and which thereby anchored a sense of self, both individual and collective. In Pittsburgh, besides Kaufmann's, Horne's was the other major local store that I remember. These were the sorts of stores familiar in other cities as well that were housed in beautiful bespoke buildings that eventually became anointed as historical landmarks, often shortly before the stores were closed or swallowed by a national chain snaking its way from the East Coast through the fields and forests of the middle part of the country. By the time I was old enough to be dragged along on shopping expeditions, it was far more likely we would visit the suburban mall locations of these stores than their flagship buildings downtown, and even then it was only if something really nice was needed, worth a little extra beyond what Sears or J.C. Penny's carried. But occasionally we'd venture into the old locations, with their balconies and marble floors, elevators rather than escalators, and the clear message that shopping was a dignified and important activity.

My own rememberable experiences of these stores began fifteen or twenty years after my parents bought the Japanese print, and by then the region’s continued prosperity was in serious doubt, as the steel industry was in full-on collapse. But in 1964, it was still going strong. I don't often imagine my parents young, newly married and figuring out what a life together would be, but I like to think of them making the drive into downtown, windows down and cigarettes lit, coming up an Ohio River valley still teeming with industrial activity, the river crowded with barges, emerging into the wide space of the confluence and seeing the downtown skyline of older buildings not yet dominated by the glass and steel towers that U.S. Steel and PPG would build for themselves in the 70s and 80s. I imagine their desire to find a gift for one of the most important people in their lives, someone who modeled intelligence and curiosity and lived seemingly comfortably in the tension between independence of self and commitment to family, and I think of them finding their way up the many floors to the art department, perhaps stopping to look at ties or a new dress along the way, and then spending a pleasant hour not just shopping for a piece of art to give to someone else but taking the time to really see things together, talk about what forms, colors, periods, and styles they liked, and in the process put together a few more elements in the aesthetic of marriage they were creating, a work combining both areas of an acute realism of shared outlook and patches capturable only as a kind of cubist synthesis of fractured perspectives. The task they came to accomplish would eventually pull them back from this, perhaps because they had a concert or a baseball game to go to or just the desire to return back down the river to the house in the hills they had found, and then they would have to shift out of their mutual discovery and find something that they could see would fit within an aesthetic not their own but one that my grandmother had herself built over the many years of her own interesting life.

Kaufmann’s was nearly a century old when my parents went there, and, knowing what came over the next couple of decades, that means my own visits to it found it in its commercial dotage. I had until a decade ago a short-sleeved, somewhat wide-collared button-down shirt with a Kaufmann’s label that I found at a thrift store, purchased when I moved back to Pittsburgh in my early twenties, only a few years after dotage became demise. I chose it because polyester prints from the 70s had fashion cachet and I was learning a new visual aesthetic from the friends I had found when I returned. I’ve since given the shirt away, and it is, if still in someone’s wardrobe, almost certainly not in anyone’s who knows what Kaufmann’s was. I suppose that reflects the only kind of endurance any of us can reasonably hope for. Whatever we make in the times we live will inevitably fragment as new times take over, and the fragments will scatter, but, if we're lucky, they'll become incorporated into the new things others make for their own times. There are worse destinies than to be a lingering name of forgotten origin on an object that has nevertheless found a place in a new life-world.

The Japanese print on my mom’s wall is numbered, something out of fifty or sixty copies. I don’t know if the artist knew where their work was headed when they sold it, and certainly they could not have known it would be bought as a gift by a young couple in Western Pennsylvania for a family member in Virginia and more than a half century later end up on the wall of a house in Michigan. But what more could the artist have hoped for, flinging their prints into the winds of a mid-century American boom?