Note to Self: Pay Attention

I would make a terrible police witness. If I witnessed a crime and had to testify, I would have to write the victim a profuse apology note for my crap observational skills. As I previously mentioned in an earlier blog, I need to pay a lot more attention to what's going on around me.

See, I have a tendency to live in my head. I have lengthy dialogues in there, as I suspect many people do, and sometimes, I'll even repeat those conversations out loud. In other words, I talk to myself a lot.

My husband (who has amazing powers of observation) has caught me doing this in the shower. He silently peeks through the curtain, not unlike Jack Nicholson in The Shining because he thinks he's funny (although I'm now onto him, so he can't scare me anymore), and says, "Who are you talking to?" The first time I was a bit embarrassed when he caught me, and now I don't care. "Myself! Duh! Get out!"

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was going to start reading a new book: How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell.  Chapter 2 is called, "How to live: Pay attention." That chapter might as well have been subtitled, "Michelle Lewis, I am talking to YOU." The French Renaissance writer learned to pay attention, halfway through his life, by deciding to write about everything. "Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are," writes Bakewell.

So I thought, Let's give this little exercise a go. Right now. If it worked for Montaigne in a tower in a 14th-century French chateau, then it might work in a 1957 Florida bungalow.

I work from home. I spend most of my day, and frankly, my evenings, in one room. The room is called ... surprise ... a Florida room. In Britain, it would be known as a conservatory. I look at these objects in this room, and the view outside, every day, all day, but I don't LOOK -- really look -- at them. And so that is what I'm going to do. Right now. Let's take a little trip round the ordinary, shall we?

• My black cat Sophie, who we rescued with the help of the RSPCA in Britain, is sitting on a tatty beige doormat, which used to belong to my grandmother (she lived the last eight years of her life here before we bought it), in front of a glass door (there are two in this room). Sophie is watching squirrels and lizards. Her fur is fluffy, her eyes are yellow, and she wears a collar with sushi on the band and a waving cat bell.​ She reminds me of a sentry when she does this. My male cat Paul does it, too. (I've been watching too much Game of Thrones, I admit it.)
• There is a Victorian plant stand and a nest of side tables that I bought at Reed & Son in Saffron Walden, Essex — a store that my daughter used to call "the old-fashioned store" when she was small, because it sold antique furniture and smelled musty. It's been run by the same family since 1880. I loved the store; she hated it. I made her go anyways. Kids should be bored sometimes.
• A table fan shaped like a pineapple sits on the plant stand. I think fruit-shaped things are funny.
• To the left of the plant stand is a pink mid-century armchair that belonged to my grandmother. I don't know where she bought it. (Since she was a military wife it could have been anywhere.) It comes with a matching footstool. It is chunky and square. It is a bit shabby and probably needs to be reupholstered. On the chair is a fleecy pink blanket. It belonged to our niece, Ed's sister's daughter. She gave it to us when we visited them in Lancashire, so my daughter wouldn't get cold on the drive back. Now Paul the cat has claimed it as his own, so it's covered in cat hair.
• ​Next to the chair is the flat-screen television. The TV stand is walnut and a bit Jetsons-like. I bought it from John Lewis in Cambridge. I just really liked it, and we needed a new one when we moved house the last time in the U.K. We look at the TV a lot. We don't have cable. I hate American cable. But we love HBO and Netflix.
• Then there's the catty corner (#sorrynotsorry). There is a leopard-print cat bed, some dangly cat toys, and a beige, three-story cat tower. A lizard once got into the bottom box cubby and all hell broke loose: It was the most exciting thing to happen to our cats in years. We found it hilarious. The lizard did not. We rescued it. The cats were most disappointed.
• On the terracotta-tiled floor, which Ed laid, is a Persian area rug that we bought in Sedona, Arizona. It has zig-zags of pink, purple, light blue and turquoise against a gray background. It will last a lifetime and then some, because it's handwoven. I negotiated hard, and I was proud of myself, as I'm not usually very good at negotiating.
• On the rug stands an oval-shaped table with six stools that tuck underneath. Two stools are square, and four are triangular. It belonged to my maternal grandparents. Both of my grandfathers were U.S. Army officers. One was stationed in Rio, and the other in Bogota in the 1950s. U.S. military families would travel to South America by ship, and once they reached the Panama Canal, they would buy imported carved wooden Chinese furniture. So funnily, both sets of grandparents had similar furniture; one set was teak (this is ours), and the other was mahogany. I grew up surrounded by this type of furniture. The carvings depict mountains and faces and men sitting in contemplation. As someone who once worked for Christie's told me, it is beautiful and well-made, but not worth much, because there is so much of it about. 
• I am lying on a purple velvet sofa from Joybird. It's pretty new, and it's super comfortable. I spend a lot of time on this sofa, reclining on bed pillows with pink covers. It relieves the muscular tightness I still experience from the major back surgery I had 18 months ago. I like to work on it. I like to watch Game of Thrones on it. Sometimes Paul the cat joins me on this sofa, and tries to stand on my MacBook Air while I'm using it. He is sitting next to me right now, staring at me. He is a gray tabby. He always has to undergo a big contemplation before he jumps up, like it's a big life decision.
• On the sofa are two throw pillows. My friend Julia made the floral purple and green covers for me out of Laura Ashley fabric, when I bought my own house in Saffron Walden, after I got divorced. On my arms are five sterling silver bracelets that she made for me. They all remind me of how I miss her (she is in Britain), and how clever she is. 
• This room contains a lot of pottery. My husband has been making pottery for nearly two years now (he's getting really good), and he also likes to collect it. On a triple-level metal Art Deco side table that I bought in Red Hook, Brooklyn, when the neighborhood was still derelict, there is a Swedish Kosta Boda bowl with white and blue swirls that look like splattered paint. There is a moss green vase, and a sapphire blue bowl, that my husband made.
• On the windowsill above the sofa, through which you can see the kitchen, there is a pot that looks like Van Gogh's The Starry Night (another Ed creation). Next to that pot is a small terracotta Native American pot that we bought in Sedona. It has geometric patterns in red and black. 
• On the opposite wall is a metal sculpture made by an artist from Michigan (I forget his name, sadly) that depicts leaves and a dragonfly. Above the purple sofa on the left is a big, square oil painting of London at night by the artist Sonia Villiers, who lives in Hadstock, Essex. You can see the London Eye, and the sky is black and red. We used to take art classes with Sonia, where we'd paint with acrylics. I found out I wasn't as bad at painting as I thought I'd be. (That was NOT the case in pottery class.)
• To the right of the purple sofa is an etching by David Hunter of river egrets. I love etchings, and we met David, who is from Winter Park, Florida, at the big annual art festival in Dunedin. This little Florida town is very artsy. We love that.
• Finally, in my line of sight is a flower-shaped lamp made of copper and papier-mache. We bought it at an art gallery (now closed) on Church Street in Saffron Walden. Beyond that is an original vintage tea towel displayed in a pink frame that features recipes for Barbados rum cocktails on it. My stepmother bought it for me, because I lived in Barbados for a year.
• Then I look out of the windows, because the wall that faces the sofa is 70% glass. I look at a huge bird of paradise, and palm trees, and a camphor tree, upon which still hangs my grandmother's garden ornaments: a heavy-lidded "tree face," a hummingbird feeder, terracotta wind chimes, a South American statue of St. Francis holding birds. I see squirrels galore, weeds that annoy me, and lots of plants I like. I also see leaves everywhere, thanks to the camphor and the live oak. The trees provide shade. They are majestic. They are also messy, and a wee bit scary in a hurricane.
• I listen: the cicadas are noisy. Ed is digging around in the kitchen for pasta and shaking the boxes to see how much we have. Sophie is purring.
• I smell: Ed has made spaghetti sauce, which we will eat for the next three days. We love to bulk cook. My daughter hates it. She'll miss it when she goes to college, we often laugh.

So many words for just one room! It's hardly a tower in a chateau. And I sure as hell am not Montaigne. But there are so many memories and experiences in this room that span centuries, beyond my lifetime — of people I know and people I don't. If you put all the people who have touched every object into this room together, they'd barely fit. And if I don't pay more attention, then I will miss the narratives of everyday things if I'm always inside my own head.

This may not have been all that interesting to read, because these objects belong to me, and there are many houses just like mine — thousands. Millions, perhaps. But perhaps try this exercise in one of your own rooms. See if it evokes memories that make you smile, or think.

Montaigne was right: Writing really does open one's eyes to how marvelous ordinary things are. I hope it never happens, but perhaps, I'll become a better crime-scene witness, and ultimately, be more present. 

---