My parents have had a rather interesting piece of furniture for what I believe to be my entire life. This darkly stained wooden cabinet of sorts is tall, perhaps as tall as my head. It’s upright, with an open bottom and a cabinet on the top, with carvings in the door and a metal slide latch that secures the contents. I don’t know what this sort of cabinet is called, nor have I seen a similar one in the thousands of homes I’ve toured. Is this cabinet valuable? No one knows. What is its intended use? My parents call it a Wine something-or-other, even though my parents do not drink and under their ownership this has never had wine in it. What is in it? No one knows that either. Various things, gadgets, drink-wares, papers, silver coins, old pairs of glasses, maybe. Have the contents ever been emptied and rearranged? Unsure. Is there anything in there that anyone wants or needs? Who could know? It’s just there, a big old cabinet thing standing tall in the middle of their house, offering a place to put things.
I thought about that cabinet today, or more correctly about its mysterious or overlooked and ignored contents, when I looked at a painting that I had bought some time ago. The painting isn’t hung on a wall, because it’s a stupid painting and no one likes it. I don’t even like it and I was the one who bought it. But who could throw out such an uninteresting painting? The frame is nice, so perhaps that matters. The painting is large, which makes it even harder to both hang in place or throw out. What a waste it would be to throw this unwanted thing away. I thought I should put it in the crawl space area of my home. There it would be safe and secure and out of my way entirely. Someday my children or the new owners of this house will look through the nook or cranny where I placed it and wonder if it had some special meaning. What is our dead father trying to tell us? What did this painting mean to him? What secrets does it hold? If we could decipher all of this, we might find a way to know our dear dead dad. That’s what my kids might think. But in reality I just had to put it there because I have no wine cabinet like my parents do, and even if I did this painting would be too large to stuff into the back corner.