When the past takes up residence
THE urn on the mantel of Jan Palchikoff’s fireplace looks completely out of place in her Mar Vista home, which is filled with strong colors and modern furniture with clean, simple lines. The foot-high urn is ornate, even kitschy: a single pink-and-blue pastel nymph painted on porcelain atop a filigreed metal base.
“It’s pretty ugly,” Palchikoff says cheerfully. But that urn has had a place of honor in every home she’s inhabited for the last 30 years. It was brought home from Germany by her grandfather, who fought in George Patton’s Army during World War II, and it sat on the mantel of her grandmother’s Beverlywood bungalow.
Among the myriad responsibilities that come with adulthood is guardianship of goods and possessions from grandparents’ and parents’ households as those relatives age and move away, downsize or die. For the lucky few, these acquired objects are useful or beautiful, even valuable. More often, though, they are none of these.
And they may be as big as a piano or as small as an old tonic water bottle with holes punched in the cap, used for decades of sprinkling family laundry to be pressed in the era before steam irons.
Some of them are easy to set out in the driveway for Saturday morning bargain seekers. Some are foisted off on siblings. An Orange County woman found herself unable to throw away her late mother’s wooden potato masher because it held too many memories, so she mailed it to a sister who was “not a saver” and would toss it.
But other items exert a powerful, even mysterious hold. “We give certain objects life -- the life of emotional association,” says Robert Mendelsohn, a Brentwood marriage and family therapist.
“I loved my grandmother,” says Palchikoff. “She was a real Rosie the Riveter type who wore pants before it was stylish and had incredible biceps and a great sense of humor.
“When I was a child, she would say, ‘It has your great-aunt Gertrude’s ashes in it,’ ” Palchikoff recalls of the urn. “It wasn’t until years later that I discovered there was no great-aunt Gertrude.”
After her grandmother died, “my mother got the urn, but when she moved out of her house, I claimed it. I think of my grandmother almost every day when I see it.”
Teacher and writer Mary Cappelli’s Pacific Palisades home office is all surf motif: There’s an “Endless Summer” poster, another exhorting “Pray for Surf!,” a photo of five surfboards and a “shrine” of surfing trophies Cappelli won as a teenager. On a shelf above her desk, however, is a huge Victorian dollhouse, its ornate gingerbread curves painted burgundy, blue and white. It was made by Cappelli’s mother, who died three years ago, and is one of her most precious possessions.
“My mother used to display it in the center of the living room. It’s not my husband’s thing, or I’d put it there too,” she said. “It reminds me so much of her. She was an Irish immigrant who had every decorating journal you can think of, but couldn’t afford to do much except build these dollhouses. And now my oldest daughter’s studying to be an architect.”
One of cantor Paul Dornan’s personal treasures is the ornately carved Italian antique chest that sits incongruously in the TV room of the simply appointed West L.A. home he shares with his wife.
“It used to be the focal point of the second-floor hallway of my grandmother’s New York house,” he says. “She lived around the block from my family, and was my refuge. She passed away when I was in my late teens, and it’s a piece of her I don’t want to let go of.”
Denise Wasko doesn’t like the heavy carved wood and rattan rocking chair that her mother bestowed on her, which takes up too much space in the living room of her Picfair Village apartment and goes unused because “it’s so uncomfortable that people who visit would rather sit on the floor.”
But it exerts a grip. “She gave it to my husband and me when we got pregnant. It used to be in our family living room, one of those old-fashioned formal living rooms that I never was allowed in, unless it was time to dust. She brought it with her from the Philippines. I know she’d be devastated if I got rid of it. So here I am. Before, I never was allowed to use it, and now I have it and don’t want it.”
Travel agent Robin Van Zak holds on to a lifetime supply of greeting cards that her late mother collected. “She was a shopaholic,” says Van Zak. “She’d buy cards whenever she saw something she liked, but didn’t send them because she never could remember where she’d put them.”
Storage isn’t exactly abundant in Van Zak’s Culver City bungalow, but she would never consider cleaning out the nine-shelf caddy stuffed with hundreds of cards.
“I’ve used a few since she died last year, but mostly I keep them because they remind me of her. Seeing the cards is like being able to touch her.”
Van Zak’s phrasing is apt. In fact, says therapist Mendelsohn, the inherited family possessions that we find so precious are just like the blankies, binkies and stuffed animals that children learn to clutch in place of mother -- “transitional objects, inanimate things that we imbue with the emotional dynamics of the relationships we associate them with. They have a kind of life.”
And, he adds, turning a house into a home requires making room for them. Spouses and partners need to be understanding about urns and chests that look ridiculous. If real conflicts arise over these objects, Mendelsohn says, “couples need to be sure that the disagreement isn’t reflecting larger issues in the relationship. Aesthetics are one thing, but we also need emotional connection with objects that reflect ourselves and our pasts.”
That connection is what prompts physician Doug Levey to keep a small old pine desk in a bedroom of a La Jolla-area condo whose style otherwise leans toward “bachelor eclectic -- leather and wood, knickknacks and artsy stuff from my travels.”
“I’ve had this desk since I was 4 years old,” Levey says. “It was in my bedroom on Long Island, and it was where I did all my homework and drawing. I probably spent thousands of hours there, sometimes with my parents standing over me. My father’s gone now, and my mother’s getting old. It’s one of the few attachments I have to my childhood.”
That’s something most grown-up sons and daughters understand. And just as smart parents quickly learn the value of the frayed cuddlies that comfort their kids, otherwise rational adults who find themselves compelled to keep scarred dressers, tacky watercolors and obsolete kitchen implements quickly learn to stop thinking and simply make room.
“My wife is a designer, and much of our home is designed with aesthetics in mind,” says Mendelsohn. “But in one corner of our bedroom, there’s a 1950s Danish modern table that’s kind of ugly and doesn’t fit in with anything else in the house. It’s from my parents’ home, and when I see it, I have almost a sensory experience of seeing it there, and of myself as a child.
“And that gives me a sense of the safety and warmth I felt being with my family,” says Mendelsohn. “For me, it’s one of the most important pieces in the house.”
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Carol Mithers can be reached at home@latimes.com.