Goiter Guy And Carmen

     A few weeks ago my siblings and I came to the consensus that the time had come to begin the process of selling our mother's house.
     As anyone  who's gone through the logistically and emotionally ponderous process of selling their parents' house knows, the first step in this process is the disposition, distribution or otherwise clearing out - save for a few strategic pieces of staging furniture for showings- of all the stuff that's been accumulated over a lifetime, often along with some additional stuff left-over from previous lifetimes that's been inherited or otherwise acquired by one's parents, such as the pieces below given to my mother by her mother, a washer woman, who received them close to a hundred years ago from a well-to-do customer in exchange for payment.

     (Which  gets one thinking about one's own accumulation of stuff which will someday have to be disposed of, distributed, or otherwise cleared out by one's own children).   
     In any case, the task of overseeing the prepping and selling of our mother's house has fallen to my brother who lives in Seaford, Delaware and who was our mother's guardian up until two-and-a-half months ago when we relocated her to Gahanna, Ohio and I took over the job.

   My mom in her new place in the Memory Care unit of Sunrise of Gahanna.

     A few weeks ago my brother put out an APB to the siblings that the clearing-out phase was imminent, and if anyone wanted anything from our mom's house, now was the time to come and get it before everything but the staging furniture was disposed of.
      As for me, there were only two things I desired to take from my mother's house, a couple of wall hangings.
      The first was a piece one of my father's artist friends made as a gift for him, an illustration of a quote by the ancient Roman writer Juvenal. The artist crafted ceramic pieces which he glued onto wood:    

   The words, "Quis tumidum guttur miratur in Alpibus" are Latin and mean something like "What a strange swelling of the throat in the Alps." It's believed that Juvenal was remarking on the existence of goiters among the people in the Alpine region.

    My father being an endocrinologist and diseases of the thyroid being his specialty, his friend thought he'd appreciate this reference to thyroid disease found in ancient writings.
      My father did, in fact, like the piece and it hung in the living room of our home in Philadelphia (See post from 11/29/2018, "The New House, Part 2"). When my parents moved to Seaford, Delaware in the 1990's it hung in their living room there, too.
       I always thought it was a cool picture, sculpture, or whatever it was. My siblings, however, referred to it as "Goiter Guy." Turned out nobody but me was interested in inheriting "Goiter Guy."
        The other of my parents' items I hoped to have was a picture my mom made of the dancing gypsy Carmen from the opera "Carmen," and which she and we subsequently referred to as "Carmen."

    My mom made "Carmen" by dying sheets of newspaper then ripping the dyed newspaper into small pieces which she fashioned into spit-ball shapes. She then dipped each spit-ball into a mix of glue and water and then glued the pieces onto a piece of painted wood.
      Turned out nobody but me was particularly interested in taking "Carmen," either.
    But I was always fascinated by my mom's stylized papier-maché process in making "Carmen."
     I tried it myself back when I was a teen-ager and made a copy of Paul Klee's painting "Death and the Fire"

Paul Klee's opus

   Mine

    And so Tom and I decided to drive out to Seaford, Delaware to my mom's house  for a final visit and to retrieve "Goiter Guy" and "Carmen."
     To be continued...