Shrines

The Bear and I have our Saturday circuit – usually involving the flea market at 6^th Avenue at 25^th  in the city, in a two-story garage (known in our jargon as “The Flea”). Another day La Calavera will talk about global flea markets, but the reason to mention it today is that on Saturday the vendors had their memorial table up, which is not there every week but is a regular feature.

We don’t know exactly who does it, but this is a very touching shrine to the members of the vendor community who are no more. We have gotten to know some of them because we have our things we like to look at (books, industrial design, things that incorporate letters, beads, glass and ceramics). But we don’t know everyone, and I can’t say that we know any of the people featured on the shrine table shown here.

There are always flowers on this table, and photos of the lost friends, with framed obituaries and mementos. The close-up below shows the little card they put on the table stating “In loving memory of our friends” in nice type, but there is also the amusing tent card for the insensitive passers-by who might have missed the larger message in the display of religious statuettes, medals and frames – “Don’t Touch not for sale.”

As someone who grew up in a non-Catholic faith, shrines of this type entered my consciousness only relatively recently. I’ve always seen those shrines at the side of the road where people leave flowers and signs for loved ones killed there, but didn’t associate that to this kind of display. My appreciation of shrines was completely changed after the September 11^th attacks, and one day soon I will publish my account of a fire department’s shrine in the aftermath which was pretty overwhelming.

Our habit (between the Bear and me) is to make shrines in the form of little books – so the Bear’s father was made a lovely book for his funeral, with everyone’s remarks and little stories in it. I wrote my mother’s obituary while she was actually still alive, for her 75^th birthday party, and that too I will publish at some point here; I think we all knew at that time that she was not going to live a whole lot longer and it seemed the right thing to do. Though, now that I think of it, I also made a shrine for her at the funeral itself, using photos from her life and little mementos. It was actually someone else’s “shrine” contribution that made me the most sad – someone put a little wooden toy on her ashes box, which she would have loved. Her husband gave us all a piece of the granite from her gravestone which I’ve put on the front table in our foyer, and will one day put a small plaque on it so that future generations will know what it is.

I know cemeteries perform this function too, and actually we have enjoyed many of them over time, but that’s only possible when someone you love dearly is not recently added to the inhabitants. When my father died Joan made him an enormous monument and, I’m quite sure, looks after it to this day.

There are shrines of happiness too, I have noticed – like the display of the Berlin Wall in New York City that I ran across a few years ago. It had special resonance for me as I was there for that occasion. One day I will write about that.

A segment of Berlin wall in New York on 53rd Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues(1)

I guess I don’t think of things like public monuments in this same way, because they seem institutional. I like the shrines that people make spontaneously, locally. They are truly from the heart.

La Calavera would love to share other shrines. Get in touch!

(1) Taken 19 January 2008 by Gaurav1146 who can be found on Wikipedia – thanks Gaurav for putting this image out there!