The Mini Museum of Me

By Michele Bazan Reed  |  Email: bazanreed@hotmail.com

When you enter my apartment, you proceed down a long hallway, with waist-high maple bookshelves topped with a black-painted shelf. Atop that shelf is an eclectic collection of artifacts.

Some days, I see it as clutter that needs to be dusted, but thanks to a recent visitor, I’ve come to think of it by a different name.

One day, a delivery driver was bringing his cargo down the hall and stopped in wonder. “This is awesome,” he said. “It’s like a little museum.”

Thus I came to think of my shelf as “The Mini Museum of Me.”

There’s a crystal candy dish made in Poland. Inside are Polish wooden nesting eggs, hand-painted with little flowers, attesting to my Polish heritage.

A whimsical lamp in the shape of a crow is named Edgar (after Poe), an exhibit of my love of reading and writing mystery fiction.

Edgar has another meaning in my tiny museum. The Reed coat of arms features three crows and so does the coat of arms of Corneilhan, our village in France (its name comes from la corneille, the French word for crow). Edgar signifies my late husband’s family and the dream retirement we two enjoyed in France.

Another exhibit of my love of France and of my family is a hefty bronze inkwell in the shape of Sacré Couer (Sacred Heart) Cathedral in Paris. My father carried it home from his service as an ambulance driver in World War II, along with a tiny cast iron replica of the Eiffel Tower, next to it on the shelf. As a child I played with them both, dreaming of someday going to France.

I dreamed of Italy when I picked up a plaster replica of Michelangelo’s Pieta at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City. Three years later the dream came true on a high school trip that included a stop at the Vatican to see the real thing.

Gifts from Bill remind me of our life together, including a dozen crystal animals, a Japanese cast iron teapot with a sculpture of a laughing Buddha on top and a hand-blown glass vase.

A covered wooden bowl ends the display by the door, holding my keys. It was made by a friend using wood from a black walnut tree that stood near our home. My husband and I planted the tiny sapling, no bigger than a pencil, the year we built our house. It grew to be a massive tree and for nearly four decades our family enjoyed its shade, climbed it, and swung from swings and hammocks hung from its branches — before a storm split it in two. The bowl is a tangible symbol of our family and the home we shared.

The metaphor of the museum resonates with me because of our family’s lifelong love of museums.

Every family vacation featured visits to that city’s museums, from the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. The Corvette Museum in Indiana, the SafeHouse, a spy-themed restaurant and museum in Milwaukee and Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum are quirky favorites. Toronto’s magnificent Royal Ontario Museum, with a 50-year family history, from “date nights” with my husband in our graduate school days (Free Tuesdays and dinner in the museum cafeteria) to family visits when our son was at university there, will always hold a place in our hearts.

But you don’t need to go far afield to find wonderful museums worth a visit. Central New York is home to a plethora of interesting collections, everything from Oswego’s Children’s Museum to Syracuse’s Everson Museum of Art.

Explore history at the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, the Safe Haven Holocaust Refugee Shelter Museum and H. Lee White Marine Museum, both in Oswego, and the CNY Living History Center in Cortland.

The Skä•noñh or Great Law of Peace Center in Liverpool is a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Cultural Center. It tells the story of Central New York’s native peoples, focusing on the Onondaga Nation.

Get scientific at Ithaca’s Sciencecenter or Syracuse’s Museum of Science and Technology or see craftsmen working with hot glass and explore the history of the substance at Corning’s Museum of Glass.

And if all that sounds too serious, take a trip on the Yellow Brick Road with a visit to the All Things Oz Museum in Chittenango, the birthplace of L. Frank Baum.

And what better time to show our local museums some love than on International Museum Day, Saturday, May 18. Many museums have special events. Check with your favorites to find out. And don’t forget to bring a child or two to foster a love of learning.

If getting out and about is difficult for you, why not explore online? Many museums have programs where you can enjoy the collections virtually.

Whether you go out and explore our local museums or create your own “mini museum of me,” enjoy the fun and learning museums provide.