Meanwhile, a small-huge project finished

While all the end of year stuff was going on, I completed a project. Technically, it was probably half of a project, but it’s done, all the same. It was another thing that went well last year—even though it took nearly 40 years to complete. Naturally, there’s a story in that.

The project was about hanging some movie posters in my hallway, and the photo up top shows the before and after (with a special guest appearance by the over-shaggy Leo). The project, however, was more than just hanging pictures—if that’s all it was, there wouldn’t be any point in sharing it. In this case, my past, and a long-held wish, enters the story.

I moved to Chicago in the early 1980s, after I finished university. There, I met a guy who was my boyfriend for a little more than a month, although we remained good and close friends for many years after we broke up.

He did sideline work (what would now probably be called a “side hustle”), doing the displays in some shops’ windows. Around 1984, after we’d broken up, he asked me to help him with some of his work on displays. The one I most remember was when he was recreating the Chicago skyline as a backdrop to a representation of the lakefront. He asked me to help him “sketch” the buildings (it was meant to be very rough) on a long length of canvass, and I was surprised at how good my contribution was: It was probably the first (and last…) time that what I drew came out well.

Possibly to thank me for helping him, he gave me a couple movie posters he’d acquired somewhere along the line to use in a display. They were the tall, skinny kind that in those days were put in tall display frames at cinema entrances (inside our out).

One poster he gave me was for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was released in 1979. The other poster was for Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition, the 1980 expanded and re-edited re-release of the 1977 movie.

I’m pretty sure the posters were already rolled up, and I kept them that way, with a rubber band around them. I was going to thumbtack them to my wall, but, fortunately, never did. I considered that because I knew there were no frames for them, though I considered getting a larger standard frame and putting them both in it. I didn’t do that, either. They remained rolled up, and moved with me many, many times.

I think, but I’m not certain, that when I was getting ready to fly downunder as a tourist in September 1995, I was looking for some physical thing to bring with me to leave with Nigel as sort of tangible evidence that I’d be back. Those simple posters meant a lot to me, and I knew he loved science fiction movies, too, so if things went wrong and I couldn’t come back to be with him, he’d have them to remember me by. Or, something like that: It was more than 26 years ago, after all.

Once I was living in New Zealand, those same posters moved with us from house to house. The rubber band perished, and for some bizarre reason, I never replaced it. So, the outermost of the two (Close Encounters) became looser and one edge was slightly damaged by a small tear. I always wanted to frame them, but never got around to it.

Sometime around the turn of last century, give or take, Nigel and I were in a video store (a common thing back then), and they had a box of movie posters they were selling, after they’d been used in the shop to promote the home release of various films. I looked through them while he browsed the videos, and I saw a rolled up poster with Star Trek: Insurrection written on the outside of the rolled-up poster. That film was released in 1998, the ninth in the Star Trek film series. I don’t remember how much they were asking—probably something small, like $5—and I told Nigel I wanted to get it. He was a bit nonchalant about it, I thought.

We took it home, and like those old posters I’d brought to New Zealand, it remained rolled up for years, moving from house to house with us, too. One year, at the second-to-last house we lived in together, I took the poster and had it framed for his birthday. We hung it up for awhile, but after some rearranging we had to take it down. We hung it again in his office at our last house.

When I moved into the house I now live in, I was pretty sure I wanted to hang it in the hallway (it’s long and has big white walls, a bit like a narrow art gallery, actually), but I wanted to hang those other two posters with it. I had to find them first, but, surprisingly, that happened pretty early on. However, taking them to a framer just seemed too hard, especially with all the Covid Alert Level changes we were enduring.

This past November, I finally resolved to do something about it. I thought I’d find an online framing place and just order in what I needed, and found a place in Auckland called Framing Online, and they sold ready-made frames for the sort of movie posters I had. I ordered two in black, even though the frame edges were rounded, which I wasn’t keen on, and even though they said it would be more than a month before they’d be shipped: Early January, in other words. A birthday present for me, I decided.

Then I got an email: The wood for the frames I’d ordered was out of stock, and it’d be February before it’d be available from their supplier. I could cancel and get a refund, wait, or they could offer me a square frame instead of rounded. I jumped at that option, which was what I actually wanted all along. They replied that they’d try to get it to me before Christmas, but with shipping delays it might be after. Considering I wasn’t expecting it until sometime in January, I couldn’t believe my luck. They arrived December 21.

Because of Christmas and everything else going on, I just didn’t get a chance to get to them until the following week, and I ended up hanging them the same day my second set of shelves for the lounge arrived, December 29 (while I assembled the shelves today, that project isn’t done yet; stay tuned for all the exciting developments). The only real prep work I did was too carefully unroll the old posters and lay them flat, face down, one on top of the other, with a white sheet I bought to use as a photo backdrop under, between, and on top of them. Then I put weight on them and left them overnight.

The next day, I placed them in their frames, carefully pressing the torn part of the Close Encounters poster down, then carried them into the hallway. I measured “carefully”, screwed up and had to move them down, but the end result was almost exactly where I wanted them. They’re deliberately a little bit high so that it’s possible to read the small print at the bottom of all three posters.

That meant that something I’d wanted to do since I moved in—hang all three movie posters together—was done. More importantly, something that I’d wanted to do for some 37 years was finally done, too. I really wanted to do that while Nigel was alive, but I just never got around to it, as with so many other things one or the other of us never got to do. This achievement, then, may seem small, and even unimportant, however, the impact on me has been giant, both because it was a desire I held onto for so very long, but also because what I’d once thought of as tangible evidence that I would return to New Zealand to live with Nigel, instead became tangible evidence that I’m taking steps to live without Nigel. Small, unimportant achievement? Hardly.

And that’s the story of how such a small project became so massive in the way it affected me. Now, I just have to finish hanging other stuff in the hallway, too (after nearly two years in this house, it’s definitely time). But none of them will matter as much to me as this little project did. It turned out to be a great final project to end the year.

Footnote: I wasn’t compensated in any way to promote the framing company, and I paid normal prices for my frames and shipping. My genuine and sincerely held opinion is that their service—and customer service in particular—was absolutely stellar. I expect I’ll use them again.