Dr. Carolyn Lee reflects on a different cliché each week. Recently, in her blog, “Clothes Make the Man”, she considers the significance of clothing choices.  This week Carolyn explores the cliché, if walls could talk. 

Learn more about Dr. Carolyn Lee on her biography page or investigate 29 more clichés in her latest book, Keep Your Eye on the Ball And Other Clichès to Live by. 

If Walls Could Talk

Actually, walls can talk, if we’re willing to listen. I’m sitting at the computer in my study at the moment. I am nearly surrounded by walls, all of which are jabbering away. If a stranger were to come into this room and just “listen,” he would learn a lot about who I am, what interests me, who’s important in my life, where I have been, and how I like to spend my time. 

To my right is a large bulletin board filled with snapshots. Most of them feature people who have meant something to me. My parents are both up there, my sister and brother-in-law, their kids and their kids’ kids. There’s a four-generation photo with my grandmother on one end and my baby niece on the other. There are lots of friends: my college roommates, current good friends, some former students, old Up with People pals. Travel pictures. There I am in front of Bangkok’s Grand Palace, my nephew and his new wife standing in front of the church in Ecuador where they had just been married, my sister and me posing by a fountain in Copenhagen, eight members of our family at the ziplining site in Costa Rica. 

There are photos everywhere of plays I’ve been in or directed or just enjoyed—like that shot of me as Aunt Eller in Oklahoma!, taken about a hundred years ago. Only slightly less ancient is the picture of my friend and me playing Cecily and Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest.  The framed poster from Beauty and the Beast, starring my friends, LouAnn and Noel, dominates the wall in front of me. There are posters and programs and ticket stubs representing the musicals on my resumé—The Music Man, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown; The Sound of Music, Hello, Dolly; Mary Poppins, Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, Singin’ in the Rain, Shrek. Featured prominently is a framed poster from a 1963 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Merchant of Venice, starring Judi Dench and her husband, Michael Williams. And there’s the program from Funny Girl, reminding me of the time I saw Barbra Streisand from the fourteenth row of the Winter Garden Theater.    

To my right is a felt banner: green, white and orange, featuring the word, “IRELAND” in Gaelic calligraphy. Above it, my diploma from the University of Michigan, matted in blue and gold.    

On one whole wall of my study are bookcases, crammed full of a variety of tomes. Very revealing. I didn’t even realize this until I started looking just now—I have nine Bibles plus a One-Year New Testament. I also have books entitled Adventuring through the Bible, Don’t Know Much about the Bible, and Who’s Who in the Bible. “Spiritual” books fill one shelf, books on prayer and meditation and seeking and suffering.  

There are books on communication left over from my seminar-leading days and books on acting and directing that I can’t seem to part with, in spite of the fact that I haven’t taught those subjects for thirty years. I have out-of-date travel books: Frommer’s Ireland from $60 a Day, and, just for fun I’ve kept Howard Stein’s Budget Guide to Europe, copyright: 1961, in which he recommends a London hotel for $4.90 double and a ”splurge” three-course meal at the Cheshire Cheese for $1.50.  

My non-fiction shelf holds the works of favorite authors: Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, Annie Dillard, Phillip Yancey, Henri Nouwen. Way over to one side, barely noticeable, is my dissertation, which represents an important chunk of my life, but which has had a readership of about eight people.  

In my fiction section are books I want to read, books I’ve read but can’t seem to turn loose of, and books I apparently have no intention of reading. Those eight, leather-bound books from the International Collector’s Library have been up on that shelf ever since I can remember, and I’ve never opened any of them. Maybe one of these days I’ll read The Last Days of Pompeii by Sir Edward G.E. Bulwer-Lytton, maybe not. Probably not. I’ve read every one of those Anne Tyler novels. I think I’ll read A Gentleman in Moscow again, and next on my to-read list is Horse by Geraldine Brooks. 

The whole bottom shelf of one bookcase is filled with cookbooks. I’ve never made one recipe from Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking, but I do thumb through it every now and then. I couldn’t possibly get rid of my old Joy of Cooking or Better Homes and Gardens’ New Cookbook, in spite of the fact that I seldom consult them anymore. I have every Cooking Light magazine from 2007 and 2008. “One of these days,” I say frequently, “I’m going to go through those and tear out the recipes I want to save.” Mmmmm . . . right. 

Interspersed among all the books on my shelves are do-dads and mementos. There’s my mug collection. For years I thought it was a good idea to pick up mugs from my various travel destinations. Now I can’t remember which mug came from what place, but I’m sure they’re all from somewhere terribly interesting. There’s my bronze statue of Cyrano de Bergerac, a reminder of a show I was in my senior year in college. There’s a very cute piggybank that my dad gave my mom on their thirtieth wedding anniversary. He filled it with thirty dollars. There’s an interesting rock I picked up on the shore of some Irish island. Ah, and a prized possession: my remuneration for delivering an after-dinner speech to the American Society of Military Engineers—a marble paperweight emblazoned with their insignia. 

Does all of this add up to anything? Am I the sum of all these parts? Do my walls talk? I guess that depends on whether anybody listens.

What’s after If Walls Could Talk?

Check out Dr. Carolyn Lee’s blogs on her website, she features a new cliché each week or you can order her new book, Keep Your Eye on the Ball And Other Clichès to Live By. Want to know more about the woman behind the words? Read more about Carolyn here. We hope you enjoyed this article learning more about the cliché, if walls could talk.