One of the artifacts from my years with Sherry, between 1970 and 1973, is a page of illuminated music manuscript. Another of our artifacts hasn't survived: a 3 x 5 card inscribed in Sherry's black-letter script that we posted in the refrigerator after I broke a glass shelf and replaced it with a piece of masonite: Res graves in plauteo inferno non ponete. Flexit. -- "Don't put heavy things on the bottom shelf. It bends." These two objects
exemplify the precious and rather pompous humor we went in for. We couldn't even plead callow youth as an excuse for this sort of thing. Sherry was in her late twenties; by the time we moved out, I was thirty.
I was studying Latin at the time and produced the out-of-wedlock text for the sign. The music manuscript was a product of my brief study of Medieval music. In a moment when there must have been something constructive I could have occupied myself with, I transcribed Take Me Out to the Ball Game into thirteenth century mensural notation. "Mensural" refers to the fact that that system of notation showed relative note values, in a crude and limited fashion. I used Take Me Out to the Ball Game instead of some other hokey tune because triple meter is much easier in thirteenth century notation than anything counted in twos.
Sherry was delighted with this exercise in arcane whimsy and produced an elegant illuminated manuscript, gold leaf and all. I framed it and it hung on our wall, and subsequently on various walls of mine. There was no place for it in Medford, so it was relegated to the attic. I wondered from time to time what changes were being wrought in it by the heat, thinking that, if anything, signs of age might befit it. There were plenty of things in the attic that were in more danger.
When it did turn up, it was in about the same condition as when it emerged from Sherry's pen and paintbrushes. Illuminated manuscripts are tougher than one might think: the Book of Kells has been fished out of water -- maybe even sea water -- any number of times, after the Vikings tossed it in or the monks hid it there. Take Me Out to the Ball Game has now been restored to public view, on the wall behind the piano.
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This reminds me that while I was in college (roughly the same time as you), I accumulated from somewhere an actual page of medieval music manuscript, provenance now lost, with actual illuminated capitals on both sides. Since it was on actual vellum, I figure it represented about a quarter of a sheepskin. In my college lodgings (and for that matter in my house in El Cerrito) it was tacked to a crumbling brown corkboard with long pins, the sort of think you use for macrame.
Then I got married and moved to the house in Oakland, and I wasn't sure what Jim would think of it, so it went in the upstairs closet, corkboard and all. It stayed there for 26 years, or until we decided to do a massive remodel and put the entire house in storage.
Fast forward five months. We're unpacking our stored belongings, and Jim finds, in a box, the manuscript page and the corkboard. The page, not surprisingly (being at least 600 years old), is in better shape than the corkboard. "This is neat," he said. "We should do something with it." I agreed that we should, and it's at a local framing shop, being suitably framed for hanging. I should have asked him about it when we moved in but that's how new marriages are.
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