How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci October 31, 2011

The other day I had a flash back to our first apartment in Chicago.  Alan and I lived above the Cooney Funeral home in Wrigleyville/Southport Corridor.  Our kitchen was directly above where the casket would be set in their viewing room, so our kitchen was carpeted.  We figured that way if we dropped a pot or something, it wouldn’t make too much noise for the mourning family below.

The specific memory I had was us sitting in the bathroom, smoking around the toilet (we didn’t smoke in the apartment, only where there was an exhaust fan, hence, the bathroom) and working on a book my dad had gotten for the whole family, How to Think Like Leonard DaVinci.  The bathroom was pink.  The whole thing!   Pink tiled walls, pink sink, pink toilet, pink tub, and silver and pink floral wall paper.  Perhaps the best feature were the sliding glass doors around the tub, monogrammed with the letter, “C”.  A friend freaked and was like, “Oh my god!  Is that for ‘Cooney’?”  And to ease her mind, I told her it was for Chicago.  I don’t think she believed me.  Weirder still was the window in the bathroom that was not a window to the outside, but to what we simply referred to as, “The Weird Room.”  That’s for another post.

But I just remembered sitting around that pepto-bismol pink toilet, smoking my cloves while Alan smoked his cigarettes and we each worked on the accompanying workbook for the DaVinci book.  My dad had given everyone a copy for Christmas and said for his birthday (which is in July), he wanted everyone to do the workbook by July and come to my folks house to discuss.  Not sure what happened, but we never did finish it and Dad never brought it up again.  We still have our workbooks and I’ve always thought about returning to it.  Maybe I will this winter.  Could be a good evening activity as the weather starts to turn.