A Room With a Viewpoint

The family room did not even exist until seven years ago. Before that, the dining room culminated in a sliding door leading to a flat stretch of yard. “The addition,” as it was called while it was being built, was constructed while my family was on a vacation, so I have no memory of the process. However, I do remember the resulting dust, which had somehow managed to get all the way to my room on the other side of the house.

My family room has a high vaulted ceiling and huge windows to the back yard. The furniture is an odd mishmash of shelves and chairs retired from other rooms in the house, as well as a few new ones from IKEA. It also holds our electric piano, awkwardly placed in front of a shelf and next to our rather stubborn wireless printer. (This placement has prompted a few “waiting for the printer to finish” concerts on my part.) With such an odd mix of items, the family room seems to lack purpose. In other houses, the family room has the unflattering job of holding toys so that the living room can stay spotless. That may have been the plan when “the addition” was first built. But like most plans in my family, it did not quite work out. Toys are no strangers to our living room. In fact, my little brother and sister seem to prefer playing there.

It seems to me that the apparent purpose of our family room is to collect things. A collection of board games that we rarely play (due mainly to my mother’s aversion to competition). A collection of old books made inaccessible by piles of newer books. A collection of DVDs carefully alphabetized and sorted by age-appropriateness. The skylights even collect snow in the winter, a sight that I find much more interesting than the mundane sky visible on most days. Of course, the biggest collection at the moment is comprised of Legos.

At one point in the summer, I decided that it would be a good idea to try to count and catalogue our Legos. With over 15 years of accumulated bricks, axels, and figures to dig through, it represented quite the undertaking. About half a day and one huge headache later, I decided to go with the tentative estimate of ten thousand and move on to better ways to waste my time.

There is one other collection in my family room and, although it may not consist of quite as many pieces as the others, it means so much more. A few years ago, my mother discovered “wall words,” vinyl wall decorations in the form of sayings or quotes. Now our family room is surrounded by phrases that caught her interest. These range from the simple (“Dream Big”) to the profound (“The mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting”).

Over the years, these wall words have caused me a bit of grief – my friends have made fun of them at least twice – but secretly, I love them. My personal favorite is not the most colorful or elaborate. In fact it could easily be missed by the casual observer (it turned out to be a bit smaller than we anticipated). I appreciate that it is not too flashy and that it is not trying to say anything too deep. Near the far corner of the room in small black letters, the wall words that I feel most connected to read “Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.”