The Norman Elder Museum

The other day, Rachelle and I got an e-mail from a friend that contained this link :  http://www.hame.ca/blog3/norm/

It concerned Norman Elder,  an explorer, exotic animal owner, author, artist and Olympic equestrian. A child of privilege and wealthy bachelor, he was a Toronto eccentric who lived in a beautiful and strange home at 140 Bedford in the Annex.

The link sent us to a photo gallery of the Norman Elder Museum, which he founded in 1967, and which was gutted and fully renovated shortly after his death in 2003. The museum was home to a bestiary of taxidermy, secret tunnels, panther skeletons, human skulls, pythons and unexploded military mortar shells. In short, it housed magic.

The upper floors of the home served as a rooming house for tenants, and it looks like the website was put together by somebody who lived there for a spell, probably during the late 70’s or early 80’s.

I can barely imagine what it would have been like living there as a young man. You must have felt like you were living in a movie, that you were the real life embodiment of The Royal Tenenbaums. Really, everyone there must have felt so alive, so very special.

The photographs are amazing for all sorts of different reasons, and they tell their own story far better than anybody using words could ever hope to.

However, there is one picture that stands out for me, and it’s a picture taken in the bedroom of the guy who created the site, back when he was living in the museum. In this photograph there’s a beautiful, young  woman reading a book on the floor, while all around her the future blooms.

It looks a bit like a dorm room from 1978, but what’s remarkable about the picture is how out of place it is. It’s personal, intimate even, and it pops up in the gallery as if by accident. The textual gloss describes the picture with the introduction “Better days—“  I imagine the guy who lived that moment, now near 50, recalling Cathy reading and exactly what song was playing, and just what a perfect point in time that was. Now, when he looks back on his life, he returns there, with all else, Norman Elder and his eccentric museum, the cavalcade of people coming and going, falling away, seving as mere backdrop to the potential written into that photograph.