When I was young, I had a fantasy that as an infant, I had somehow been switched—by a wild and convoluted set of circumstances that I never went to the trouble of trying to contrive—with Prince Edward. Yes, that Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, the youngest son of the Queen of England (and Canada and Australia and all sorts of other places around the globe). The fact that his name was Edward and that we’re about the same age made the fantasy seem more plausible than any of the other switched-at-birth scenarios I could come up with. I hoped that some day the mistake would be rectified and I would get to go live in a castle and ride polo ponies and go to Cambridge and be third in the line of succession to the English crown. I let go of that fantasy long before Edward was demoted to seventh in line by the births of his nieces and nephews and became as bald and dorky as all of his male relatives. You only have to look at a photograph to know without a doubt that he’s Prince Charles’s little brother.

So it turned out that I’m just the youngest son of Jim and Jean Gumnick, and every time I look in the mirror, I see a little more of Dad.

As far as I know, our ethnic heritages or national origins include Polish, Austro-Hungarian, French-German (Alsatian, woof!), and Irish with maybe a touch of Pennsylvania Dutch thrown in. We can’t claim any royalty, nobility, or even commoners of great distinction in our bloodlines. But I think one of the birthrights of Americans of mixed ancestry should be the right to claim anyone you like as one of your ancestors—whether by genes, by culture, or just by affinity. And so I claim descent from Genghis Khan by way of his first grandson, Orda Khan, who invaded Poland in the thirteenth century. It’s entirely possible that he left behind some Mongol-Polish offspring, and I credit the Khan genes for my natural talent for leadership and my propensity for cross-cultural communication.

Culturally, I consider myself a descendant of Leonardo Da Vinci. He was creative, imaginative, left-handed, at least a little bit crazy, and is reported to have had a weakness for men much younger than himself. A man after mine own heart. I think I will start referring to him as “my uncle Leonardo.”

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

This piece of art has been a fixture in my life for so long that I don’t remember any details of its creation. I have to imagine my parents, who would have been somewhat younger than the age I am now, hunched over the brown-and-white Formica kitchen table, sorting the tiny tiles and organizing them into rows. I picture Dad arranging the chaotic blocks of solid color that represent the buildings while Mom patiently laid out the orderly pattern of the sky. You can see a little wavering in the neat rows where the two sections of the composition come together. Maybe they miscalculated how many rows it would take to meet in the middle, or maybe one of them was fitting the tiles more closely together than the other. In any case, they found some way to make it work as a single consistent picture.

The City isn’t remarkable as a work of art. I keep it because the colors are pleasing and because my parents made it with their own hands. I also like that it seems outdated, a little retro, and that it gently connects me to every house I ever lived in with my parents. I think there’s something written on the back in pencil in my father’s handwriting, a date perhaps, but the mosaic is heavy and I don’t want to take it off the wall to remind myself what it says. I look forward to being pleasantly surprised by that writing again some day—or not—when I have occasion to take it off its hook, maybe to take it to the next place I will live.

I also display it because I like mosaic as an art form, so it’s kind of cool to have not one but TWO pieces in this unusual medium in my room. (I’ll tell you about The Fishies at a later date, perhaps.) My fondness for mosaic might be associated with my Rome fetish. The Romans were masters of the mosaic form at several stages of their history. At the ancient port city of Ostia Antica, a town that was abandoned 18 centuries ago because of the silting-up of the Tiber river, entire mosaic floors were preserved under the mud. They’ve been excavated now, and some of them are still in such good condition that visitors are permitted to walk on them. In the heart of Rome, pieces of intact mosaic floors are visible here and there throughout the Imperial Forum. This stuff could last forever.

A few weeks ago, I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see an exhibit about Pompeii. One of the artifacts on display was a beautiful piece of mosaic floor. A simple design made of tiles somewhat smaller than the ones my parents used surrounded a central mosaic medallion of much tinier tesserae that depicted the Gorgon Medusa. A plaque on the wall explained the technique. The central medallion was designed to be removable so that if the owner moved to a new home, he could take the finer, more expensive part of the artwork with him.

I’m trying to imagine the house I’m sitting in as it might look if it were undisturbed by human activity for 20 or 30 centuries. If some catastrophe or sudden change in economic or demographic factors should drive us away from here, and assuming that climate change doesn’t send Houston once again to the bottom of a giant inland sea, how long would The City survive? Exposed to the elements, the wooden frame and backing would probably disappear in just a few decades. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine that the tiles themselves, and with a little luck, the mortar that holds them together, might survive.

What might some future anthropologists think of my parents’ cityscape? What stories might they make up to explain its meaning and its historical significance? What will it tell some future museum-goers about our culture and beliefs? I like to think about leaving The City for them. I’m sure some of them will like it.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

“This is my city, and I am as much a Roman as anyone here.”

I’m excited by the task because I’m always happy to think about Rome. I can talk about it for hours and hours. I’m scared because so much has already been said about it that I can’t conceive of adding so much as one original phrase or fresh observation. (Even that statement strikes me as a cliché.)

And it’s hard to imagine expressing a rational basis for the city’s appeal for me. Sure, there’s all the history, the art, the architecture, the fountains, the pines, blah, blah, blah. But the city is filthy, it’s noisy, it’s falling apart, it’s damp, it’s full of tourists. And yet it compels me again and again, so I have to face the possibility that at least some of my love is irrational, and I don’t like thinking of myself that way.

So, down to work. The place? I can’t think of a favorite. When I try, I walk in my mind’s eye from one favorite spot to another. Rome is all about the walking. I could start at the end of the Via dei Fori Imperiali where it runs into Piazza Venezia, near where I took the panoramic photo last January—the one at the top of this page. Broken remnants of the glory of the Imperial Age are scattered at my feet. I try to envision ancient people walking on the decorative tiles on the fragment of floor a few steps from the sidewalk. I find that I can’t picture it. Cars race by behind me, horns blaring. I walk toward the piazza past a South Asian man who sells silk scarves and plastic souvenir Colosseums made in China.

A right turn would take me up the Corso, but I don’t want to go that way. It’s a noisy canyon of buildings that seems to trap the vehicle exhaust. Instead, I make my way around the bottom end of the piazza, even though that entails crossing four or five side streets, mostly without benefit of traffic lights. I dodge the current of taxis and buses like a native Italian.

I don’t know the name of the street, but by habit I find my way to a place where pieces of an ancient structure have been incorporated into the back of an 18th- or 19th-century building. Three columns look as if they’re lifting the modern construction up out of the excavation pit. The hole is separated from the sidewalk by an iron railing in front of which Czech and Polish expatriates sell magazines in Slavic languages. I look for a family resemblance. I wonder what subtle twists in history turned me into an American tourist and left these distant cousins of mine to become citizens of the European Union.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick