An image began making its way across Twitter Friday morning, and I am haunted by it.
Most people, I think, laughed. The picture shows a round glass coffee table crowded with about 25 picture frames surrounding a plant.
It doesn’t make any sense. Yes, the smaller photos sit up front, forming a sort of auditorium effect wherein ostensibly you have a clear sightline to the pictures behind it.
But it mostly looks messy. Messy in a way that life often is — only this is done on purpose by a person who maybe wasn’t there for all the real messes and is now trying to convince himself he was.
This is Urban Meyer’s coffee table, and as everything always goes with Urban Meyer, the message it is trying to send is meant to shroud, not reveal, a truth.
So cool to be invited into the home of Shelley and Urban Meyer. Thought you’d like to see inside the home of the Jags’ head coach. I loved all the pictures. Shelley says Urban put every single one out + guess who used to live in this house? + funny story how they met. @FCN2go pic.twitter.com/BLFRdRbkXH
— Jeannie Blaylock (@JeannieBlaylock) September 17, 2021
It is no surprise the Meyer family would open their home in this way at this time. It’s a clear public relations ploy: Meyer’s Jaguar’s team lost badly in Week 1 to a Texans team that has the worst roster in the NFL. His players, according to reports, are already disgruntled with his failure to acclimate to pro football (who could have seen it coming?). And the indefatigable Diana Moskovitz over at Defector continues to excavate all the ways Meyer shielded protege Zach Smith after the young coach began terrorizing his wife.
Urban and Shelley Meyer are not admirable people. Urban mostly waffles between coaching and pretending he absolutely must stop coaching football. His health! His family! His focus! He must get it right!
When in fact he is usually abandoning a mess of his own making, knowing new chances will come along because he wins, and that every town has a TV anchor willing to lop off the difficult parts of the story if it means an exclusive shot of two blow-up swans in the local coach’s pool.
Shelley, a registered nurse, is a font of misinformation and decrepit thinking. She did incalculable harm spreading lies about the coronavirus pandemic, and should never be taken seriously again.
But along the way they lived a life and raised three kids and went on a Carnival Cruise and bought a plant and here is the humanizing proof: A hodgepodge of pictures so uncultivated it was most certainly cultivated to look that way.
None of these pictures is the most bizarre thing in his living room, though. That title would belong to the beach photo above the fireplace. At first glance it appears to be solidly of the genre: A happy, similarly dressed family, standing near the ocean as the sun goes down.
Generally a photo like this is taken so that spontaneity is added back in. OF COURSE these people gathered here in this way precisely to get these photos taken, but look at them: They are in fact just living life and enjoying each other! It’s not a candid photo, but it’s trying to be, and that’s enough.
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Except that’s not the case here. This photo is staged as if a person who covers his coffee table in pictures of his family when the news camera stops by has requested that his beach portrait be rendered like a Renaissance painting wherein he and his adoring family are shown walking toward the light. Their light.
“I loved all the pictures. Shelley says Urban put every single one out”
Yes, I see him there, sorting through a box, picking his favorites, reminiscing about the day each picture was taken, worrying about equal representation — three kids, a gaggle of grandkids, gotta fit everybody! — caught up, as we all get at moments like that, in longing for the past.
That’s why we capture those moments. We suspect maybe they’re all we’ll really have.
And Urban Meyer wants you to know he has them. So many of them. There’s no place even for you to rest your coffee cup. Have you seen that picture over there? How about that one?
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