Native Places

Insomnia and its Charms

A katydid sings in an oak tree near the street. Jupiter is an orange disk in the sky. It’s 3 a.m. and I’m sitting outside in the garden. Just me and my insomnia.  

Sleep, wrote the Bard, is the “…balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course…” In fact, during Shakespeare’s time it was normal to wake after midnight. Back then folks got out of bed, put another log on the fire, folded the laundry, talked. Then they slept until dawn. We have the industrial revolution to thank for insomnia. With the eight-hour or more workday, we’re trapped in an eight-hour sleep cycle.  If we wake, we worry. Politics, marriage, did I put the cheese away?

Sitting out at 3 a.m., I don’t fret about the cares of the day. I’m listening to the katydid which sings at 65 beats per minute, the same as my heart.

Remembering Macbeth’s lament, “Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care…,” I may fold the laundry in a little while.

B

“I just want to lie down and die,” my friend slurred.

I’ve known B for 25 years. We gardened together at my home. She was a great conversationalist, knowledgeable and funny. And an alcoholic.

And so, at 4 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon I sat in a detox center in the middle of nowhere with fluorescent light bouncing off the walls. Occasionally, a nurse would pop through a pair of double doors, gaze into the middle distance, and disappear again, a bit like a cuckoo clock. Kafka would be hard pressed to imagine worse.

What struck me was the divorce between nature and healing.

In the fourth century BCE, priests in temples of Asclepius interpreted dreams in walled gardens. In the nineteenth century, Dorothea Dix founded the first American mental asylum around a grove of oak trees. That connection with nature was not available to B.

I know detox is a deadly serious challenge, but surely a more humane approach is possible.

After B realized that the doctors were not going to give her drugs right away, she started screaming. Six hours later she was admitted.

I said goodbye to B and came home to my garden where the only cuckoo was a real one. The milkweed plants, named after Asclepius, were blooming.

As I took a full day to recover from the experience, I was thankful for the flowers in my garden that B had tended. I was thankful for the nurse who finally came through the doors to care for my friend. And I was thankful for the healing gift of nature.

Less Is Love

“God is in the details,” Mies van der Rohe liked to say.

If so, I saw God recently on the front steps of Crown Hall, a building Mies designed for the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1956. Those steps are so beautiful that I felt as if I were ascending, if not to God, at least to a special place next to His wine bar.

“Less is more,” Mies also insisted.

Mies van der Rohe began his career as a stone carver. To him, every millimeter of stone was precious. Later, as an architect, he asked his staff to build repetitions of his details that varied less than the width of a steel washer so that he could find the correct one.

The travertine steps of Crown Hall and every steel column, pane of glass, and door knob are as nearly perfect as he could make them.

On that balmy June evening, a few hundred architects and friends gathered there for a reception. The quietly elegant building welcomed us in , making no claim other than to make us feel comfortable. The tall ceiling and refined proportions simply focused our attention on each other, the music, laughter, and the light at dusk.

Mies died in 1969. Yet I felt his presence that night, as I stood less than five miles from the frenetic, eye-popping skyscrapers of the Chicago Loop.

Through his work he seemed to offer a quiet and persistent admonition ,a prayer almost : Architecture is about simplicity, proportion, craft. And even love.

Catbird at 6 AM

At the age of 22, Virginia Woolf was depressed and refused to eat. She began to hear things—she thought the birds were singing in Greek. Then she heard King Edward VII speaking nasty words in the azaleas outside her bedroom window.

We get the news differently today, although I prefer the king speaking in the shrubbery. And our news still contains fear, paranoia, and yes, nasty words keying us up for the next crisis.

Now there’s another voice in the bushes outside my window: a catbird sings at dawn. The catbird’s voice is usually squeaky but can change in a heartbeat to a lullaby. Thus, its song combines happiness with sadness, sweetness with irony. Hear a song like this and your depression evaporates.

What comforts me is this dusky creature from another world, singing as dawn grows light, at home in its place.

And Virginia Woolf? She recovered from her 1904 depression to become one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished writers.

Drawing Shadows

One September afternoon after I’d moved from England to Alabama, I saw the shadows of leaves dancing on a whitewashed shed. I cried with happiness. I loved England, but not it’s overcast days.

Years later, my wife Judy and I built a house in North Carolina with stucco walls like blotting paper for shadows. When I wake in this house, I see images of leaves on the curtains. Moonlight casts shadows onto the living room floor. A prayer and a benediction.

A shadow cast by the sun is a diary, moving slightly every 24 hours. Drawing this is a quiet moment against the distractions of daily life.

The light from the sun traveled 93 million miles to make these shadows. The least I can do, faced with such wonder, is to draw them.

Bee in the Grass at Night

The other night I sat in my garden enjoying the smell of fresh grass. I was rubbing my bare foot on the grass when Bam! A bee stung me on the big toe. She was a worker bee from a nearby hive. She’d crawled to a place in the grass attempting to fly but couldn’t. The next morning, I found her lifeless body.

“I think this is the prettiest world — so long as you don’t mind a little dying,” wrote Mary Oliver in her poem “The Kingfisher.“

It is, of course, the job for all of us to die to make way for the next wave of dreamers.

Am I at the same stage in life as the honeybee in the grass, I wonder? I don’t want to sting anyone.Then I remembered Maggie Smith: “Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways.”

I spread some extra honey on my toast.

Eudora Paints Her Porch Swing

The news is pretty worrisome: Russian tanks in Ukrainian wheat fields and the Supreme Court in the bedroom. 

All of this makes me hungry for a Triscuit. 

My mother discovered these little wheat crackers in 1952 and shared them with her children while we listened to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio. Unbeknownst to us the Korean War was going on. 

In 1967 when the Six-Day Arab-Israeli war convulsed the world, Eudora Welty was shaken. She had lived through two world wars and the assassination of a young president, so when it came to crises, she knew what to do. 

“Went out and painted the porch swing and chairs,“ Eudora wrote, "to keep steady while the news crackled.”

Eudora painted on the side porch of her house in Jackson, Mississippi. She and her friends gathered here in the cool summer evenings. I wonder if she was thinking that a crisis made friends even more dear. Now her house and side porch are a National Historic Monument. 

She probably served Triscuits. 

I’m not suggesting that porches and crackers can solve the world’s crises, but there’s comfort in knowing how others survived an ominous and unpredictable time, isn’t there? 

Proust had his madeleines. For me, love tastes like a two inch square wheat cracker. 

Three Cherries

Do you ever have one of those days when the earth is aligned and three cherries click into place on the slot machine wheel of life? Well, I’m having one today. Yesterday I was in the Atlanta airport, loudspeakers squawking, travelers walking, and nowhere a place to rest. Today I’m sitting in my garden with the sun at my back wondering why I have to board an airplane just to realize how nice it is to be at home.

Somewhere in Washington, I’m convinced, officials sit around drinking Tab in a windowless basement  deciding how to make air travel as unpleasant as possible. Loss of privacy: check. Bad food: check. Lots of long lines: ditto. Seats 12 inches wide: you got it.

My three cherries today are: sunlight on the lawn, the sounds of laughter from down the street, and spring in all its unbuttoned glory.

So Farewell Terminal A with your ceaseless boarding calls and your chicken sandwiches of despair. Next time I’ll take the train.

Mont-Saint-Michel

“You must get an omelette made by La Mere Poulard.” Marjorie told me when she heard that I was visiting Mont-Saint-Michel. Her eyes softened as she remembered her youthful visit to the famous abbey in 1920. Then she pressed her well-thumbed 1910 Baedeker’s Northern France into my hand.

So in the spring of 1962, I bicycled over the dead-flat landscape of Normandy like a pilgrim searching for M Poulard’s auberge. In the distance, Mont-Saint-Michel appeared like a mirage. Built on a rock in the sea sometime in the tenth century, it is one of the most famous, and romantic, monuments in Europe.

As I pedaled closer, though, I had to squeeze between dozens of tourist busses on the causeway to the abbey, coughing on diesel exhaust mixed with sea air. Finally I arrived. But not at a quaint inn. Instead, I parked my bike in front of a spiffy hotel where a sign read, “La Mere Poulard’s renowned omelette.“ Behind the hotel’s plate glass windows, three chefs wearing red tunics were whisking enough eggs to serve a hundred customers.

I was beginning to learn that what people did in Niagara Falls they also did in Mont-Saint-Michel: They cashed in on a good thing.

When I returned to London, I didn’t tell Marjorie what I’d seen. Memories are best left to age, I thought, like fine wine in a cellar. That concept now includes my own image of Marjorie — crossing the causeway in a two-seater towards a lamp-lit inn and a plate of gently beaten eggs bubbling over a charcoal fire.

The Wooden Church at 3pm

The wooden tower caught my eye through the yellow poplar trees near Penland, North Carolina. Intrigued, I asked my landlady if the chapel was open to visitors.

“I couldn’t tell you, honey,” she said. “You’ll just have to go and see.”

So that afternoon twenty years ago I walked through the valley as the wind blew yellow leaves uphill. I climbed the fieldstone steps up to the chapel porch . When I pushed the chapel door open, leaves clattered across the floor, then silence.

Everything I could see in the dim light was plain and simple: the stiff, uncomfortable pews enclosed by unpainted wood walls, a pedal organ, and a cross the size of a candlestick.

These worshippers, it seemed to me, believed that plainsong went straight to the ear of God.

In Vienna in 1910, Adolf Loos wrote:

“If we find a mound six feet long and three feet wide in the forests, formed into a pyramid, shaped by a shovel, we become serious and something says, ‘Someone lies buried here’ … Now that is architecture.”

Today, buildings trend to power and purpose. Meekness is undervalued. Yet this wooden tower whispered that here, among the poplar trees, was a place for the spirit.

Ode to a Hardware Store

On Saturday mornings for most of my adult life I’ve found my way to a hardware store. If I can buy a machine screw to fix a broken receptacle, and it fits when I get back home, I feel a sense of elation comparable to the time I dropped my last quarter into a vending machine at the Interstate 20 rest stop in Tallapoosa, Georgia, and not one but two packages of Cheese Nabs fell out.

But if the screw doesn’t fit when I get back home, I can be inconsolable. Especially if the receptacle is in the dining room and my wife has been asking me for three years to fix it and her formidable Aunt Jaxie – who notices everything – is coming for dinner that night. When I tried to wire the receptacle in place it shorted out the entire kitchen. That’s when the handy circuit tester I picked up at Pledger’s Hardware in Columbia, NC, ten years ago and hadn’t used since came to my rescue.

For long-term projects – home renovation, education, or an election – the rewards rest in the future. But fixing a busted receptacle is a short-term satisfaction. It keeps us in the present.

As far as I know, Aunt Jaxie never even noticed the broken receptacle.

Oh Canada

Farmers in Canada have begun tapping their sugar maple trees to make syrup. Meanwhile, bad-tempered Canadian truckers have occupied downtown Ottawa and blocked the bridge at Windsor – all to protest against COVID vaccination. And in New York City, there’s a shortage of cream cheese to schmear the city’s beloved bagels.  

The news is full of crises. So full.

“I despair of my country,” the American writer William Maxwell penned in 1952 about the election of Dwight David Eisenhower. “If there was a wilderness, I would cry out in it, but even that we’ve disposed of.”

Every catastrophe is unique, but otherwise we are the same.

Across the street from me, our native maple trees are slipping on a veil of tiny red flowers.

It looks a little like dawn at midday. And while the current catastrophe is always unique, I’ll side with the maple trees that look like dawn this time of year and always will.

Soon, one evening, there will be lightning bugs.

A Can of Chicken and a Shotgun

The Automobile Association gave us the route to Damascus. We were architecture students traveling to see Greek ruins. So far, we’d passed through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria without problems, but at the Greek border the customs officer wanted to know why we needed a Winchester 21 shotgun. “Hunting?” the officer asked. No, we said, we’re going camping in Turkey. “Ah,” he said knowingly. “it’s dangerous in Turkey.“

When we got to Turkey, the Turkish customs officer asked us about the gun. We’ve just been camping in Greece, we said. "Ahhhhh!“ he said, and waved us on.

Driving through a mountain pass a few days later, we had to stop at a roadblock. Someone had felled three large trees across the dirt road. Could it be an ambush? As the sun set, we heard a car approaching. My friend fingered his shotgun. Then to our surprise, a Vauxhall sedan, driven by a British Counsel with his wife and mother-in-law in the back seat, pulled up behind us.

“We’re used to this sort of thing,” he said as he pulled a canned chicken out of the boot of his car. “It’s the army on maneuvers. Looks like we’ll be here for the night. Tea, anyone?”

Half a century ago I learned, not for the last time, that the pain we fear usually doesn’t happen.

And that chicken in a can isn’t half bad, especially at dusk on a mountain road.

Slightly Faded Places

This stretch of Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, North Carolina – a narrow commercial strip sandwiched between the State Fairgrounds and the Norfolk Southern railway – was never much to look at. But its shops served neighborhoods on both sides of the railroad tracks with the basics of life. You could buy a washer to repair the kitchen sink at the hardware store, get your hair cut at Westover Barber Shop est.1939 , pick up a gallon of milk from the Pay N Go,  and load a stack of oak firewood into your trunk at the wood yard.

On Saturday mornings in the fall, men gathered at the hardware store to buy collard seedlings and shoot the breeze. Once a year, homeowners turned their front yards into parking lots and rented spaces to fairgoers.

I love places like this. They don’t make sense economically and you don’t look for them on Facebook. They’re not memorable. But they thrive.  

Our city has spent millions of dollars building roads so you can get to  malls and shiny big-box stores. They’re like anywhere. But places where you can get 5/8-inch washers and a short back and sides are somewhere.  

Slightly faded places are part of the wealth of cities.

Julius Caesar and Sliced Apples

To put it plainly, my mother didn’t know how to cut an apple. She’d hold the fruit in her left hand and cut slices with the knife toward her. She would ease the blade through the apple’s flesh and stop just short of her thumb.  

“Don’t ever cut the knife towards you,” my father admonished. At the age of six, how could I determine which parent was right?

Virginia Donaldson could sew a blouse and weave a basket as fine as a hummingbird’s nest. Her fingers could knit and purl as smoothly as they could play Chopin or stroke her son’s hair.

She could also bend her thumbs backwards 90 degrees. She pointed out that Julius Caesar had the same kind of thumbs. After her cats and her children, my mother loved Julius Caesar the best. And dexterity, she said, comes from the Latin “dexter,” meaning right hand – skillful.

I resisted Latin, but I learned to build balsa airplanes with an X-Acto knife.

Twenty years later, when I was standing near the Curia of Pompey in Rome where Julius Caesar strolled to his assassination, my mind drifted to the tart scent of freshly sliced apples.

It’s possible to imagine that Julius Caesar and my mom are together now, comparing double-jointed thumbs while she cuts a red Rome apple.

I still cut apples the way I saw her do it.