Native Places

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.

Songbirds and Submarines

The other morning, I was fixing oatmeal while the radio news described the infrastructure bill, voter suppression, and submarines in Australia. Some new awareness to add to my list of unfinished anxieties, I thought, and turned the radio off.  

Then I took out the trash. Above me, dozens of birds were flying south in the autumn sky. It was their annual southerly migration. Morning glories bloomed on the fence nearby – they’re late this year – and sunlight tipped the plum tree.

All of that seemed much more important than Australian submarines.

Of course, clean water and clean air will benefit all living things, including tiny brown birds flying to Venezuela. A democracy can uphold conservation laws.

But for that moment on that morning, I was struck by the wonder of songbirds and morning glories.

“If I were a bird” George Eliot wrote ,“ I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”

Sometimes it’s good to stop worrying and just look around.

At the DMV

“The DMV is where I’ll go to die!” a friend said and I’m sure you know what she meant: a dingy room with plastic partitions and ripped vinyl seats. You don’t have to be a design critic to know this is the decor of doom. You can find the decor of doom in VA hospitals, state-run liquor stores, toll plazas, and anywhere else there is little regard for people’s well-being.

Contrast the DMV with another place where citizens go to ask complicated questions and get advice – an Apple Store. Steve Jobs wanted his retail stores to feel like a clubhouse: well lit, airy, and well made of oak, stone, and glass. An Apple Store has an esthetic of kindness. You can also find this esthetic in family-run bodegas, kindergarten classrooms, and farmers’ markets.

What Apple Stores and kindergarten rooms have in common is respect for human dignity:  the feeling that someone cares, that someone has noticed you.

If I could be the good fairy who taps on the shoulders of folks in charge, I’d ask for a decent place to board an airplane and a beautiful place to get a driver’s license.

Sitting on a ripped vinyl chair already for two hours I’ve got nothing else to do.

A Poet and a Catbird

A grey catbird slipped out of town last week. In April he’d flown from the Caribbean to nest in a honeysuckle thicket in my garden, singing to his mate from morning to evening.

I’m reminded of the poet John Clare who wrote some of the most fetching poems about nature I’ve ever read. There were no catbirds in England, but here’s what Clare wrote about a nightingale:

Deep adown
The nest is made, a hermit’s mossy cell.
Snug lie her curious eggs in number five
Of deadened green or rather olive brown,
And the old prickly thorn-bush guards them well.

In July 1841 Clare, who was troubled by mental illness, escaped from High Beach Asylum near London to walk eighty miles north to his home. It was a four-day journey. He ate grass and slept by the road, taking care to sleep with his head pointing north.

He was unable to recognize his wife when he reached Northampton and was again committed to an asylum. He died there in 1864. His last words were, “I want to go home.”

I hope the catbird migrates again to nest in my garden. Odds are he will.

Almost all creatures, from catbirds to troubled poets, have a way to find home.

A pack of cigarettes and a revelation

The news from Afghanistan has been overwhelming. People falling off airplanes, children handed across barbed wire. How is it that, at the end of conflict, we can’t make peace? Helicopters and bullies don’t represent the best in us. Kindness does.

In 1965 I was a student traveling in Turkey. Touching the stones of Priene, staring at the ruins of Jerash, I knew this was a priceless experience for an architect. But a shopkeeper gave me an even greater gift.

Half hidden under a stone arch, it seemed more like a pantry than a shop. Barrels of figs and olives lined the wall, lemons hung in bunches, and golden tins of fish flickered in the dim light. The owner stood at a counter, a rotund and cheery soul.

After paying for bread and sardines I was a few lira short for the pack of cigarettes I wanted.

Just as the bus was leaving, a boy rushed out of the store to give me two packs of cigarettes. The owner, who had no reason to share this gift, would never see me again. He had nothing to gain.

Imagine a culture like that.

Perhaps the medieval poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī, who lived not far from this village, said it best:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there. 

Wilson 

“Glory days, well they’ll pass you by…” ~ Bruce Springsteen 

Thirty rears ago, Wilson, North Carolina, seemed like a prosperous tobacco town. Factories hummed, tobacco warehouses lined the streets, and gracious homes stood on shaded lawns trimmed with boxwood. Barton, the local college, boasted a modern classroom building and a covered walkway that looked like something out of Brazil. 

Back then, my 13-year-old son and his pals did tricks in a skateboard park built in a creek bottom. While they skated, I caught up on architectural magazines from my office. 

Both Wilson and I have aged. On a recent visit, I found that the tobacco market and the skateboard park were gone. Porches sagged on houses that needed paint.  Many factories were closed. And Barton College was building a Georgian-style football stadium. 

The Town of Wilson has created a whirligig park near the train station. Tourists come to stare while licking “Softee” ice cream. Chimney swifts nest in abandoned smokestacks. A tobacco warehouse is now an Iglesias Pentecostal. “Sean Todos Bienvenidos (Everybody Welcome),“ the sign says.  

It’s easy to ignore change in cities and in life “as if it were possible to escape the drift of our lives,” the poet Stephen Dunn wrote, "the fundamental business of making do with what’s been left us.” 

When I left town with a big "Softee” in my cup holder, I realized it was comfort food.

The Peanut Butter Oracle

Edward Gibbon needed six volumes to describe the fall of the Roman Empire.

Now people follow the stock market to predict the next apocalypse. For me, I look for a jar of peanut butter at the reception desk to predict disaster. With crackers.

It was a dreary state office building that I entered  several years ago. There, to my surprise, I found a receptionist eating peanut butter straight out of the jar. The next thing I knew there was a change in government and that department no longer existed.

A friend worked for a legendary fashion designer in New York City. The office workers had stashes of peanut butter in their desks to help them get through the next all-nighter. A year later the studio collapsed and the famous designer tried to write a novel.

Recently, I visited a 100-year-old interior design firm. The receptionist pronged a moody cracker into her 32-ounce jar of creamy smooth and asked, “Can I hep you?” I give them six months.

And if I ever get there, I hope that Saint Peter isn’t sitting at the pearly gates with a big jar of Jif.

Still Life

Recently I discovered a small still life that my wife Judy drew when she was a student in graduate school. The drawing seems as fresh as it did thirty-three years ago when she made it. Everything is in its place. The colors radiate calm.

But Judy’s life was far from calm back then: she was a graduate student with two young children, a busy husband, two cats and a dog living in a leaky seventy-five-year-old house with her sick mother holding court in the guest bedroom.

Her drawing, by contrast, was serene.

One of the minor ceremonies I enjoyed for over forty years was the ritual of Judy choosing which earrings to wear. This ceremony usually took place in our bedroom when we were already late to dinner. There was Judy calmly choosing the agate or turquoise, silver or gold, as though nothing were more important. What did I think of the yellow quartzite?

A piece of gold and three crimson pears may seem unrelated, but in Judy’s eyes they were part of the same story: that the world is more beautiful than useful, and one life is hardly enough for the glory of it all.

The Mulberry Tree

An old mulberry tree grows outside my house. Years ago, college students used its massive branches to lift an engine block from their car. Later our ten-year-old daughter hung her rope swing there. In spring, songbirds and squirrels gather to eat the mulberries. 

This afternoon Cedar Waxwings, who usually travel in noisy flocks, arrived silently, one by one. They came so quietly it seemed primeval. They gorged on the purple fruit.

I thought of the Indigenous people who lived here ten thousand years ago. Had they watched Cedar Waxwings gather on a mulberry tree? They touched the earth so lightly, taking only what they needed and using all they took. And they left behind so little: arrowheads, pottery shards, some ashes.  

Recently, I learned that the mass of all the roads and buildings on earth outweighs the mass of all living things. There are more tons of asphalt and concrete than there are tons of elephants and ants and mulberry trees.  

After a while the Cedar Waxwings flew off into a thicket, already digesting seeds that might sprout a new mulberry tree. Great things come on small wings.

George Bireline on the Steps at Brooks Hall

I hadn’t seen George Bireline since he was my teacher at the School of Design 20 years prior. He was a celebrated painter. He was a formidable presence. He asked unforgettable questions.

I was afraid of George Bireline.

So here I was, two decades later, a newly minted Assistant Professor at the School of Design, when I bumped into George as he was climbing the back stairs of Brooks Hall. We stopped to say hello—then talked on the narrow marble landing for nearly two hours – about politics, the weather, architecture, and the paintings of Ad Reinhardt.

George wanted to know what I thought. He didn’t tell me what to do, or what he thought, or drop pearls of wisdom. Instead, he listened to my narrative, made an occasional remark, asked a question or two, laughed, and let me figure it all out.

We design splendid sanctuaries for sermons, but wisdom often comes up the back stairs. I learned from George Bireline that the greatest gift a teacher can give is attention, and that we can impart wisdom only when we enter someone else’s world.

The Good Enough House

In a better-off part of our town, houses stand freshly painted, windows cleaned, with carefully clipped evergreen front lawns shaded by picture-book magnolias. On weekdays, white vans sit in driveways with the names of plumbers, landscapers, and window cleaners painted on their doors.

These houses have elaborate fronts, but few tell their stories. “All happy families are alike,“ Leo Tolstoy wrote, “but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

A few miles away, smaller, simpler houses tell different stories. In this neighborhood, you may see a child’s wagon and a dollhouse in the crabgrass in a front yard, or an engine block on a front porch that’s shaded by a mulberry tree. You won’t see many white vans, though, because when the plumbing leaks here, a neighbor can fix it.

This is a place that’s lived in, relaxed and friendly, not stand-offish. Some of the windows are a little grimy, but in the evening people water their tomatoes while children ride tricycles on the streets.

These modest dwellings, with their scrappy lived-in yards, remind me that a house can reflect who we are, not who we pretend to be. And perhaps because they aren’t perfect is what makes these houses feel like home.

Amtrak Spring

Every time I drive towards Charleston, South Carolina, on Interstate 95 it seems as if there are a million other people driving alongside me. Last month, by contrast, I went to Charleston with about 100 people. We were all passengers on Amtrak’s Palmetto express.

From my sofa-like seat, I traveled through a variety of landscapes ranging from trailer park to black water swamp to soybean fields the size of a small town. Yellow jessamine flowers gilded the tops of pine trees. I felt the gentle descent from the piedmont hills in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to the low country of South Carolina.

The Amtrak engineer blew his whistle at a lonely rail crossing just as I was biting into my French dip sandwich. Then on a hilltop I saw an abandoned dump truck. Its rusty bed was aflame with golden jessamine flowers. It was the prettiest thing I saw all afternoon.

To ride Amtrak saves energy and anxiety. Amtrak also allows us to see America without the asphalt. Planes and cars may take us from one place to another, but riding the train helps us know how we got there.

Plain Spoken beauty

Hunting Quarters Primitive Baptist Church stands on Shell Road in the fishing village of Atlantic, North Carolina. When the congregation built it in 1918, almost every man and boy in Atlantic knew how to build or repair a wooden boat. After the carpenters finished building Primitive Baptist, they painted the whole thing white, just like the white-painted wooden workboats in nearby Core Sound. Church and workboats have a soft-spoken beauty.

“I used to go to the Primitive Baptist Church with my grandmother who was a Primitive Baptist,“ recalls Janice Smith in The Workboats of Core Sound by Lawrence Earley. "And I remember that beautiful crystal water pitcher with a big hunk of ice in it. And when you go, you go at 11 o’clock and sometimes it was four o’clock before you got out of there. And every once in a while, Mr. Grey, the pastor, he would pour him some water, and I’d say, ‘Mama Alice, I certainly could use some of that water.’ And she’d say, 'Honey, we’ll be out in just a little.’

“You know how they paid him?” Ms. Smith continues. "They put money in the palm of their hand, and when he shook hands with them he’d take the money. They didn’t take up a collection or anything like that.”

Creek Children

When I imagine the perfect classroom, it has a creek running through it.

You see, I grew up by a creek. I discovered Buffalo Creek near our home when I was six years old and played there until I was 12. I can’t remember much of what I learned in school during those years, but I’ll never forget what I learned at Buffalo Creek.

Children raised by creeks are never bored. Creek children don’t know about learning by rote, neither are they conditioned to working nine to five. Berries are their first discoveries, and birds’ nests, and watching the stars come out. Later they discover books.

To creek children, learning is discovery, not instruction.

Occasionally, I return to my creek, where the water is still clear and the crawfish are plentiful. No place I’ve ever known has been nicer to me than Buffalo Creek.

Hawk

Hope is the thing with feathers.  - Emily Dickinson

My daughter Laura and I were at the dining room table eating French fries dipped in mayonnaise. Chickadees and finches nibbled at a bird feeder outside the window. Birds thrive in this slightly run-down university neighborhood where unkempt hedges and rough backyards offer food and shelter.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon when a Red-tailed hawk dropped out of the sky onto a tree branch outside our window with a songbird in its talons. As we watched it tear apart and devour its prey, Laura observed, “The hawk is big as a chicken.”

But unlike a chicken, the Red-tailed hawk had rapier claws and a beak sharp as a paring knife. It was a killing machine with feathers. If nature is a contest between predator and prey, the songbird’s momentary lack of attention and the hawk’s sharp eyesight determined the match.

One doesn’t often witness a matter of life and death over a plate of fried potatoes, but we’d glimpsed a parallel world – a place of grace and blood feathered against a pallid winter sky. For several minutes we didn’t speak.

Then a chickadee chirped and a flock of house finches returned to the feeder. We cleared the table.