Native Places

Pompeii

Few moments of my life have taught me more about architecture than the time I was thrown out of the House of Menander in Pompeii.

I did it for my mother. She was a Latin teacher back in Greensboro, North Carolina, who loved everything Roman. The House of Menander was one of the finest houses in ancient Pompeii before a volcano destroyed it in 79 AD.

So there I was in 1967 AD, an architecture student standing before a restored Pompeian house named for a Greek playwright on a scorching day in July only to find that the building I’d come over 4000 miles to see  was closed.

That’s when I noticed a gate with a broken latch. I pushed it.

Once inside I found a house arranged around two courtyards: one was in shadow, the other opened to the sky. You travelled from dark to light, as Le Corbusier said, from minor to major key. It was like moving from a forest into a clearing, a revelation, like hope.

I thought of this recently when I watched our new president and vice president emerge from a dark tunnel into the light of the National Mall in Washington for their inauguration.

The police that day in Pompeii were not amused. “Dio mio,” they said when I showed them my sketch. “Un architetto!”  I didn’t mention my mom.

El Malpais

We’d never seen such things: thick skinned and spiny plants clinging to the blackened rock like out-sized insects. It was mid-afternoon in El Malpais, New Mexico.

It was, my friend said, a kind of tough beauty.

In the mid-1500s, Spanish explorers named this area “El Malpais,” meaning “the bad country,” because they found the jagged rock treacherous to navigate. American surveyors later found the plants growing in El Malpais “more unpleasant to the sight than the earth itself.” El Malpais, they reported, was utterly useless.

But to the Ramah Navajo, El Malpais was home. At the El Malpais National Monument Visitor Center I found this inscription:

"When we go into the Malpais, we go in with a purpose – to conduct sacred acts that are related to our spiritual and physical well-being. We collect purifying and healing plants. We gather wild greens, nuts such as acorns and pinyon, berries and yucca fruit… We collect pollen for ceremonies…

Everything that exists in the Malpais – the mountains, rocks, caves, plants, trees, and animals – is sacred and contributes to our survival.”

That afternoon I wanted to stay forever. In a sense I did. El Malpais taught me that even the little patch of land I lived on was sacred.

Crinum Lily

A postcard from the pandemic:

“One of my grandfathers died of a clump of Iris stylosa,” wrote Beverly Nichols, the British gardener and playwright. “It enticed him from a sickbed on an angry evening in January, luring him through the snowdrifts with its blue silver flames; he died of double pneumonia a few days later. It was probably worth it.”

I thought of Grandfather Nichols recently when a pink crinum, usually a late summer flower, decided unexpectedly to bloom in mid-December. I trudged out to see it, not in a snowdrift but in my frost-withered garden. There it was in the pale December sunlight, a frail and slender lily that chose to fling its pink star into the night.

After nine months of fear and darkness, it seemed like hope. 

Omelette

“Sometimes the spaghetti likes to be alone.”

It’s my favorite line from the1996 film “Big Night,“ in which two brothers, Primo and Secondo, suffer a disastrous opening night at their new dream restaurant. At dawn after their guests leave, Secondo cooks an omelette. It’s like a peace offering to his brother. In contrast to the chaotic night, the omelette was an homage to simplicity: butter, eggs, and an iron skillet. Calm.

I was reminded of the peace of simple things when I discovered this 18th-century house and shop in London. Everything about it was serenity itself. Nothing could be added or taken away. In a city full of main-dish architectural standouts crying out to be noticed, this little house was quiet and refined. It reminded me of the basic role a building can play in holding a city together.

There are thousands of these little houses standing unnoticed and tucked away in London. Each house is like a violin playing in harmony with another, but softly: I’d walked past this building for ten years without seeing it.

Sometimes a simple building or a dish of beaten eggs can introduce into the chaos of our lives a tiny slice of serenity, and we’re happy with the present moment.

Burgundy

Someone left a racing form on the café table.

It was Sunday morning in Burgundy, one of those autumn mornings when you could breathe well-being right out of the air. Stone buildings surrounding the square looked down on the cafe like pilgrims from an earlier century. Nearby, a priest greeted his grey-haired worshippers at the doorway of a 600-year-old church. The worshipers wore black. Some had rosaries.

The racing form aligned perfectly with a wine glass, a China coffee cup, and a plastic ashtray. Were two people sitting here before us? A single cigarette lay crumpled in the ashtray.

How different this was from the Sunday mornings of my protestant childhood in North Carolina where our minister laid out the communion wine cups in precise, orderly rows.

The church bell rang at 11 a.m. Inside the cafe, the barman fingered his smartphone.

We left to drive through vineyards in the morning sunshine.

What the Chrysanthemum Knows

When I planted the tiny chrysanthemum beside a low wall a few years ago, I didn’t know it would get so big. Soon it spilled over the wall with bunches of flowers, each waving and glowing in the sun.

On a recent November afternoon, I sat beside the wall and watched a dozen species of insects and two dappled spiders visit the yellow chrysanthemum flowers. They were there to gather pollen and nectar. I was there to watch.

Two hundred years ago, the poet John Clare watched the insects of his native Northamptonshire. “Insects as small as dust are never done,” he wrote, “with glittering dance and reeling in the sun.” Whoever looked at them, he thought, saw eternity.

I imagined the eternity of my little insects – some as small as dust, others the size of my thumb – clustering around flowers for all the autumns of history. They’d be gone soon, but their descendants would return next year.

In the flux of 2020, that felt like a promise.

There’s talk of it being a cold winter. Yet on this late autumn afternoon, tiny winged things hover.

Natural Learning

Education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.  - John Dewey

It’s been a difficult year in school. Online learning during the pandemic isn’t working for many students. Some schools have reopened with students spaced six feet apart. 

Yet children learn from everything.

My friend Rain (age 8) has learned to sew. She’s making pillows to sell at the market on Edisto Island, South Carolina, where her family lives. She and her brother are also tracking the history of their island by discovering 100-year-old bottles in the salt marshes.

Another friend, Thompson (age 4), came by recently to give me a bag of figs. Then, while I talked with his mom and dad, Thompson played barefoot in the sandy path – twirling, jumping, picking up the sand with his toes – expending energy that came from discovering the world.

At an outdoor preschool in Durham, North Carolina, children collect seeds in the nearby fields and woods. Then they play with them, classifying the seeds by color and shape, counting them, and trading them.

Against the backdrop of a fretful world, children know what to do. What’s important is to play in the sand, study ancient bottles, and collect things.

One seed at a time.

The Orb Weaver

One of the great satisfactions of the human spirit is to feel that one’s family extends across the borders of species.    - Stanley Kunitz

I’ve been living a quiet life recently during the pandemic. Almost no one‘s coming to the house. When visitors do call, we sit outside under the live oak trees.

Then the spider came.

She was an orb weaver. She spun a web across my balcony door, and when I opened the door, as I do every morning, she scurried to the center of her web. She was here for most of September. I’d started thinking of her as a roommate.

My friend Alice brings me eggs laid by her chickens Trevor, Sweetie, and Mama Boots. I know each chicken by the color of her egg. Sweetie’s are pale blue. Mama Boots, reddish brown.  

Recently my spider roommate left. “Maybe she’s relocated  for more food,” Alice said. Then yesterday I noticed a new web in the redbud tree a few feet from my balcony.

It was nice to see an old friend. And it’s good to have eggs from named chickens.

Guanajuato

I haven’t been to a supermarket in six months because of the pandemic. Instead, I’ve shopped at an organic farm and a one-room co-op. As a result, I’ve learned to see the supermarket for what it is: a windowless, artificially lit, poorly laid-out box where the graphics scream at me and the atmosphere is reminiscent of a visit to the DOT.

I sometimes saw my friends there. But what if our supermarkets were truly social places and pleasant environments to be in?

This was part of the promise of the central food market in Guanajuato, Mexico, that I visited several years ago. Rows of meat, dairy, and produce glowed in the sunshine beneath a lofty roof of iron and glass. A mariachi band strolled between the peppers and melons while families and strangers promenaded together, savoring each other as much as the produce.

I sat at an oyster bar near the center while the market surged around me. A grandmother and her family walked past. Shopkeepers stacked grapefruit and baskets so carefully the effect was esthetic. Nearby, two women began shouting at each other. I thought they were fighting when suddenly they hugged. I realized they were sisters.

Imagine a supermarket as an atmosphere to savor.

Sissinghurst

I thought I’d stumbled into paradise. After walking two miles from the village of Cranbrook, Kent, I’d arrived at  Sissinghurst Castle. Far from being a castle, it was a labyrinth of ruins where an impressionist canvas of gardens emerged between ancient brick walls, hedges, and a moat.

Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicolson began their garden at Sissinghurst Castle in 1930. At first, they restored what was left of a formerly immense Tudor house. Then they wove a paisley of gardens between the ruins.

War broke out in 1939. German bombers flew over Sissinghurst on their way to London. The lawns grew up in nettles.

After the war, the Nicolsons cut back the weeds and slowly restored the garden. They admitted visitors on weekends for a shilling a person.

I can imagine the lines of people with their dreary rationed overcoats and spam sandwiches coming to find bright flowers and velvet lawns at Sissinghurst. It would have been a place of hope and beauty that they hadn’t known for years.

It was, in the words of T.S. Eliot, a still point in a turning world.

Mrs. Ladu

I’d been learning about ships and she reminded me of a man-of-war: dreading nothing, able to sail anywhere. Her eyes could disable a smirk at fifty paces and her hearing was unerring. She could hear a mouse in the grass and a boy saying “ain’t“ under his breath.

My parents didn’t like Mrs. Lena B. Ladu, my fifth- and sixth-grade teacher. I adored her.

Paired with my interest in boats was my passion for finding birds’ nests. Mrs. Ladu was the only teacher who let me look out the window. When I spotted a robin’s nest in a dogwood tree, she was as thrilled as I was. John James Audubon was one of her heroes. “Make a drawing of it,” she said. When I did, she pinned it on the bulletin board.

One of the most important people in our lives is the first non-family adult who recognizes our worth and uniqueness. Mister Rogers said that the worst people in the world are the ones who tried to make you feel “less than.” Mrs. Ladu validated my love of bugs and balsa wood. She made me feel “more than.”

Nowadays my memory of Mrs. Ladu is less dreadnought and more a thrush singing in the woods. She was, it turns out, an archangel. 

Things In My Window

I was cleaning up and came upon a collection of things I keep on a window sill. Useless things, really. A rock I picked up in Texas that’s over a billion years old, a sycamore seed and three cicada skins a friend gave me, a lump of coral. Valueless and precious. I call the collection my personal museum.

Should I throw these things away? I mused.

I’ve noticed that once I look at a photograph, I tend to remember the photograph more than the actual event or person in the picture. But this piece of coral I picked up one late afternoon on the beach in Bermuda is more evocative than a photograph. It reminds me of the pink sand between my toes where I found it. I can almost smell the wind blowing off the ocean and through the hair of the person I was with.

“We are each of us an endangered species,“ Janet Malcolm wrote. "When we die, our species disappears with us. Nobody like us will exist again.”

I think I’ll keep my little museum.

Earl

“If anyone ever looks at my wife or says anything about her,” he said, “I’ll break them in two. I’ll kill them.”

Earl Causey was the dishwasher at Capt. Bill’s Waterfront Restaurant in Morehead City, North Carolina. I’d run away from home that summer to go to sea. Assistant dishwasher at Captain Bill’s was as far as I got. My salary was $1/ hour plus one meal a day.

Earl taught me how to slop the uneaten hush puppies and wash dishes bare-handed in 120-degree water.  He confided that he’d recently retired from the circus, where he traveled the country as the Human Pincushion. To demonstrate, he pushed a knife up his nose.

Most of the cooks made fun of Earl. One who didn’t was Rose, an elegant Black woman who came on Thursdays to bake pecan chess pies for the week. “He got the whole world,” she sang as she baked, “in His hands.”

Earl drove around Morehead City in a rusty 1951 Pontiac convertible. The convertible top was always down. Later I learned that was because it was in tatters.

One evening I caught a glimpse of Earl and his wife in the Pontiac. Her scarf fluttered over the seat as he steered toward the setting sun. Her face was as lovely as a Cherokee rose. But I was stunned to see that her body was severely disfigured. She had been a “freak” in the circus sideshow.

To my 16-year-old eyes, Earl and his beloved were simply a curiosity. It would be decades before I could understand the tenderness and love they shared.

The Trip Not Taken

The real voyage of discovery is not to seek out new landscapes, Marcel Proust thought. It’s to have new eyes.

People living in Florence and Venice have recently gained new sets of eyes, and they like what they see. The coronavirus lockdown has greatly reduced the number of tourists.

For the first time in memory, Florentines have Florence to themselves. Instead of waves of tourists, the city is quiet. You can hear the blackbirds sing where once the smell of hamburger and the clomp of crowds filled the piazza. The Venetian dialect again echoes in the alleyways and canals of that city.

For the rest of us it’s time to ask: Are we destroying the places we visit? The places we say we love?

I’m reminded of a conversation between Katherine Anne Porter and William Faulkner, recounted by their friend Eugene Walter, after a magnificent dinner in a Parisian restaurant:

“Back home the butter beans are in,” said Faulkner, “the speckled ones.”

Miss Porter fiddled with her wineglass. “Blackberries,” she said wistfully.

Joe

We were both expatriates. He was not shy about his opinions, such as: ”If you have sex before marriage, you’ll get cancer.” And: “Electricity in America won’t shock you. It’s pure because it’s made from water.”

Joe Yusuf was a Turkish Cypriot who helped me gut and renovate a rundown Victorian terrace house in Islington, London. It was my first project. I had learned about architecture by going to school. Joe had learned to be a mason, plasterer, tile setter, carpenter, plumber, and electrician by watching others. I don’t know where he got his opinions.

You could shave with one of Joe’s chisels. He used them and a handsaw to make new double-hung sash windows for the 100-year-old house that closed as softly as a jewelry case.

Joe couldn’t read. But he could lift 4x8 sheets of plasterboard weighing a hundred pounds up a ladder, wedge them against the ceiling with his head, then nail them into place.

Every day he’d send me for supplies. His instructions sounded like ”go to the third corner, then when you get to the curve in the road where there’s a betting shop, turn right till you get to the pub… you know, the one with the awning.”

Joe’s dream was to have a little shop of his own.

The windows he built have been there for 45 years. The last time I went by, I’d say they’re good for another 200.