Classrooms

I went back to college yesterday.  Just for one day.  But sitting in libraries and lecture halls brought back lots of memories.

University of California at BerkeleyIt was “Cal Day,” an annual sort of open house at the University of California at Berkeley, where each department offers new students, parents, kids, community folks, and anyone who wanders by a chance to experience university life – thousands of people roam the campus all day.  It’s a huge meet up.

We stumbled upon it some years ago.  My husband really likes to go to the events put on by the music department – earnest and incredibly accomplished students in a Baroque ensemble or playing piano concerts. 

I am more curious about the teachers than the students.  That might be because I’ve done some teaching myself, some of it well and some not so well.  What are college professors like these days?  If they are presenting one lecture as a way to highlight their department, what will it be?

Howison Philosophy Library Moses HallI decided first to go to a Philosophy class.  It was in the Howison Philosophy Library in Moses Hall.  It felt like Hogwarts.  The rich old wood paneling, big oak tables, wrought iron balconies from the stacks filled with dusty tomes, and the dark oil painting of some old guy philosopher over the fireplace (Hume? Kant? Mr. Howison the benefactor?) So odd to be in the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, in 2016, and to keep looking around for Dumbledore.

Delightfully the professor was a Scot, actually more in the style and body type of Hagrid than Snape, and charmingly witty and wise on the subject of  “The Limits of Scientific Explanation."   Science, he said, can explain us cell by cell, but can never understand our inner life, which he reassured us is the most important thing about us. But then, having described convincingly the limits of science, he presented what he called science’s revenge.  When research subjects reported they had made a decision at a specific time, that time was actually 8 seconds after their brains had already acted chemically to lead them to make that choice.  So much for free will, he said.

Like any philosopher worth his or her salt, he gave us no definitive answers, but got us thinking, and he led a good discussion with the curious and hopeful students considering a Philosophy major.  After the class I said to another older woman - we were both looking for the bathroom (did philosophers have women’s rooms, we wondered – yes, another Hogwarts-style room) that I wasn't sure if I was reassured or troubled by his presentation, and we agreed he had done a good job if we were still talking about it in the loo.

The next class I went to was  “Positive Thinking for Cranks and Pessimists.”   I chose this because I was feeling a little abstract after the Philosophy class.  Do universities also offer some practical life skills?

Sibley Lecture Hall Bechtel Engineering BuildingIt took place in the huge modern Sibley Lecture Hall in the Bechtel Engineering Building.  Padded theater style seats, no blackboard, just a massive screen. I could imagine generations of engineering students studying there and going on to make millions. 

The young self described misanthrope prof from the “Greater Good Science Center” presented all kinds of statistics and graphs about how happy people live longer, make more money and have better sex lives than grumpy people, and he offered some simple ways to be happier (practice mindfulness, say thank you.) 

He was funny and charming.  But the students were completely non-responsive, just sat there in the dark.  That’s a weird feature of the Power Point style of education – staring at screens in the dark.

The last class I went to was in an old-fashioned steep lecture hall, aptly named Lecture Hall 1, in Le Conte Hall.  Here were the chairs with the little desks that come around from the right, and a huge blackboard and a small sense of claustrophobia – not quite enough exits.  If the Philosophy Library was like Hogwarts, this was like the lecture hall in The Paper Chase.  The topic was “The 2016 Presidential Election” and it was standing room only, 300+ folks.  Three youngish white guy Political Science profs (come on Cal, where’s your diversity?) showed us more graphs and charts.  Favorability of candidates: in all the years of polling never have we had two leading candidates in each party with such low favorability ratings.  The role of the state of the economy at the time of the election in determining outcome: if the housing bubble had burst one year later we would be enduring President McCain.  How mid term elections are really more important than presidential ones.  Smart guys expounding on mostly the obvious.  Sweetest moment was when a young woman asked, “This will be the first time I get to vote.  Many of my friends are saying they won’t vote, what’s the point?  What can I say to them?”  All three  professors, who had been pretty dispassionate up to that point, taking the long view, giving us data and more data, said, with one voice, “Supreme Court.”

My day back at school taught me a few things. 

-I am still sort of an old fashioned girl and I liked the Hogwarts Library the best.  A classrooms space does affect how learning happens.  The conversations there, and even in the steep lecture hall were much better and more engaged than in the sleek modern dark tech hall. 

-The profs I heard were all white guys.  Among the prospective students whites were in a distinct minority.

-Best educational moment: the unscheduled political protest at noon, where current students of color locked arms and blocked access at Sproul Plaza (site of the Free Speech protests 50 years ago), chanting “Whose university? Our university!”  I was impressed that the thousands of hungry blocked students and families didn’t get angry, but stayed calm, and figured out a way to get around, went on the next activity. 

Or was it sad that we just said,” Oh, Berkeley, protest, where can I get a burger?”

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter

On the Field and In the Stands

Baseball season has finally opened!  Your “building correspondent” reminisces about various ballparks and why it’s so great when a player makes it “home”.  Play ball!

I sang the National Anthem once before a San Francisco Giants baseball game. 

Mercifully it was not a solo; I was one of 30 or so folks from my town who huddled together on the foggy windy field at Candlestick Park and belted out that most unsingable of anthems. But more than the singing, and the crowd, and the wind, I remember the bowels of the stadium.

It had to have been over 15 years ago, because that’s when the Giants left Candlestick Park and built their fantastic “new” ballpark, AT&T Park.  The 49ers, the San Francisco football team that shared Candlestick with the Giants, hung in there for a few more years after the Giants built their nicer, smaller, sunnier downtown park.  But they too finally moved to a $2 billion stadium in sunny Santa Clara last year.  Both teams abandoned the old brutalist Candlestick Park, with its horrible Soviet-like concrete slab architecture, soggy fields from the neighboring bay, and freezing foggy weather.  A game was called once because of the fog.  (Candlestick is now being torn down, and they’re going to build a mall and condos there.  How the mighty are fallen.)

We had to arrive early and meet the national anthem coordinator at some obscure gate in the vast parking lot and then be escorted down corridors even dingier than the ones in the public sections.  We waited behind a rusted chain link fence through the pregame show and batting practice.  And then our moment in the – not sun!  We ran on the field, sang, left. 

This baseball memory got me thinking about stadium architecture.  When we go to a game, or just watch it on TV, we see the front of the house, the stands, the field.  We don’t see what’s behind the scenes, the locker room, the training room. But we anthem singers were part of the “downstairs” crew, we were backstage, to use the theater metaphor.  We huddled and waited, and then, like the team, we came out of the dreary bowels of the building, and into the bright lights of the field, the tens of thousands of cheering fans, the pubic announcer – “Please Welcome….!”

Sports arenas are a curious combination of the very public stage and all that’s behind the scenes to make the spectacle happen.  Out front - the manicured field, the big screens and noise, like a theater staged for action and entertainment.  And then there’s the hidden back stage, locker rooms and training rooms and security and delivery.  The public usually sees only the front of the house.  We singers got a small glimpse of the bowels.

Stadiums and ballparks actually descended from theaters (Greek) and amphitheaters (Roman), both massive public structures for performance and entertainment.  The Greeks knew how to build a mean theater, great acoustics even today.  When they built the original Olympus stadium in 8^th century BC, it could seat 45,000 people, plus the athletes, who were competing in a race of many “stadia,” a Greek measure for 1/100^th of a mile, hence the name. 

The Romans added even more drama and excitement to public spectacle.  The “Circus Maximus” in Rome (“circus” –actually an oval track for chariots and horses) seated 200,000.  They added a fourth wall to the Greek U-design, making it easier to charge admission, and with a private entrance from the emperor’s palace.  Roman “arenas” also had a special viewing spots for the emperor, who acted sort of like the judges in American Idol, casting the deciding vote on whether the final act would be the slaughter of an animal or Christian martyr.  (“Arena” means “sand” in Latin.  A sand hobbyist collector today is an “arenophile.”  They needed a lot of sand to mop up all that blood.  So it was literally a “sand lot.”)

OK, like parent, like child.  If ancient theater and amphitheater begat today’s modern stadiums and ballparks, that’s why we still like to gather in the tens of thousands to witness speed, skill, and violence.  And is it a vestige of Roman imperialism that requires we sing the national anthem before ball games?  (And why not before basketball or football games?) And so many American flags.  It sometimes feels like a political convention.   At least today’s athletes do not have to say to their owners (as the martys reputedly had to, to the emperor) “We who are about to die, salute you.”  (Well, some team owners have about as much humanity as Roman emperors.  And football players actually do die in the cause of entertaining their owners.)

Ken Burns did a fantastic 9-part series on the history of baseball (some of it is on You Tube), nine decades, presented as the nine “innings” of its near century as “America’s pastime.”  I learned from him that we call it a ball “park” because the first games were played, not in Cooperstown NY as legend would have it, but in an even more iconic American city, Hoboken, New Jersey, in an open public park, known (could it get any better?) as “The Elysian Fields.”  Paradise in Jersey!  From “parks” they went to “fields” and “grounds” like Ebbets, and Wrigley and Polo. 

But the rural game became increasingly urban and there was money to be made in big stadiums and domes.  A building boom created today’s billion dollar behemoths, funded by a very American marriage of politics and corporate greed.  In Europe many new rugby and football stadiums were built as well, not just because of the popularity of the game, but because so many tragic deaths from stampedes and raucous drunken crowds led to laws requiring stadiums to be “all seaters”  - every one must have a seat.  That was less of a problem in US sporting venues; lazy Americans would never stand through a whole game.  Our biggest (literally) challenge when building new stadiums has been to make the seats bigger for our bigger butts.

Stadium design includes more and more amenities, especially food and drink. At the Giants’ Park you can eat garlic fries and Ghirardelli chocolate and every ethnic food you can think of.  They know that women go to games too and made enough bathrooms.  They have a kids play area and last year they added an organic garden just beyond left field.  So hip, so Californian.

“The House that Ruth Built” is a nickname for Yankee Stadium, sort of the Vatican for the religion of American baseball.  “House” can mean line and lineage, the house of David, the house of Babe Ruth.  But a house is also a building, a structure, a home.  The goal of baseball is getting home, unlike those linear games of soccer and football.  Most important spot in the whole massive structure?  Home plate. 

Come on home, baseball fans, baseball players.  Home is where the heart is.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter

Jesus the Carpenter

Since I’m a Christian minister who builds a little, and I write here about construction and tools, you’d think I’d love it that Jesus was a carpenter.  How cool is it that, that this guy I admire and try to follow, worked in construction?  He was so different from me, and lived long ago and far away, but we both like to hammer and saw!

After a frustrating day on the road with the disciples or the Pharisees, neither of whom seemed to listen very well, maybe Jesus would go back to his workshop and build a little table, or sand down a nice bowl for his mom.  Just to relax and see some actual results.

I can identify with that part of his dual identity – rabbi and carpenter.  Both my husband and I, minister builders, have been known to say, “I get it why Jesus was a carpenter.  It’s so satisfying to look at something you built and say, I did that.  While ministry can be a little frustrating in the results department – did I really accomplish anything today?”

But I must admit, a lot of the carpenter myth about Jesus seems like just that, a nice fairy tale.  Sweet father Joseph is a carpenter, teaches his son in the little Nazareth woodshop, son has a nice common touch, and takes Dad’s building skills and uses them not just with wood but builds the Kingdom of God.  

(It’s a tale eerily reminiscent of Pinocchio – another sort of odd son of a carpenter (Geppetto) who strives to be good, suffers death but then the Holy Spirit, uh, Blue Fairy, brings him back to life.  Bad joke about this.)

In the Gospels there are only two brief references to Jesus as a carpenter.  Actually only one specifically about Jesus -  incredulous folks say, “Isn’t this the carpenter….?”  In the other reference, a crowd is likewise incredulous, but adds in a little hostility - “Can this be Joseph the carpenter’s son…?”

Being a carpenter does not seem to be a job that increases Jesus’ credibility – why should we listen to this carpenter, or why would a carpenter have any insight into God or the meaning of life?  I guess these folks don’t know that we carpenters can apply our great skills to other enterprises (a good eye, steady hand, some skill with measuring, finding the right tools etc…)

Most likely they scorn him as carpenter or carpenter’s son because a “tekton” (the Greek word) was not a beloved Geppetto or “This Old House” restorer.  Literally a craftsperson, either a builder in wood or a stone mason, tektons belonged to one of the lowest and most scorned social classes of Jesus’ time, even below the peasants, just above the untouchables and expendables (according to Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan.)  It would be like saying, why should we listen to this septic tank cleaner?  

So while we may romanticize the carpenter, his supposed occupation did nothing for Jesus’ credibility or success.  But it’s good to learn that Jesus really was a lowly man, not even of the peasant class, let alone a union shop contractor or a professional rabbi/teacher.  No, the tektons, the artisans were men and women barely visible or acceptable.  Christians would do well to remember that our messiah was such a man.

A very different view of Jesus the carpenter can be found in The Last Temptation of Christ, the controversial novel by the modern Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis.  His Jesus isn’t a jolly craftsman building chairs or houses either.  Instead, this Jesus builds crosses.  The man who is to die on a cross is employed by the occupying Roman forces to build these very instruments of execution.

Pretty heavy symbolism, or irony.  I didn’t get it at first, I recall, why the author created this devise.  And a wise colleague said, “It’s just another example of Jesus’ humanity.  We all build our own crosses, we all at least contribute to the situations that sink us.” Kazantzakis uses these scenes of Jesus sweatily and dramatically carving these death machines as a way to show his own inner turmoil, his “temptations” to live only a human life, most controversially for many, with Mary Magdalene.  (Kazantsakis was excommunicated from the Orthodox church for writing this book, and when Martin Scorcese made a movie of it he received death threats for years.)  Traditional so-called Christians couldn’t imagine or accept that Jesus would have any kind of inner turmoil or that he would need to make a living or that he would take Roman money or that he would sweat and toil over lumber and tools.  IE, that he would be human.

The other irony or controversy is that the Lord of Life would use his constructive skills to build a destructive object.  (Lenny Bruce said that if Jesus had died today we’d all be wearing little electric chairs around our necks.)  But that’s something we humans do all the time.  

The English word carpenter seems to come from old Latin words that mean carriage; a carpenter built wooden carriages.  But the definition goes on to specify that carpenters built carriages, but not Roman chariots, vehicles of war.  That was another job.  No, the dictionary says, carpenter’s carriages were the kind of vehicles that women rode in.  That interested me, women’s vehicles - does that mean they are more comfortable, smoother?  Or that they were used by women to carry the food and other products they had grown to market, as opposed to those male chariots of war?  

So I guess I do like it that Jesus was a carpenter.  Because it reminds me that he was truly a man for all the people, especially the poor, since he was one of them.  And that he did have good building skills, both for community and kingdom.  That he much preferred the company of women and food than men of war.  And that even if he did struggle with his own demons and doubts (“Take this cup of suffering away from me.”) and maybe even built his own cross, even strong carpenter nails could not keep him there.   I guess I will keep building alongside him.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter

The (Other) Animals that Live in My House

More stories about life in our hand-built house in the woods.  While writing this I started humming, "All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small...."

I pretend that it’s only my husband and me living in this house, but honestly all kinds of other creatures call this place home.

Termites.  Carpenter ants.  Mice.  Wood rats.  Bats. 

(Also some visitors.  Birds fly in an open door.   A feral cat sneaks in occasionally for our cat’s food.  Various bugs come and go.    Ron says that when he was first building the house and the windows weren’t yet in, he woke one morning in his sleeping bag on the floor and there was a deer in the living room.)

Most of us have shared living space with various wild animals.  Living in New York City, I felt like I was renting from the cockroach landlords.

But this is the first time I have cohabited with bats. 

Hundreds of bats live under the redwood shakes that cover the outside of our house.  Our friend Byrd lived here while the house was still being built and his rent was to mill the shakes off old redwood stumps on our property, remnants of the early 20th century logging along the central coast. (Chop them off vertically with an old chisel axe-type tool, the froe.)

Byrd left us a huge collection of redwood shakes, and Ron nailed them to the outside of the house one summer (1972).   Then it was school time, and Ron went back to Berkeley to teach more Unitarian-Universalist minister candidates and to wonder about how his half-built house was doing 140 miles to the south. 

Well, the forest denizens must have quickly scouted out this new empty housing development, because the next summer when he returned, he heard curious squeaking in the walls.  At dawn and dusk he’d see flashes of black beings darting around outside the house.  He realized bats had moved in under the shakes.

The collective term for bats is a “colony.”  I guess we were colonized.  Did they come on little ships from another land?  Or imperialistically arrive to rape and pillage our native land/house?

Actually they are most welcome co-habitants.  Their squeaking in the walls is sort of comforting.  Their darting flights at dawn and dusk are little ballets or Blue Angel flyovers.  (Contrary to folklore they do not try to fly in your hair or bite your neck.  Their radar is really good and they stay far away from any other life form they can detect. I’ve sat outside til dark and listened to their whirring and never been touched.)

Like all animals they eat and screw and poop.  That's taken some getting used to.

Well, the eating part is an unexpected bonus.  They eat all the bugs.  We have nary a mosquito or deer fly.  They are like goats in the poison oak - they are thrilled to eat the very thing that annoys us the most.  Thanks you bats!

The pooping?  Well, if we needed any proof that bats were living under the shakes, we get it from all the regular piles of little bat poop pellets on the stairs every morning (especially warm days - I think they sleep more on cold days.)   Ron the first time builder had put the staircases outside the house - ingenious, and fine in California, except the rainy season.  Since the bats live under the shakes that line these stairs, the redwood steps are their litter box.  Poopy.  I try to sweep them regularly.  Then it rains.  Wet and poopy, slippery on wet redwood steps.  Just a part of living here.  Always use the railings, especially in the dark. 

And their sexual habits?  One spring early morning I was sleeping in my daughter’s old room that looks out over the big deck and I was wakened by a strange rhythmic thumping noise.  Whop whop whop.  Confused by being in a different room and by the early hour, I lifted my sleepy head to look out the windows.  Hundreds, maybe thousands of bats were flying in a tight circle above the deck on the lower level, round and round.  But they flew so fast and frenetically that they had abandoned the precision formations I had always observed.  The thumping was an occasional bat hitting the house, but even that seemed barely to slow them down.  I peered in confusion and awe, until the day got lighter, and gradually the circle slowed and the bats flew away, maybe back to their redwood shake beds.  (It’s hard not to make a Dracula reference here, back to the coffin as the sun rises.)

Later I described this strange phenomenon to a park ranger I know who is also a bat expert, she even builds little bat houses at the park and interprets how great bats are.  Oh yes, she said, that’s a spring ritual that is rarely observed.  We think it might have something to do with mating, some kind of group ritual that’s intense and deliberate.  Oh, I said, you mean group sex?  (This was at a lecture she was giving on bats.  It was a wee bit dry.  I think I was trying to liven it up.)

Well yes, she said, you could call it that.  Mating in flight?  Then do they build nests?  How long is gestation?   There is still more to learn about my neighbors.  Well, my roommates.  Glad they moved in.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter

Tree Houses

In which your building correspondent reminisces about two of her favorite things; childhood and construction, that is, tree houses.

We built our kids a tree house 25 years ago, in the trio of bay laurel trees that look out over the canyon.  It’s not far from the house, but up in the branches you feel like you are far away, on a ship sailing through air.

Actually we added in a few ship-like features, an old wheel and a flag, and it soon became a pirate ship.  Many happy hours were spent there saying “argh” and “ahoy.”

I say we build it for our kids, but we all enjoyed it.  Sometimes we would sleep up there amid those bay laurels – it was like sleeping inside a jar of bay leaves.  The sweet pungent smell filled our dreams with journeys to more exotic lands.

My husband had no tree house when he was growing up.  In the Depression on a farm I think the idea seemed too frivolous.  But he did have a barn to play in, with some of the same features, a high hidden spot for imagination in nature (well, hay.)

But in suburban New Jersey I think every home had a tree house.  Ours was in the large maple tree right in front of our house, and perhaps my interest in building comes from my five-year-old contribution to this structure, the first time I used hammer and nail to build something I could inhabit.  I actually think my mother did most of the building, but we all took part, and I recall heated arguments about whether there should be steps nailed into the tree or a rope ladder.  Rope ladder won, which meant one could deny entrance to other would-be residents, or pirates, by pulling up the ladder.

Richard Louv in his important book, Last Child in the Woods, argues that kids are suffering tremendously these days from lack of free time to play outdoors with no plan and little supervision.  He calls it “nature deficit disorder” and cites all kinds of studies about the over-programming of kids, the paranoia of parents about so-called strangers and the hyper regulation of planned communities which allow for no crazy projects like tree houses.  I am grateful I lived in an earlier and simpler era where my parents helped us kids build a crazy structure and then left us alone.

And where they didn’t sue our neighbors the Perkinses when I fell out of their tree house.  Besides helicopter parenting, that’s the other reason tree houses are actually being forbidden in building codes these days – lawsuits.  Of course they are “attractive nuisances” – that’s the whole point!

The Perkins’ tree house was in some big old cherry trees.  I climbed up there only once.  Their kids were older; the tree house had been un-maintained and abandoned for some time.  The platform spanned two, maybe three rougher, sappier big old cherries, not a lot of branches, massive trunks and the climb up was longer and harder than ours.

As I stood there surveying this new view, the platform slowly tipped forward.  I was horizontal, then vertical; headfirst back down to earth, scrapping myself on that rough sappy bark all the way.  I got a huge bump on my head, bloody knees and shins.

(My somewhat casual mother called the doctor who suggested I stay home a day from school.  No, I was supposed to be in a play the next day, a third grade presentation about Peter Stuyvesant.  I was a little Dutch girl, sitting on a low three-legged stool.  Of course I went to school.  It hurt to put my little lace cap over the bump on my sore head, and I hoped I wouldn’t bleed on the quaint long dress.  I staggered as I got up from that stool to sing the closing song.  Years later a doctor felt my collarbone and said, “Oh, you broke this when you were younger?”  And I said, “Not that I recall.”)

Our kids are long grown and gone.  A couple years ago my husband the real builder started eyeing the boards in the bay laurel tree house.  Nice two by fours that would save a trip to the lumber yard and would come in handy in other projects.  But he recalled the hours of pleasure sailing on the high seas in that structure, and carefully asked each kid if he could take it down.  Sure, they both said, with barely a thought.  Pirate days were passed.

But I objected, remembering probably not just our happy days up in the branches and nights in the bay leaf jar, but my own childhood adventures in the maple and cherry.  Ron was patient.  I spent an afternoon up there.  I thought about another bay leaf overnight, but it really was starting to tilt and rot.  Better use the wood now before another wet winter.  Really only the cat would miss a high perch from which to survey her kingdom.

Maybe we like tree houses because they remind us of our ancestral home in African trees, safe from predators, able to scan for dinner.  They certainly fulfill the promise of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, that the main purpose of any house is to give us a play to daydream.  I hope my children, if they have kids, will not object to a new tree house at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, a little dangerous, out there on the high seas.

Copyright @ 2016 Deborah Streeter