Two Large White Buildings

Every Thursday morning I leave my brown house in the green forest and drive 10 miles up the Pacific coast beside the blue ocean to the town of Monterey.

Monterey Bay AquariumMy destination is a large white building, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a three-story former sardine cannery now a world-class conservation center and tourist destination. 

On the way I drive past another large white building, the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, a large sprawling complex, pure white outside and in.

I love both of these buildings, their style, their beauty, their history, their purpose.  Both are very important to our community, and have been a central part of my life here, indeed life saving to me.

So I’m going to spend the next couple columns thinking about this Hospital and this Aquarium, these two large public white buildings.

What do they have in common?  Think about a hospital and/or aquarium you know and see if this list works, or what you can add to it.

   - Big buildings with lots of different kinds of living things inside.

   - Concerns and rules about health and cleanliness.  

   - Complicated plumbing systems. 

   - Often multistoried and white.

   - Many windows.

   - People coming and going.  Some have jobs there and try to keep things alive.  Others pay to get in and
     hope for a good experience and value for their dollar.  Some are volunteers who help others find their way.

   - Open rooms for gathering, waiting, viewing and visiting.

   - Behind the scenes rooms like mysterious labs and quarantine rooms and storage areas.  Big machines in the
      basement or on the roof.  Use of the term “operation.”

   - Inspired by science and technology; at the same time they try for some personal touches and aesthetics. 

   - At all hours there is at least a minimal hum of activity and monitoring; you can’t just turn off the lights and
     go home at night or on holidays.

   - Places of birth and death and everything in between.

   - Gift shops. 

   - Cafeterias.

   - Complicated kitchens.

   - Good clean, accessible bathrooms.

Some history:

Community Hospital of the Monterey PeninsulaIt’s universally called CHOMP, Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula.  It began 100 years ago as a small clinic in Carmel, then a larger building in downtown Monterey.  In 1962 doctors and civic minded citizens raised a lot of money for a modern, state of the art, architect-designed building on land in a large pine forest donated by Samuel FB Morse, local generous land baron.  With a large indoor fountain and koi pond, art work in every room and forest views from every window, it has a somewhat ritzy style and reputation (the nutrition staff delivers your meals wearing black jackets and bow ties.)  But it's a highly rated heart and cancer center.  Both my husband and I have had life saving surgery there.

The Aquarium’s history begins with the prosperous sardine industry of the first half of the 20^th century, with canneries up and down the Monterey Bay coastline.  Norwegian immigrant Knut Hovden built the Hovden Cannery in the 1916 and became the Henry Ford of the industry, automating much of fishing and canning of the tiny fish.  His cannery operated into the 1950’s, but even he couldn’t can what was no longer in the bay, and over-fishing caused the industry to crash after the war. The big white building sat empty for decades, a hulking abandoned shell, until young marine biology grad students from the next door’s Stanford University Hopkins Marine Station came up with the crazy idea to buy it and transformed into the Aquarium.  It helped that one of them was the daughter of David and Lucile Packard, of Hewlett Packard fame and fortune.  Designed to keep the look of the old cannery on the outside, inside it has million gallon tanks, a complicated plumbing system taking water from the bay, and state of the art technology and labs. It opened its doors in 1984 and welcomes over a million visitors every year.

Both institutions are non profits.   I like that community folks saw a need, and that wealthy local people were generous.  I also like that they created not just functional spaces, but places of beauty.  Both could have sacrificed beauty for function.  But the founders of both the Hospital and the Aquarium insisted that beauty would further their mission.  Beauty helps healing, and beauty inspires conservation.  

The Hospital has a huge budget for art.   I was recently a patient at Community Hospital; in my room hung a painting of a favorite local beach, China Cove at Point Lobos, where I have visited many times.  My slow healing came thanks to the drugs and nurses and physical therapists.  And thanks to that painting, especially during those long lonely painful nights, staring at the cove.  Someone set up their easel and painted it, someone decided to have art in every room, someone donated it, someone hung it up; my healers.

The Aquarium also uses beauty to promote its mission, which is “To inspire conservation of the ocean.”  They know that changing behavior (being better ocean stewards) requires inspiration as well as information, and that beauty inspires.  A recent exhibit, “Jellies: Living Art” presented jelly fish as works of art, with some of the tanks surrounded by ornate picture frames and protected with a velvet rope in front like at a museum.

I go to the Aquarium much more often than the Hospital.  I’m at the Aquarium at least once a week, and have been a volunteer for 17 years – I just got my 3000 hour pin. There have been times in my life when I worked at a hospital, as a chaplain, so I was there every day, at age 26 and again at age 43.  Now I go to hospitals more rarely, but in the past 10 years I’ve had two major surgeries at CHOMP, and have visited family and friends there often, attended births and deaths.

With both big white buildings I feel confident when I walk through their fancy entrances.  There’s a sense of competence and experience and care for life that pervades both kinds of buildings and all the people and other life forms inside.  I feel like I am in good hands.

My experience as hospital chaplain and visitor (and as patient) is that health care workers seem to be more caring and generous than the general population.  Likewise Aquarium staff.  Maybe there is self-selection for folks going into this kind of work, that they tend to reach out, listen, want things to be better.  Or maybe these work environments bring out the better parts of human nature in a way that working in a factory or changing people’s oil simply doesn’t encourage or reward.  I like to think that working in a big, open, clean, well-lit, life-promoting building fosters open, life-promoting people. 

In both places there’s a lot going on, noise, movement, groups of people gathered to make decisions and try to make things better. 

But both places also offer quiet rooms for these visitors and patients.  Hospitals have chapels or meditation rooms.  And Aquariums have realized that some people come not for the excitement and exotic thrills, but for more meditative reflection and inspiration.  Exit surveys show that 15% of Aquarium visitors are what the marketing people call “spiritual pilgrims.”  So this big white building has set aside a few quiet places, plays meditative new age music in the jellies exhibit, posts inspiration quotations on the walls.  I like seeing fish, and I like seeing quotations from Thoreau; “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

Many doctors have fish tanks in their offices because looking at marine life calms people down; medical studies prove that blood pressure goes down looking at fish.  So maybe the two white buildings could combine – fish in the operating rooms, operating tables in front of the exhibits.

For now we just say thanks, to these two big white buildings full of life and care and beauty.

Copyright © 2105 Deborah Streeter

Kitchen Table and Dining Room Table

As we wander around buildings and construction and tools and houses, I think back to my childhood home, and the tables where we ate.

In the house of my childhood we ate breakfast and lunch at the kitchen table and dinner at the dining room table.

The kitchen table was at the sunny east end of the yellow room, with windows looking over my mother’s roses along the driveway.  The table was  sturdy, a pine half circle built into the wall, with sort of modern plastic molded chairs.  Between meals I liked to sit on top of the table as well as at the table, drawing, feeding my fish, talking to my mother while she cooked.  The only radio in the house was at that table (until I became a teenager and got one in my room to listen to the Beatles.)  I was sitting at that table eating a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch one November Friday afternoon (we got out of school early on Fridays) when we heard about Kennedy’s assassination.

Every night at 6:30 we had dinner together in the dining room around a family heirloom walnut table with silver candlesticks. The room’s bare walls were white, and there was a nice oriental carpet, from the same ancestor as the table, I think.  The kitchen floor was linoleum but the dining room was hardwood.  We had to dress nicely for dinner and take part in conversation, usually led by my father.  He had grown up in a very formal household, and insisted we use our knife and fork correctly.  We were not allowed to pick up our food in our hands (I never ate fried chicken until I went to college) or make a mush of our peas and mashed potatoes.  (If we begged we were allowed to go out onto the front porch in the summer and mush up our ice cream, but not at table.)  We waited for everyone to be finished and then asked to be excused.  My mother would serve the vegetables and starch at her end, then pass the plate to my father who would place the meat on it.  I was served last, as the youngest.  We each had our own plates, in a series on American Trains and they were stacked in the right order.  Mine was “Best Friend of Charleston.”  (The first American steam locomotive, 1830, but you knew that.  I was a little spoiled, as the youngest, and figured I really was the best friend.  My brother’s train plate was “Man o’ War.”)

In retrospect this seems antiquated and rigid, but it seemed normal to me.  Sometimes we went to my grandmother’s an hour away for Sunday dinner and that was really formal, with servants and finger bowls.  So our dinner table didn’t seem that extreme.  I did notice when I went to college that no one used their knife and fork as precisely as I did. 

With my own kids I tried to have family dinners several times a week, to carry on the practice of shared conversation at a slow pace and some basic table manners.  I never pushed the upper class knife and fork routine, nor did we have a dress code.  But we copied my parents in having candles we lit to mark the beginning of the meal and ritually blew out at the end.  And we do each have favorite forks and plates.  My husband the carpenter made both our dining room table, from thick walnut slabs milled in our woods, and the smaller plywood and pine table attached to the kitchen wall.  Same wood as the two tables in my childhood home.  We think we are different from our parents, but maybe not so much.

I wrote earlier this summer about visiting the house in Akron of AA co-founder Dr. Bob and had these pictures.  His kitchen table, where he and Bill W. first met and helped each other stay sober, with coffee made by their wives.   In a recent Grapevine, the AA newsletter, someone wrote, “Alcoholics Anonymous was nurtured in its early days around a kitchen table ... True, we have progressed materially to better furniture and more comfortable surroundings. Yet the kitchen table must ever be appropriate for us. It is the perfect symbol of simplicity.”

The dining room table in Dr. Bob’s house, like my childhood house,  was more formal, less used.  But it did have on it the typewriter that his daughter used to type the first draft of the Big Book and I think the docent said she worked at that very table.  The only work I can remember being done on our dining room table was laying out patterns for sewing, the thin pattern paper that my mother would pin to the fabric.  But the sewing machine was in another room.  The fancy old dining room table was really only for eating and talking.   While all kinds of things happened at the kitchen table – drawing, fish, radio.

The kitchen table and the dining room table inspired two well known contemporary American works, both by California women.  Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal, by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is a very popular and moving collection of hopeful stories told by people living with disease, which is widely recommended by healers and has helped millions.  Her style embodies the informality, simplicity and deep conversation that happens around a simple table in a warm room filled with delicious cooking smells and dear friends and maybe even a mother to help you feel better. 

Artist Judy Chicago created “The Dinner Party” art installation in 1979, when I first saw it in San Francisco, and it is now permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where I saw it again recently, 35 years later.  It is a large triangular table with 39 place settings of mythical and historic women, from Ishtar to Virginia Woolf, with ceramic plates decorated with symbols of each woman’s life and embroidered table fabric with more names.  A feminist art icon, it was controversial from the start, for its explicit sexual imagery, choice and omission of women, and whether it really is art.

The Dinner PartyI like it because of its formality; it looks like a state dinner, with a classy table cloth and fancy dishes and important guests.  I liked the tradition and routine of dinner at 6:30 and using your knife and fork correctly.  It seems a little stuffy now, but at that table I learned to talk and listen.  Imagine the conversation between Hildegard of Bingen and Emily Dickenson at this fancy formal table.  And you know those woman must have done work at their dining room tables, painting and poetry and all kinds of creative work. 

These days my own dining room table is taken over by a big jigsaw puzzle I’m doing.  Our kids are grown and gone and we eat mostly in the kitchen out of bowls. With spoons, little worry about the correct fork.  But I do still like to sit at table and talk and eat, even light a candle.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Nest and Niche

Writing last week about tents got me thinking about other temporary structures, shelters put up just for a day or a few weeks. Like those hip urban pop-up restaurants that appear and disappear overnight. Or a funky lean-to made from driftwood on a happy beach afternoon and abandoned to the tides.

And birds’ nests. Lovingly built for breeding and birthing and babysitting and then left behind for the inevitable fledging and migration. (The nest may be used next year, but it most likely will need some serious renovation.)

So here’s a piece I wrote originally for my other weekly column, “Blue Theology Tide-ings,” where I reflect on coasts and oceans, and, as I do with “Building Blocks” the dreams and metaphors and images that water can inspire.

When a bird builds a nest, if creates at once a birth bowl, a baby basket, and a breakfast nook.

Twice, as I recovered from major surgery, I made camp for weeks on our cozy fireside daybed, and called it my “nest.” For this old bird, my nest was also a safe healing place.

California brown pelicans once nested up and down the west coast, including at Point Lobos. But the pesticide DDT made their eggshells so fragile they collapsed under their mother’s weight. By 1970 biologists found only 600 nests and only on Anacapa Island in the Channel Islands. It took decades of political pressure to outlaw DDT, wait for streams and oceans to clear and clean, watch the birds nests on the islands, and keep all people away.

But last year – nearly 6000 nests. Conservation works, if you work it.

And here on the Monterey Peninsula, where pelicans spend the winter, and then head back south for baby time, they have been exhibiting for several years what biologists call “pre-nesting behavior.” That is, they might be coming back here to stay year round. Like sea otters, whose range also shrank to almost nothing because of human greed, and which now extends hundreds of miles, might the pelicans rebuild their baby bowls this far north?

The French word for nest is “niche.” Nous disons “niche” aussi en Anglais, meaning “sheltered place, a recess in a wall.” Or “a habitat supplying all that is needed for an organism to exist.” Or “a place, employment, status or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted. “ My niche, my nest, where I am birthed, fed, healed, protected, and where I thrive.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Jesus the Camper

My columns recently have been about strong sturdy structures, bridges and crypts and foundations.  Here are some thoughts about movable flexible shelters – tents.

The 1970’s and 80’s TV show M*A*S*H, about army doctors and nurses in the Korean War was funny, sad, sweet, ironic, political (its barbs were really about the Vietnam War) and very popular.  More people watched the final episode than had watched any TV event up till then.

The whole show took place in tents.  Mobile Army Surgical Hospital tents, perched near or in the war zone.  They operated in tents, ate and showered in tents, made love in tents, drank martinis in tents.  Father Mulcahy, the sweet and sort of dopey army priest character, led worship in tents.

Occasionally the fighting came so close that they had to quickly take down all the tents, pack up the whole camp and move to safety.  You can do that with tents.

I am a child of the suburbs and bucket lists.  So for me, a tent evokes vacation and adventure; funky canvas childhood pup tents at camp, and fancy Alpine extreme, sleek, light tents.

But for many world citizens, like nomads and people who follow their flocks, tents are the only kind of home they know.  And for refugees and disaster victims, the gift of a tent is literally a life-saver.

The word derives from tendere, to stretch.  Tents are structures made from fabric stretched on poles - light, mobile, inexpensive (unless you go to REI). 

There’s a great religious tradition of “tent meetings” especially in the African American communities, summer treks to a big field where they would set up huge tents.  For days they would sing and preach and eat and pray and reunite with families from afar, the tents and people assembled just for a short time, but lasting in meaning and memory.

They probably got the idea of tent meetings from the Bible, which is, among other things, the long story of a nomadic people settling down in villages and cities, but never forgetting their tents.  Leading your flocks into green pastures or fleeing Pharaoh into the wilderness – you always had your tent with you.

When Moses came down from the mountaintop with the two tablets, the people built a special tent to house and protect and carry around these new sacred community guidelines.  The King James Version translators gave this portable structure a fancy name, “tabernacle,” but in Hebrew it’s just the basic word for tent, same word used to describe a shepherd’s simple shelter.  In this tent Moses held sacred conversations, both with God and other leaders, and some modern translators use the phrase  “the tent of meeting” or “the tent of presence.”

Those 17^th century Bible translators, commissioned by King James, lived in Oxford and Cambridge and probably had not done a lot or camping.  They just could not bring themselves to use the word “tent.”

And then in the New Testament, when John describes how Jesus took human form, the incarnation, he wrote, in Greek, “And the word became flesh and pitched its tent among us.”  But those proper urbane English translators probably just couldn’t imagine Jesus in a tent.  Their lord was clean and permanent  and high and mighty.  Not a camper.  Likewise their words and buildings and worship; clean, permanent, high, mighty.   

So they translated, “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.”   Such a different image, to dwell, as opposed to “pitching a tent.” But Jesus calls himself a shepherd not a home owner, he certainly knew tents.  He was a carpenter after all, could easily put hammer to stake, and pitch the tent.  Pitch, such an active word, unlike dwell.  Tents are not for wimps.

Sadly, unlike Moses and the MASH health workers and those African Americans folks, we don’t worship in tents much any more.  Instead we sit in solid strong church tabernacles and wait for God to magically show up and “dwell” with us. I wonder what it would be like if we had more tent meetings and tents of meeting.  Our sacred spaces should be flexible places of community, not one-person tents.

Calling our churches tents might also remind us that our fortress buildings don’t serve (just) as a safe shelter for us.  They should also inspire us to help folks who have no home, like all those Syrian refugees, for whom a tent is their only home.

And like those MASH tents, our churches should more obviously be places of healing.  Ever visit a really sick person and see a canopy over their head with moist oxygen, helping them breath?  They call that a – tent.  Lifesaving encampments in hospital rooms.  Tent- like churches could help us all breath a little safer and deeper.

So get out your camping gear.  Stretch yourself, as you stretch that fabric over the poles.  Think of all those millions sleeping on the hard ground tonight.  Pitch your tent.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Wind Eye: The Domestic Anatomy of Windows

Look at your house, or apartment, and picture it as a body.  What’s the face, the mouth, the skin?

In any residence, the eyes are the windows.

Domestic anatomy: we are bodies, and we experience our surroundings in body language and image.   

(I might write more sometime about domestic anatomy; the mouth of the house/body would be the front door, or the kitchen.  The back door and the garbage cans, the bathroom – that’s the house’s bladder and intestines.  The bones – that would be the house’s foundation and beams.  Our domestic skin – the roof and walls.  That’s actually a building term, the skin of a building.)

But for today, windows and eyes.  Without our body’s windows, the eyes, we are blind.  Without our house’s eyes, the windows, we’re in the dark and separated from the outside world.

Our English word “window” comes from the Old Norse word  “vindauga,” which means “wind eye.”  

Those old Norse, so many great words.  What they called “windows” were burlap or wood shutters over a hole in the wall, as Asians had oiled paper windows, and Romans translucent marble.   Glass windows weren’t invented until the 14^th century, and only became common in middle class homes in the 17^th century.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

The “wind eye”: the eye of the house that lets in the wind, or sees the wind, or wonders what the wind is doing out there.  Beauty is in the eye of the wind. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Two interesting times and places in the history of windows: 17^th century Holland and 1901 New York City.

The 17^th century Dutch were good at a lot of things: shipbuilding, international finance, universities, religious tolerance, tulips, Rembrandt and Vermeer.  Being a rising world power led to a vibrant bourgeoisie who virtually created domestic architecture, simple, warm homes filled with light.

My favorite writer on architecture, Witold Rybczynski tells this story in his great book, Home: a Short History of an Idea.  Up until then houses were bigger, with extended families and tenants all living together, and darker, with wooden shutters and smoky rooms.  But these newly bourgeois folks had the money and desire to build homes just for their families, no need for tenants.  So they built smaller and more simple houses.  They wanted the walls to be light in weight, since they were built on pilings on reclaimed land.  And they wanted them to have light, not those gloomy medieval house.  So they used a lot of these new fangled things called windows (or whatever the Dutch word is) because glass windows did both – they were light, lighter than wooden or stucco walls.  And they brought light far into these narrow interiors. 

At first their windows were like their doors – Dutch!  Divided horizontally, there was glass only at the top, with wood on the bottom.  As glass improved, they made the windows bigger, but it became awkward to open such large windows.  So they invented a new type of window, the sash, or double hung window, split in half vertically, opening in or out.  Soon these were copied in England and France.

Look at this Vermeer, like most of his paintings, a domestic scene.  The bright, sunlight rooms were cheerful, in contrast to the dark interiors that were typical in paintings from other countries.  Vermeer’s famous light symbolizes all that is new in Holland, and the wall map of the New World underlines this point; light symbolizes the new and wakes us up to the new. The Enlightenment and the invention of windows happened about the same time.  It’s harder to stay insular and traditional, when the “wind’s eye” is beckoning you outside.

Two centuries later waves of immigrants flooded to New York’s Lower East Side.   Slumlords built block after block of tenement buildings with long narrow multi-family apartments, called railroad flats because they were like a line of train cars.  These rooms had no exterior windows.  Overcrowding and lack of air and light led to disease and despair. 

Of the many reformation efforts to humanize these slums, a landmark law passed in 1901 required that every room in an apartment have an outward facing window and that buildings have inner shafts for air and light. This law revolutionized building design, with more corners to create space for windows, and interior light wells that brought much needed air to stagnant rooms. 

Without windows we can’t see and without windows we can breath. 

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

One more thought about windows and eyes.  They are something of a paradox, because they are at the same time a source of great power, and they are inherently fragile.  A window opens up a room, a vista, as eyes open up our lives, creating possibility.  But both are also so vulnerable; a nick on the cornea, a crack in the glass, a shattered pane, a punctured eye ball – devastating. Poke my cheek – annoying.  Poke my eye – could be life changing.

That’s why we frame and protect them both.  Windows we protect with wood or steel frames.  Now there is shatterproof glass and even new kinds of plastic and glass that can even be a weight bearing part of the wall. 

And our bodies have evolved with greater eye protection - a complex orbital cavity in our skulls, 7 interconnected bones frame and shelter our tender eyeballs.  Plus eye lids – how often we close them in the face of a threat.  And safety glasses.  Our bodies know these little jellied balls need protection.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

It’s an old saying: our eyes are the windows of our soul.  If you can read this, thank your eyeballs.  And then go over to the window and look out.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter