Cementing Our Lives

“What is a kiss?  Why this, as some approve:
The sure, sweet cement, glue and lime of love.”

Robert Herrick, poet and clergyman (1591-1674)

“The feeling of having shared in a common peril is one element in the powerful cement which binds us together.”
Bill Wilson, Alcoholics Anonymous founder, (1895-1971)

Cement comes in heavy bags of a dry chunky powder: a mix of calcium, lime and clay.  I’ve hauled those 60 lb bags in from the car, plopped them into the mixing trough, and broken open the bag with a shovel.  I’m anticipating setting a post, a strong base to last for years.  But I must be careful with cement; it sets fast and it seems a bit poisonous.  Just opening the bag, a toxic smoke rises up that you don’t want to breath too close, nor touch, like it would sting or burn. 

Actually, what I buy is Ready-mix, which is cement already mixed in with various aggregates - gravel and sand.  You stir water into that mix, and you get concrete.  Strictly speaking, cement, the calciumed lime and clay is just the glue.  The final goop, with the added aggregate and the water, is the concrete.

Cement makes things strong and hard, but it’s a little dangerous.  Once you’ve poured the cement, there’s no going back.  Just ask the hapless victims of gangsters , their feet encased in cement and then pushed off a deserted pier, to sleep with the fishes.  Somehow I associate cement with death.  Just keep reading…..

Cementing a relationship, or a deal, has always seemed an odd metaphor to me. I understand the value of glue, bonding and binding.  But I can’t help thinking of the toxic smell and the hard permanence you can crack your head on. When I kiss my beloved I don’t, like poet Herrick, call it a sweet cement.  In a 12-step meeting I feel more that I am linked arm in arm with others, not cemented, immobilized and hard. 

This may be a dilemma of the modern age, to associate cement with dangerous chemicals, and to think that being cemented to others is just a little too constricting.    Maybe in Herrick’s day, even Wilson’s, cement meant something more like Elmer’s Glue, pliable and non-toxic and fun.

A different, more positive way to use cement as a metaphor might be to compare it to our bones.  If our bodies are like buildings, then bones are the foundations and the pillars,  bound together with cement.  Actually both cement and bones are calcium based, and they hold our buildings and our bodies vertical, strong and connected.  Like cement, our bones start off soft and pliable, then harden and strengthen with age.

If you’ve ever scattered the ashes of a loved one after death, you’ve seen the similarity, when life has ended, between bones and cement.  The texture of “cremains,” the remains of your loved one that the crematorium delivers to you, is eerily like that sack of dry rough concrete powder and gravel, some little chunks of the mineral-based bone, similar grayish white color.  It’s like a little box of dry cement.

I know that the texture feels like cement, because I have held a lot of cremains in my hands, even mixed and poured them.  At one church I served we had a memorial garden where we placed human ashes.  Part of my job was to take the remains out of the box from the crematorium, and put them in a brown paper bag, a sandwich bag, which would decompose eventually.  Then I would use a post-hole digger to dig a hole a foot deep or so, and put the full sandwich bag in the hole.  It was at once a very practical and very spiritual kind of job, often done alone.  We had a lunch program at that church and I’d use sandwich bags from their stash; it sort of felt like giving the earth some nourishment.

One year a beloved church member Bill Mudd died, and his wife Joanne gave me his cremains in the box from the mortuary to keep in my office; she was too sad to have them at home.  But she made me promise that when she died I would mix their ashes together and place them together in the garden.  Bill kept me company in his box for several years on a bookshelf in my office, but the day came with it was time to mix in Joanne.  Back down to the church kitchen.  With a mixing bowl I combined the two sets of cremains,  barehanded.  Then I found one bigger sandwich bag, dug one bigger hole.  Reunited, cemented together, in death.

The slang phrase that builders use for cement is “mud.”  Bill and Joanne Mudd, after decades of the sweet cement of shared peril and kisses, were bound and bonded together one last time, in the church kitchen and church garden.  Two strong and tough people, a strong and lasting marriage.  Like cement.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Ascending and Descending

Both these works of art, now considered 20^th century classics, aroused controversy when first exhibited.

What do they have in common?

Marcel DuchampMarcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” (1912) was rejected by the French Academy and caused an outrage at the 1913 Armory show in NY.   M.C. Escher’s “Ascending and Descending” (1960), which like many of his drawings confounds order and gravity, has been dismissed as clever, but not art.

Their common feature?  Besides being iconic 20^th century controversial art works, they both depict staircases.

We’re still writing about architecture, real and symbolic, and the topic today is stairs. 

Staircases                                                         Runner                                    

       Steps                                                       Falling

          Treads                                             Up Down

              Risers                                     Spiral

                 Flight                             Railings

                                 Landing

Duchamp wrote of his painting, “My aim was a static representation of movement.”

A great description of a staircase: a static representation of movement.  It’s nailed in, anchored, solid.  And its job is to move you.   The steps stay standing, and off you go. 

M. C. EscherPerhaps these two very 20^th century artists, Duchamp and Escher, intentionally chose this ancient solid form, the staircase, and then made it shimmer with a nude, or defy gravity by going up and down at the same time, to show how crazy and new was this century and this art.

I couldn’t draw a staircase, but I can sing about one.  Most people would call “Stairway to Heaven” the iconic stairway song, the Led Zeppelin classic, 1971, named by Rolling Stone one of the top ten songs of all time.  The odd lyrics, inspired by Tolkien and Celtic myth, suggest a path, an opening, a journey to the new and unknown. 

But I’m more of a Gershwin fan. My favorite stairway song is “Stairway to Paradise.” You may recall the great scene, in the movie American in Paris, where the dapper Frenchman sings while climbing a magnificent staircase, each step lighting up in turn, gorgeous white-gowned chorus girls leading the way:

All you preachers
Who delight in panning the dancing teachers: Let me tell you there are a lot of features
Of the dance that carry you through The gates of Heaven!
It’s madness
To be always sitting around in sadness
When you could be learning the steps of gladness.

You’ll be happy when you can do just six or seven—
Begin today! You’ll find it nice—
The quickest way to Paradise!
When you practice, Here’s the thing to do:
Simply say as you go:

I’ll build a stairway to Paradise
With a new step every day!
I’m going to get there at any price:
Stand aside, I’m on my way!
I’ve got the blues And up above it’s so fair!
Shoes! Go on and carry me there!
I’ll build a stairway to Paradise,
With a new step every day.

Stairways, in art and song, move us onward and upward into the new. Go on and carry me there.Where? To a better place, Heaven, Paradise. A new step every day, gladness not sadness. Up above it’s so fair!Oh sure, stairs go down also. We fall down the stairs, there are also stairs down to hell. But for today, as I walk up the stairs and even down, I’m humming about Paradise, and the steps of gladness.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

When Buildings Change

I worked for a while in a big building in Belmont, California where many different kinds of people have worked over the past decades. 

Belle Monte Country ClubBuilt in the 20’s as the Belle Monte Country Club, some of the first people to get a paycheck there were big band musicians and lifeguards.  But it did not survive the Depression, when people stopped paying their membership dues and there were no more dances and pool parties. 

The building stood empty until World War II, when the next workers in the building were dogs and dog trainers; it became one of four centers where the Army started the K-9 Corps of dogs trained to guard military installations, sniff bombs, find dead bodies. 

After the war the Kaiser family, starting its healthcare empire, bought the big building and turned it into a cancer research lab; among the employees were thousands of (unpaid) mice. 

Finally the building settled into its current life.  Its workers today include chocolate makers, UPS drivers and nursery school teachers.  Oh, and folks like me, ministers.

Yes, the building is now a church. 

Buildings change.  A lot of buildings (not all) have character, I think, and some actually are characters.  And even might have souls.   So I am wondering: just as our body’s cells completely change every seven years, does a building’s character or soul change when its purpose changes, when different workers show up, or a locker room becomes a Sunday school room?  What changes and what remains the same? 

A clergy colleague Fran Geddes claims that the appeal of old church buildings, even to the unbeliever, is that they have a “residue of the spirit” that can move almost anyone. 

What residue remains, when a building changes?

In Hillary Mantel’s wonderful memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost,” she anchors her tale on different places she has lived.  On the last pages she writes, “The place we live in now is an apartment in a converted insane asylum.  It was built in the 1860’s, one of a loop of great institutions flung around London to catch and contain its burgeoning mad population, the melancholic and the syphilitic, the damaged and the deluded, the people who had forgotten their manners and the people who had forgotten their names.”  

What a great image, living in a converted insane asylum.  Mantel had a rough childhood and some very challenging adult health crises; people seemed crazy and made her feel crazy.   Relatives and doctors forgot their manners and forgot her name.  I got a sense that there was an ironic appropriateness in her choosing this place to live.  It might have been that there was a comforting residue from those workers who actually tried to help the suffering.  Or maybe the comfort is that those days are past.  Mentally ill out, lovely apartments in.  The building’s change symbolizes and embodies her change.

My tale of the country club becoming a church is pretty unusual. The reverse is more common, for a building built as a church to be converted into something very different, given the number of churches that fold every day. There’s a great museum of science and technology in Paris, the Musee des Arts et Metiers, housed in an ancient Benedictine abbey church. In the former apse now swings, day and night, Foucault’s pendulum.  Where once was celebrated the mystery of God moving over the deep now is demonstrated the mystery of the ever-rotating earth.

Such a contrast, the medieval monastery and the modern science museum.  But still there lingers in the place a residue of awe and mystery which I think would be missing in a new modern museum building.  (Umberto Eco builds on this contrast in his novel Foucault’s Pendulum, with scenes in this building.) 

Congregationall Church of Belmont, United Church of ChristWhat about when the opposite happens, like the building I’m talking about, the Congregational Church of Belmont, United Church of Christ.  What residue of the spirit lingers from its years as a country club, then dog training center, and cancer research lab?  And even now, like lots of churches, the building is not just a place for worship, but also a place for a nursery school, for off-site training meetings for businesses (hence the UPS drivers) and for fundraising parties – they host a mean Chocolate Fest each fall. 

The church members love telling stories about the building’s past, especially the country club part.  At their 50^th anniversary celebration Rev. John Brooke recalled a time he led a baptism in the sanctuary, which had been the club’s dining room.  The grandfather of the newborn told him afterwards that the baptistery was in the exact spot where he had stood as a young man 40 years earlier and played trombone in a big band.  The residue was of joyful noises, the sounds of Jimmy Dorsey became the gurgle of new babies.

But John also said that they always kept in mind the contrast between the country club’s exclusivity and their goal to be an inclusive church with no membership fees or class  rules.  When the church converted the dining room into the sanctuary they intentionally left on the walls all the lighting scones, which were adorned with crossed golf clubs, as a reminder of its past and also as a caution against the idols of the rich.  Sort of like leaving the golden calf around as a reminder; the residue had more of a bad smell.  Let’s not go back there.

I wanted to learn more about how the building has helped the war effort, and promoted healing.  That is, more stories about the dogs and the mice.  But the old church guys who had done the renovations mostly recalled bad plumbing and mouse poop.  Sometimes when we repurpose a building we only remember the hassles, or we want to forget it, and (literally) not smell the past residue.

Many churches are being forced economically to be multi-use, to rent out space to businesses for off-site training and nursery schools.  I think because the Belmont church has so many different uses in its past it’s been easier to be multi-use.  Some church have such strict ideas of “proper use” and proper residue that they shrivel up and die.

But in Belmont’s case, I think their building’s past continues to shape them. That the building had a role in fighting the evil of fascism and was a place devoted to finding cures for cancer - surely that past lingers in its present, as a place promoting peace and healing. 

Learn the history of the buildings you hang out in, and see if you can smell that past.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Crow Bar

Often a construction job begins as a destruction job.  Many a building sits atop the ruins of an earlier structure.   Even for a new house, trees must be cut down, ground broken open.  And smaller jobs: a new closet?  You might have to rip out a wall.  Skylight?  Cut into the roof. 

Or as that great carpenter Pablo Picasso said, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

Crow BarsIn any tool box one finds construction tools, hammers and screwdrivers and such.  And tools for destruction.  Like wrecking bars and crow bars. 

I like the destruction tools, the destruction work.

Since we built our own house and are always trying to make it better or fit our changing circumstances, it feels like a body, ever growing new bones, ever shedding old skin.  A shed we no longer need provides the wood for a new flight of stairs.  We tear down an old crumbling redwood deck, saw off the rotten ends, and rebuild it smaller and stronger.

I often volunteer for the destruction part of a job.  Partly because it requires less skill; I don’t have to worry if my cuts are clean or my nails straight – I’m ripping out, not hammering in.  But I also like these jobs because I can day dream.  Sometimes I am recalling the time years ago when I did hammer in this particular nail – not bad, pretty straight.  Did I ever dream I would now be trying to get it out? I feel all the times I walked up these steps that I am now preparing for their new life as a bench. 

And of course there is just the simple pleasure of ripping something apart; it’s primitive and sort of therapeutic.  And the satisfying sound the nail makes coming out of the old board; it’s almost atavistic; “rrrr-oonk!” it screams from its decades in the wood, all those years binding that cleat into the long stair riser.  The old bent nail is removed and the redwood board is now freed to be built into something new.

One of my favorite tools is the wrecking bar or crow bar or pry bar.  They come in various shapes and sizes, and are basically strong metal levers.  We have a bigger one and a smaller one.  Both have a flatter end for prying open or apart, and a curved end to use as a lever, as well as a hole or hook that’s good for trying to get the old nails out of the wood.  I prefer the smaller one, because it is lighter, easier to handle and less dangerous if you drop it by mistake on your foot.  But the big one works much better; it’s physics I think, I get more force and strength from its length and its power. 

The JemmyBut the big one is dangerous, and not just if dropped on your foot.  It can fly out of your hand as you exert force to pry apart.  And sometimes it’s dangerous people who use those big crow bars.  They are a favorite tool of burglars, who also call them “jemmy’s”; to jemmy something open usually implies criminal intent.  They’re good for prying open windows and doors and safes and also for whacking people over the head.  It’s an old word, an old tool.  Shakespeare has Friar Laurence ask for an “iron crow” to try to get into Juliet’s tomb.  Sherlock Holmes tells Watson to bring along a “jemmy” on one of their quasi-legal investigations.

Here’s another memory of a crow bar:

I took an anatomy class many years ago, on sabbatical from parish ministry, just wanting something completely different, but also curious about how our bodies work, perhaps some insights into incarnation, word made flesh, what is our flesh, our bones and muscles and blood and organs and nerves.  We memorized lots of names and studied complicated systems, but my favorite part was dissecting the cadaver.

One day we extracted the brain from the head of the cadaver.  Our instructor had given us a moving speech before our very first cut about how this man had given us the most precious gift he could, his own bodies for our study.  Most of the students were young men and women hoping to be physical therapists or sports medicine types.  The course was required, but not their favorite.  They were not curious theologians but reluctant memorizers.  It was tempting and easy to joke about this old body or speculate about his life.  But our teacher caringly and sternly told us about the gift and not to joke.

So we solemnly looked on as he took a saw out and cut around in a circle the top of the cranium and gently lifted it off.  There’s the brain he said, pointing at a surprisingly small and very gray blob.  Now let’s get it out.  And out of his toolbox he pulled, you guessed it, a small crow bar, just like the one I use to pull out nails and rip apart boards.  But he most gently and carefully and respectfully pried, yes pried out, it really came out pretty easily, and in one piece, the brain, the memories, the filing cabinet, the feelings, of this old guy.  Gently he took it out and handed it around, and we each held the brain in our hands.

It was a destructive act.  And a creative one.  Aided by a tool.  Done in gratitude.  To help build new careers, new faith, new understanding, new lives.  Pried open and shared.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Vestibule

(Note: In this new weekly column, Building Blocks, I share stories and ideas about building.  Call it “archi-texture;” I consider a structure – an “arch” (or today, a vestibule) and then I pattern it with “texture” - some  moods and feelings it evokes.  Come on in….)

“The house will tell you what it needs,” says Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built.  

Our house said it needed a mudroom.

For years we had come to this house only in the summer and just for the  weekend, a few bags of food, a carefree attitude.  Our kids called it “The House in the Trees;” we drove on the dusty dirt road into the redwood forest, hiked down a dirt path to the hand-built house. The front door, as in a lot of California houses, led directly into the first room, in this case the kitchen, with no transition space from out to in.

So when we came to live here year round, with muddy feet on wet winter days, lugging a week’s worth of groceries, kids now teens with more stuff, we realized we needed a room to dump wet and dirty things, a place to store coats and boots and recycling. A buffer from wind and rain, a guard to keep the kitchen warm.  Our first year here we built the 5 by 8 foot mudroom.

The casual cabin getaway, now to be our permanent home, reminded us it liked light, and so it said we should put a big window in the mudroom looking out over the canyon. And the house said, “You’ll be inviting people to visit, tuck in a little daybed under the window.”

In other words, the room grew and became a little bigger and fancier than just a mudroom.

A favorite architecture writer Witold Rybczynski tells a similar story in The Most Beautiful House in the World, about how he set out to build a simple boat shed by the lake for weekend sailing, decided to add a bathroom, then a little workshop, a corner sleeping loft, and before he knew it he had moved in to the boat shed.

The VestibuleFor materials, we still had some of the cedar boards that my husband had used on the walls of the house. His father had milled the long rough hewn planks 70 years ago and stored them up in his barn from cedars that fell in the Washington State woods of his childhood farm. To make the new room seem part of the original house we covered the outside with the same redwood shakes, giant rough shingles, that we had sheared off old redwood stumps left on the property by loggers of a century ago. 

The house liked this old historic wood from family and frontier, and the mudroom wanted it too.

My husband is as much an aesthetic designer and builder as a functional one.  (See last week’s column Structual Choices – he loves his venustas.)  So this addition, with high light, sentimental wood, a little sleeping nook, was clearly more than just a place for rain boots and recycling bins.  It deserved a nicer name than mudroom. 

So we call it the vestibule.  That felt classier than mudroom, more architectural, a worthy name for a worthy entrance into our new yet old home.

Vestibule means entrance room, antechamber, lobby.  In church architecture the vestibule is the entrance area in the back of the church, sometimes also called a narthex.  In my days as a parish minister I remember visiting a church which was raising money to add such an entrance area.  Like so many California homes and churches, where you just come directly off the street into the living room, or the church nave, there was no break from the wind or rain, no place to catch your breath before coming in to the crowd, no place to hang your coat or drop your bags.  A layman there said to me, “We’re raising money for a vestibule.  I never heard that word before, but I know we need one.”

The word vestibule comes from the same root as vestments, “vestio”, I dress.  It’s a place for clothes, be they wet coats to hang up or your pastoral robe and stole to straighten before processing.  The word also evokes Vesta, the Roman goddess of hearth and home; the vestibule gives a welcome entrance to the warmth and nurture of the family.  It says, “Enter here, come in out of the cold.”

Vestibules are so important we even have them inside us, in the houses known as our bodies.  In anatomy a vestibule is “any natural hollow or sinus within the body, various bodily cavities leading to another cavity (as of the ear or vagina).”

Our body vestibules have pretty much the same function as the architectural ones. The ear vestibule is the little room where sound goes from outside to in, drops a few wet things, is welcomed home.  Vertigo and other balance problems are called “vestibular disorders.”  My house’s vestibule has a few disorders – too much crap just left on the floor to deal with “later.”  Mercifully neither I nor the house has vertigo.

The vaginal vestibule, also called the vulval vestibule (love these names!) is the entrance area to both urethra and vagina.  Like Vesta’s hearth, here is a warm birth place, an entrance to new life, and a place of daily motion and blessing. 

In and into the ear, the vagina, my house, stand these little rooms, transition places, from light to dark, exterior to interior.  They are safe, sheltered, have room for stuff.  Sometimes there’s too much stuff, some pain or disorder.  But it’s the important stuff that goes in and out there. The house and the body, having told us what they wanted, both say, “Thanks, I needed that.”

All praise vestibules!

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter