Toy Stores in Heaven

“Do they have toy stores in heaven?”

“Probably”

“The smashed-up kind?”

“????  Why would they be smashed-up?”

“You know, when there is a big crane with a ball hanging on a line, and it hits the building.  Then the toy stores are ghosts and go to heaven.”

My six year old son was talking about demolished buildings and their souls.

I watched several demolitions; I even worked in an architectural office while the Embarcadero Freeway was coming down literally outside our front door.  I was drafting at my desk and when I looked up, I could see the dinosaur head of a giant pneumatic drill.  It dug its beak into the rock-hard concrete and iron re-bars of the elevated deck and shook the neighborhood with deafening “dok, dok, dok”.  We breathed the dust and from time to time we heard loud bangs of falling weight.  Good riddance!  I think the Embarcadero Freeway went to hell.

The Chapter House of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco was another matter.  It was a beautifully proportioned stone structure, covered with ivy, and situated in front of the church, so that the approach to the sanctuary assumed somewhat European qualities: not a straight-on, but around-the-corner experience.  It was a lovely building, but the cathedral needed to expand.  God knows, we needed parking on Nob Hill – I lived there and sometimes spent forty-five minutes circling around looking for a spot.  If I remember correctly, someone condemned the Chapter House as unsafe, the so-called UMB (unreinforced masonry building), sure to fall down in the next earthquake.  I stood on the rooftop terrace of our apartment building at 1200 Taylor Street and watched.  With each swing of the wrecking ball more and more of the 1930′s bas-relief on Masonic Auditorium beyond was revealed.  I preferred the Chapter House as my view, but I was powerless.  Something else was visible, too.  As the chapter house was diminishing, I could see fragments of its interior structure: twisted iron and sturdy pillars of reinforced concrete.

What is there now?  The entrance to the gift store, the restrooms, and the parking garage, all underground.  The approach to the cathedral is via a very wide staircase with thin insubstantial railings.  It is an architectural statement, very grand in its flowing expression, but with an obvious “oops, we forgot about the building code” mark.  Where the Chapter House, Rest in Heaven, once stood, there is a contemplative labyrinth my children and I walk once in a while.

Crowd Dynamics: a Study in White and Red

Are you familiar with fluid dynamics?  My father is a physicist and I often heard that term at home.  I also went to a Mathematical/Physical High School where I learned about the movements of liquids and gases.   Their behavior can be affected by pressure and temperature.  Their velocity and density may vary.  Some fluids, channeled through pathways, move in a steady and orderly way.  Other fluid movements form turbulent torrents.  Others are trickles over time, building up to fill a container, only to spill over and flow through the channels they find.  Some behave in unexpected ways: I just learned that blood is a non-newtonian fluid, that is, an application of force makes it behave like a solid.

Do crowds move in fluid ways?  I will describe three dates when I experienced Crowd Dynamics.

May 1st, 1980. May Day was always a beautiful day for a teenager in the Communist Poland.  Any resentment resulting from having to attend the parade was offset by the weather.  The harsh blow of the wind against our cheeks was changing to a softer touch.  It was one of the first times in the year when you could wear your coat open and maybe put on the suede shoes you managed to find in a small town.  The sun was out.  The whole city was on holiday and transformed: the streets and bridges were cleaned, there were red flags on every building, and long banners spanned the facades, spelling unity with the Party.  The trees cooperated by erupting in hazy green veils of buds.  At corner kiosks, parents were buying miniature flags of stiff paper wrapped around balsa wood handles for their children.  You could smell freshly dug earth from the tulips planted on lawns in shapes of hammers and sickles.  Our sophomore class had spent the previous Sunday in the school gym hammering flat golden push pins to the tops of thick wooden sticks: attaching colorful handfuls of yard-long ribbons.  As part of the parade, we had to perform a dance for the party members which involved waving the sticks around.

The long snake of unwilling celebrants was flowing very slowly through the main thoroughfare of my city.  The avenue these days was named after a World War II hero.  We had to read a book about him in grade school, called “About a Man who did not Bow to the Bullets” (I later found out that the reason the general did not avoid the bullets while sticking his head out of the encampments may have had something to do with him being continuously drunk).  Our school’s group was stopping and starting, unavoidably approaching the main tribune, a multilevel plywood grandstand set out as seating for the Important Ones.  I was thinking about how strangely ironic it was that what were genuine street demonstrations in the 19th century, with red flags symbolizing spilled worker’s blood, has transmogrified into an obligatory, orderly shuffle of citizens dreading the orchestrated cheer for their dear leaders.

We were almost there.  Someone in front of me started the dance a little too early.  I tried to catch up.  In front of the reviewing stand, we ended up running around in circles, moving the beribboned batons to and fro.  Obviously, we had not rehearsed enough.  The embarrassment  was quickly over, as we moved past the tribune, pushed by another group eager to show their stuff.  At the last minute, still within the earshot, one of my friends, a self-described anti-communist, jumped up, waved his baton, and screamed “More light!”  One of the dignitaries did a double take, but I doubt he understood that Goethe’s dying words, even if he knew that’s what this outpour was, were meant as a protest cry, a demand for more freedom of expression.

Sometime in early Spring of 1982. The light of Free Trade Union Solidarity came in August of 1980, burned for sixteen months and was snuffed out on December 13, 1981 with the introduction of Martial Law.  Since the New Year, we had been hearing the underground murmuring: “Winter was yours, spring will be ours!”.  It was a school morning and I took the tram, as usual.  At the school stop, however, something looked different.  Why was the sidewalk so crowded?  When I came closer to the building I found out that all the students were outside.  No one was being let inside because overnight some “anti-socialist elements” painted protest graffiti on the school walls.  One of the signs was visible to the left of the entry stairs: at eye level, not sprayed, but delineated with a wide brush, were dripping, painted letters: Solidarnosc.

Opposite it, six hundred teenagers were teeming in a small park.  Some of my friends sat down on their book bags thrown on the wet muddy grass and began to smoke.  Suddenly, the door at the top of the wide flight of steps opened. A vice principal appeared on the top landing.  He was in his late middle age, bald, and very fond of one shiny maroon polyester suit.  He taught “Preparation to Life in a Socialist Family”, a subject which was a masterful combination of Marxism and birth control.  To us, he personified the hated System.

He took a step down.  By now, everyone was up.  The crowd took a step back.  He descended two more steps.  We mirrored it and retreated further.  He started walking down the stairs in earnest.  At this moment, six hundred people turned around in unison and started running away.  We pushed through the narrow pipeline of a street framed by five story walk-up apartment blocks from the 19th century, past the bakery where we stuffed ourselves with poppy seed stuffed buns, past the boutique that sold brown lace bras, past the travel agency with pictures of Bulgaria in the shop windows.  Tumult and tangle, pressing forward, escaping.  Feet stomping, my imitation leather yellow heeled winter boots on the cobble stones, tripping, book bags banging, sacks of shoes to change into lost and trampled.

Nobody looked back or slowed down until we spilled out onto Grunwald square, a non-space formed by the convergence of several avenues and holes made in the urban fabric by Allied bombing in the Second World War.  At that point, we scattered.  Some of us lit up again.  I decided with my girlfriends to eat pastries at a cafe on the ground floor of one of the “toilet-scrapers”: tall buildings in a brutalist architectural style whose concrete window surrounds look like toilet bowls.  We took the liberty to take the rest of the day off.  The next morning, we saw the vice principal outside, painting over the letters in white wash.  He traced the letter shapes, however, so now, instead of red Solidarity, we had a white Solidarity sign.

June 21, 1983. I did not know it then, but it was just a few days before I was to leave Poland forever.  Pope John Paul II visited my home city.   I was meeting Agnieszka, a friend from my university group, at one of the central squares.  We had to walk to the horse racing arena on the outskirts, where a million people were gathering to hear Mass. We, as everyone else, wore white, in honor of the papal visit, and in honor of peace we needed.  All morning, all over town, white figures in pairs or in small groups were incessantly moving through the veins of streets and alleys to a common destination.  On the field, I was struck by the altar design: the enormous cross was really its own absence – its shape was formed by the empty space within a tall white box.  Did a bird flow through it at some point, or is it just stuff of myths I want to remember?  The Pope was late, but it was amazing how well-behaved the people were.  We were so happy to see him!  Later, instead of the people coming up to the altar to receive Holy Communion , priests set out into the crowd to distribute it.  A million people kneeling in silence, a million people standing, holding up right arms, fingers stretched up in a peace sign (but for us it was a V for victory), singing the unofficial, banned anthem: “God, grant us back our free country”.

Filled with hope and good will, Agnieszka and I were returning to the city center on foot.  So were the others.  There was one main artery to take.  A white river was peacefully flowing on it.  Suddenly, with the sound I hate to this day, low-flying helicopters invaded our space with their deafening whirl.  “Disperse! Disperse!”  The militia had loudspeakers.  Where could we disperse to?  Agnieszka and I ducked into a nearby building entrance and waited it out.  We did not see any, but blood was spilled that day.  A body of a student beaten to death was found the next day in the river…

A little later, Angieszka and I said good-bye at the same square we started from. It was then called Dzierzynski square, after a blood-thirsty revolutionary.  It is now renamed Dominican, after white habit-wearing monks from a nearby church.

Venus de Cerkiewnik

She was quickly stuffing rubber boots in her backpack.  Any time, her mother could enter her room and ask: “Why would you need them for visiting your aunt in Cracow?”  Most of her friends already left for a camping trip to the Lake Country.  She would to catch up to them.  Shouting quick goodbyes she ran down the two flights of her apartment block and darted one entrance over to her friends’ flat to borrow a sleeping bag.  She made it to the train station on time, but she went North instead of South.  Many hours and train changes later she stepped off onto the platform of a town called Good Town.  The backpack was heavy and she had a few miles of solitary hike to the campsite.  She hooked her dark blond hair behind her ears and set off towards the lake.  She went through the village, the fields, and entered the forest.  According to the directions the tents should have been here, in this clearing.  Here was a steep path down to the water, there were tall evergreen trees encircling the plateau, but the site was abandoned.  She could still see the faint rectangles of flattened grass where several tents had been.  It was late afternoon and big birds started congregating in the tufts of greenery on top of black branchless tree spires.  Their eerie creeking sounds only made it more obvious that there was no human sound or sign anywhere.

But wait!  There was something sticking out of the cold embers of the fire pit.  A vodka bottle with a screw top – a strange place to put a bottle, she thought.  She dropped down the bulky load of her pack and crouched down to investigate.  The bottle held a piece of paper.  She shook it out, scanned it and sighed.  It was getting late.  She spread some plastic sacks on the ground, unrolled her sleeping bag and prepared to spend the night.  She was a very level headed girl and she was on a mission.  She liked a boy who teased her all throughout the junior year in high school.  That boy was somewhere here.  She was going to deal with it all in the morning.

What a beautiful and deserted site it was!  Hidden from view, yet very near the shore of the expansive and clear lake, it was perfect for us.  We pitched the tents, including the kitchen tent, where we kept the food and utensils, around the fire circle in the middle of the meadow.  We loved the isolation.  The birds were a little creepy, however, especially when the boys, late at night, scared us with stories of dead scouts buried nearby.  For several days we were tanning ourselves, swimming, and cooking meals in nature’s paradise.  Unfortunately, one day Little Bear (really not aptly named, as he was quite large) swam a little too far and was spotted by the lake patrol.  The policemen on the motor boat tried to “card” him right there, wanting to see his swimmer’s permit.  They followed him to our hideaway.  We had to leave immediately.  It turned out that our campsite was in the middle of a native bird preserve.  The police, thankfully, did not fine us, and offered us another, officially sanctioned site.  One of them waved in the direction of the far shore and said: Cerkiewnik is the name.

We had a couple of pontoon boats.  We dismantled the tents and loaded them on one boat.  The boys went on a reconnaissance trip.  When they came back, they reported that they were able to secure a site next to the shore, but nowhere near as nice as the one before.  It was close to the road and there were other campers there as well.  In our campsite the kitchen tent was still standing.  I looked at it, then at my friends, and back to the tent we went, picking a corner each, bundling it with its contents into a huge bulging sack.  We carried it down to the water and lowered it onto the second pontoon.  I went in that boat, slowly rowing across the water’s expanses, singing “Caravan” by Duke Ellington all the way.

That morning I woke up very early, maybe around 5 am.  Something was amiss.  I shared my tent with two girlfriends.  I sat up in the foot or so of my allotted space, trying to be very quiet and not wake them up.  I heard that sound again.  A big creature was moving outside.  I crawled out of my bag and carefully unzipped the bottom of the tent door.  I stuck my head out and there she was.  Standing in the center of the camp, dripping onto the ashes of last night’s fire, was Venus de Cerkiewnik in a yellow bikini who swam across the lake at dawn.  The stones of the fire ring were forming a  Boticelli-like conch around her feet.

Old Man in a Hot Tub (a short mystery)

I kept thinking of Hemingway the other day.  Do you know the short stories “Old Man and the Sea” and “Old Man at the Bridge”?  The first one is really a long story: I remember pages and pages describing a guy being pulled by a giant fish.  The other one is really way too short: a man standing on a bridge, speaking (I think) a few words of wisdom.  Well, I am going to give you a vignette called: “Old Man in a Hot Tub”.

I usually go into the hot tub after my swim, as a little reward.  The pool is outdoors, and is (lightly) heated.  Being from the “North”, I do not mind plunging into the colder waters first.  That day, I was done with my exercise, soaking in the heat, and smelling the eucalyptus, when a couple of friends entered the tub.  They were going to get ready for their laps by giving their muscles a hot dip.   As most people in the club, they were older than me, she, probably by ten, he, by twenty or thirty years.  They were continuing a conversation about management.  “In major corporations now, every new manager is told to pick a successor who is smarter than them”, the man was saying.   They sat down on the steps below the water, submerged up to their chests.  “Yeah, I know, I always tried not to hire incurious persons”, replied the woman.

I opened my eyes and joined in: “You know, I  had jobs where I was too curious for my own good.  I asked too many questions and made my bosses uncomfortable”.  “Their loss”, said she, and instantly made me feel better.  I crave appreciation these days while I spend my days looking for new clients and sending resumes into the ether.

I was enjoying this little bright spot in my day.  The man was telling us about his late brother who was a very curious person, an inventor.  As he was talking, I was trying to guess his age and what he had done in the past.  His vocabulary was extensive, his conversational skills a pleasure to partake in, and his eyes had an intellectual sparkle.  Was this a former CEO of some Bay Area iconic corporation?  Or, was he a UC Berkeley professor?  I did not dare ask at that point.  He inquired about my background.  “Ah, have you ever read mystery novels by Alan Furst?  They often take place in Poland”, the man said.  “You must read them”.  He stood up to get out, put on a red swim cap and was looking straight at me through impenetrable black goggles:  “And beware of loquacious old men”.

Snow Flakes

They were very, very thin and lacquered in medium light blue.  Each of them had a delicate white snowflake painted near the tip, about as big as a bottom of a Russian tea glass.  I took out my box of wax, six different colors: white for around zero degrees Celsius, red for negative five, all the way down to black for below -35.  The bottoms of the long wooden boards, with their shallow groove down the middle had to be greased well to glide.

The plains near the shores of the Volga mirrored them well: they were a tableau of crystal white tree shapes set against a clean expanse of absolute blue.  I had on two pairs of hose and two pairs of pants, a sheep skin coat tied with a man’s belt at the waist, and a kid-size ushanka: the hat with ear flaps you may know from many depictions of the Russian spies in the 1980s films.  My eyes hurt from looking at the sparkling snow and the inside of my nose was frozen.

Today was the day of the race, in one of the same string of PE classes in elementary schools all over wintery Soviet Union.  I bravely squished the tips of my everyday yellow boots under the grip of metallic red bindings.  My sole (my soul?) was free.

I was new to the sport in 5th grade, but I got the hang of the movements and started liking it.  When you fit into the two groomed tracks, get into the rhythm of sliding left and sliding right, it is pretty close to flying.  Very often, it is just you and the silent woods.  The dangerous detail of summertime understory is erased, the tangled brambles and the lurking creatures are hidden.  There are only two elements: your way through the trees and the white blanket.  You get the occasional thrill of a hill – how fun!  But then, you might have add some more snow ribbing to another hill to climb it…

I was in the tracks and I was doing pretty well, but not as well as the boys behind me who have been doing it since their early childhoods and were now on their second loop.  They were breathing behind me and shouting: “dai lyzhniu!”  I realize now that I did not know the code of the sport – I was supposed to step off the trail and let them pass.  Instead, I plowed steadily ahead, pretending not to understand them.

The Snow Flakes went back to Poland with us and were stored in the basement of our apartment building.  When the Great Flood of 1997 hit my city, I was in Oakland with baby Sean, following it on the internet.  The water went up to the “par – terre”, the first story.  Naturally, everything in the basement was lost.  I wonder if I will ever whisper, Citizen Kane-style: “Snow Flakes…”?

The Kids’ Quilt

The other day was raining in the morning and I dropped off Niels in the “after-care” room instead of the customary place, the school yard.  His classes were about to start in ten minutes or so.  As we waited, I noticed a quilt being used as a cover for an old chair.  It was unraveling in a few places and I asked Heidi for a needle and thread to fix it.  The task needed some more serious attention, however: many of the squares with writing on them were coming off entirely.  I decided to take it home and work on it there.

It is now in front of me.  I am detaching all of the white squares from the colorful blanket background.  Then, I am cutting around each of them with the pinking shears so that they do not fray in the future.  Sometimes I have to iron out the curled edges.  Just now I am realizing that I probably have to wash the underlayment: this thing has been sitting on the chair for close to four years…

I have to document the order of the squares so I can sew them back on properly after the wash.  I am going to do it here, on this blog, because they are incredibly poetic.  Each child in the extended care, from Kindergartners to fifth graders, wrote one expression about themselves.  I call the whole composition the “I am from” quilt.  You will see a picture of it after I wash it!

Aurora School After Care Quilt, 2006

I am from friends from different places

I am from stretchy pants and pig tails

I am from the sounds of wind in my hair

I am from friends who support me when I am sad

I am from loving animals and loving my life

I am from a small house with the best view

I am from the best mac and cheese from Macy’s basement

I am from pink clothes and blue clothes too

I am from rows of laughter in the open window

I am from the smell of warmness and cookies

I am from a secret place

I am from my friends at school

______(blank) lost?___________

I am from rainbow through my bedroom window

I am from the smells of pasta pomodoro and my mom cooking pasta

I am from deep blue eyes

I am from horses and dogs

I am from the whispering winds

I am from the sounds of my dad’s guitar

I am from love. I am from life.

Where are you from?

Gothique Flamboyant

When I was a teenager, I occasionally passed a certain stop on one of the streetcar routes in Wroclaw: the spot where proud girls with black cardboard tubes under arm disembarked.  They were students of architecture.  I thought: “I want to be one of them!”

I have always been good at drawing, but my art teachers were a mixed lot and had various responses to my style.  One woman in third or fourth grade insisted that I should not draw outlines at all.  To prove her wrong, I spent hours on an additional assignment of my own device: an elaborate circus scene with lions, hoops and a tamer, painted with bright poster paints filling the insides of many black outlines.  When I showed it to her she thought it was extraordinary and did not notice the offending details.  In fifth and sixth grades in the Soviet Union I was popular with the kids for drawing adorable puppies with big eyes.  When I came back to Poland in seventh grade, our school got a new art teacher, an emaciated young man, complete with long hair, a little beard, and sandals.  It was the 70s…  He had us spread big swaths of kraft-type paper on the hallway floors and use charcoal and chalk in “free motion”.  Somehow I did not get it; I was way too meticulous for that.

I don’t think we had much art in high school.  What we did have was a very difficult course in Geometry, with manual pencil drafting of three dimensional figures projected onto two dimensional planes.  Beginning in my sophomore year and knowing that I wanted to become an architect, my parents signed me up for extra-curricular drawing classes with a famous teacher.  He was an acquaintance of my Grandmother’s and was known to train young people in the sketching arts in such ways that they were guaranteed to pass the entrance exam to the architecture department at the Politechnic.

The teacher, Mr. N, and I did not get along, however.  His classes were held in an attic above his apartment which was in a multi-building housing complex planned by him in the early 60s.  The free-standing concrete blocks of flats were in the Old Town and posed a jarring contrast to the urbanism of medieval streets and squares.  I did not feel good there.  I remember trudging up and up the stairs he designed, with a low, much shallower than usual, tread to riser ratio, to the top: a crowded, stuffy, artificially lit studio.  There were sometimes ten students in a small space, sitting around a fragment of a Greek capital we were to draw.  The round gold push pins hurt my thumbs when I attached my papers to the poster-size hard wooden boards.  Mr N. was walking around in a long white lab coat, looking over our shoulders, criticizing and sometimes drawing over our lines.  There was another Kasia in our group – with long black hair, often wearing red.

One of our first homework assignments was to draw cubes.  I wanted to make something interesting, something more.  I tried.  I found a tightly wound roll of old bristol paper which I carefully spread flat on our living room rug.  I devised an elaborate construction of cubes, a pyramid of sorts.  It took me hours to painstakingly figure out the perspective and the gradations of pencil shading.  When I brought it to the next session, however, it was immediately bashed and compared to my namesake’s work.  The other Kasia’s cubes were drawn in heavy black lines and wildly flying around the page.  “Look at the pizzaz, the energy, the raw power!”, he praised.  “And what is this piece?”, he said of mine, “Something you wrangled out of a dog’s mouth?”  My ancient bristol creased in parallel lines across the pyramid of intellectualized cubes and did not look its best.  It was also obvious that my shapes were all thought, and no expression, and Kasia’s were the opposite.

I persevered, but similar humiliation continued throughout the junior year.  We had to practice drawing over the summer vacation that followed.  I was so discouraged that I could not bring myself to do it.  In September, my friend Goska brought sketches of sheep in the meadows, and a beautiful still life of a samovar.  I had nothing to show.  “It is too late for you”, Mr N. said,  “You will not be able to pass the exam” (the exam was about ten months hence).  We were drawing another ancient piece of rubble, or a chair, or maybe each other.  Mr N. wanted to dazzle us with his knowledge: “I bet that none of you knows how to say “flaming gothic” (a late medieval style of many churches) in French”.  I happened to know, did not think it was really that accomplished of a thing to know it, and pronounced it in French: “Gothique Flamboyant”.  To which he said: “Well, if you are so smart, you should study languages, not architecture.  Then you can work at the post office”.

So I did.  I went on to study English.  In my last year of high school, during breaks from very Martin Eden-type studying for the entrance exam to English Philology department (I had past participles all over my bedroom walls) I took a few drawing lessons with a father of a friend, Mr P.  What a relief, and what a difference!  He also lived on the top floor of a socialist block (over ten stories this time: we called it a skyscraper).  The complex was called “Polish-Soviet Friendship Development” and Mr P.’s apartment was huge and bright.  He must have taken over the entire area usually reserved for drying the laundry of the building residents.  He wore dashing navy suits and a captain’s hat.  His son’s girlfriend, her friend, and I were the only students.  One time we were drawing a still life of a cutting board, a coffee cup, and a towel.  “Try to capture the essence of kitchen-ness, Kasia” he said.  That was a revelation!  No corrections, no put downs, no unfavorable comparisons with peers…  I needed poetry…

As you may know, I never worked as a postal worker, and eventually became an architect.  I met many more Mr N.s and Mr P.s and had both types of teachers, bosses, and clients in my life.  Some do not trust me and question, stifle, and try to impose their own style over me.  Some kind souls believe that, through methods of my own, I will find the right path.  Thus I continue to search for the balance between inspiration and laboriousness.  I still do not believe in pure expression.  For even the exuberance of a Flaming Gothic buttress has to rely on the careful engineering of its parts.

P.S. I looked up Mr N. on the internet recently.  He passed away last year and left an enormous legacy of sketches, tens of thousands of very expressive,  sharply and jaggedly drawn ink line renderings of architectural monuments.  They are beautiful, but not in my style.  However, on the website maintained by his son, also an architect, I discovered that Mr N. lobbied against a curtain wall-clad shopping complex constructed in the 1990s next to a brick medieval church on one of the main squares in Wroclaw.  I happen to hate that awful exercise in urbanism in my city, so Mr N. and I had something in common, after all.