With the new month comes a new postcard. This month’s postcard comes from much closer to home. A maple I pass on my walk to and from work seemed to defy the monochrome of the world. Let me know if you want a copy.
The last moments of red burn brightly in the otherwise monochrome world of early winter. By now even this color has faded to dark browns and fallen to the ground.
Staring at his phone while leaning on a pillar, he swipes up as he reads. Maybe it’s an email from a colleague, or a text from a friend, or his favorite site that passes itself off as news. In any case, his phone has his undivided attention. He never glances up, never looks around, never seems to notice that he is alone on the platform. The world doesn’t impinge on his experience.
I wonder if he is reading about how much the world has changed, about how the pandemic has changed the way we live and work. Perhaps he was reading at that moment how public transportation across the country is suffering from a decline in ridership, nobody commuting to and from work these days. I wonder what brings him out this evening, standing here on the platform, flicking his thumb along his phone and waiting for the train out of the city.
I suspect in some important ways his life hasn’t changed. He was probably alone even when the platform was filled with other commuters. Each of them likewise alone, lost in the virtual worlds they hold in their hands. Eleanor Rigbys.
Stairways lure you to climb them, to see what might be stashed or hidden at the top (or the bottom). The brave explorer climbs slowly, stairs creaking under the weight of each footstep, hoping to find something, anything. Stairways also frighten. The threat of some monster lurking in the attic (or the basement).
For years I couldn’t imagine walking into an office building or a bank or department store or any other public space and not seeing an ashtray. Not because I noticed them, but because they were ubiquitous. Standing ashtrays just inside the entry doors, ashtrays on counters next to the bank teller, ashtrays attached to the wall between sinks in the bathroom. Fancy ashtrays always adorned the executive’s desk, often a tendril of smoke wafting up from the half-finished cigarette lingering in one of the depressions along the edge. Today ashtrays have been reduced to decor in pseudo-nostalgic TV shows such as “Mad Men” that receive accolades for their retro-aesthetic.
As somebody who has never smoked, I don’t miss the days when the haze of smoke clouded offices and every restaurant reeked of burning tobacco. But I do miss the design and aesthetic of ashtrays (I find the aesthetics of vaping uninteresting). And I wonder what other furniture of our lives is disappearing as it is replaced by a new aesthetic.
Wandering across a couple states recently, I paused to admire grain elevators, so many of them interestingly different in small ways — a handful of tall, thin silos conjoined rising up from the plain, faded and flaking whitewash on the outside, “Co-Op” often painted near the top along with the community’s name, an array of elevators and conveyor belts and other mechanics attached to the outsides, train tracks running alongside some. Increasingly the grain elevator that seems so iconic are being replaced by squat, corrugated metal silos. These new grain elevators are, no doubt, more efficient or cost effective or something. But they lack something. Their homogeneity arising from their mass and therefore uniform production, their dull gray corrugated exteriors, their squat, uninteresting shapes all augur for an aesthetically boring future.
I am not the first to pause on grain elevators. The pioneering work of Bernd and Hilla Becher is outstanding here. They became fascinated with what they called “nomadic architecture,” buildings that might last a century before disappearing. Their photographs of, inter alia, grain elevators, blast furnaces, and water towers reminds us to pause and appreciate the design of even the most mundane and utilitarian buildings and objects before they disappear.
With the new month comes a new postcard. This month’s postcard comes from a moment when I paused in the plains of eastern Colorado to appreciate the moment. Let me know if you want a copy.
The sun burst through the clouds for just a moment in defiance of the howling wind and rain, causing the grasses exploded in amber. Moments later, rain and snow returned, daring me to linger.
Behind some pine trees, in the corner of the park, stands a swing set. The old, heavy-duty kind. All galvanized pipes, chain, and hard rubber that will probably survive armageddon. This swing set happens to be for toddlers, the seats those horribly uncomfortable baskets designed by somebody who can’t recall the abrasions and pain these caused. Nobody uses this swing set any longer. Or any of the metal playground equipment. It has all been replaced by garish plastic single-unit contraptions that come in hideously bright colors and are, no doubt, thought to be safer. These new playground sets are placed prominently in the park, where the stand out like sore thumbs and are regularly surrounded by young parents tending to their children who are “playing” on them.
But how much has today’s “playing” changed from the days of see-saws and merry-go-rounds, tall slides, rings and bars, and swings? How much has safety from ever looming injury altered how and when kids “play”? Sure, we think today’s playground sets are less likely to scald your hands in the summer or freeze your skin off in the winter. Sure, we think today’s plastic slides might seem more forgiving than the metal ones of years ago. But at what cost? Today’s playground sets with all their built in “learning” activities don’t require the same creativity and resourcefulness, particularly when the parents are lurking about constantly telling their kids how to play. How much easier is it for kids to just conform to the parameters of “playing” the designers of playground sets and the parents lay out for them? And how will a kid ever learn that no, no matter how hard you try, you can’t swing all the way around the top bar in a circle?
But maybe we’ve consigned that form of play, a form founded in profound boredom and limited options, to the obscure corners of the park, behind some trees where few people will see it.
Wandering through town the other day I walked by a building I’ve passed a hundred times. The most interesting aspect of the building was the astrology and tarot card reader that had a shop there for a couple years. With that gone, I scarcely give the building a second look. For some reason, I paused, wandered around the side, and looked around. There, above me was a set of stairs, an emergency escape of some sort, nearly black against a uniform gray sky.
I should pause more often, loiter around the buildings I have dismissed as uninteresting. Who knows what I might see.
In so many ways life hasn’t yet returned to normal. The trains and rail stations are still empty. So I wonder, why did somebody feel the need to place a new sticker on the ground indicating which way to go? How many commuters pass this spot on any given day?
Linger for a moment to look closely at the shell in the display case. It has been there, the label claims, for more than a century. The curator who first selected it for display along with how many of the other workers who have tended to it over the years are now dead. Yet the shell continues to sit there, silently beckoning to occasional museum visitor. How many stop to appreciate its form?
Perhaps only those who might also stop in a portico to admire the form of a staircase.
Carrying around a camera gives me license to look at things most of us walk past without noticing. The camera seems to give me permission to linger, to observe, to look around and behind, to look down and up. One rainy afternoon we took shelter in a portico. There in the shadows I noticed stairs leading up. I walked over and pushed gently on the ornate wrought-iron gate. It didn’t yield. Standing there in the middle, looking up, I wondered what I might find were I able to get past that gate.
On second thought: maybe the camera doesn’t give me permission to linger. Maybe I’m just a lingerer and an observer, and I use a camera to justify to myself if not to others my fascination with the world around me.