Music and Cats

Yesterday was my father’s 70th birthday. Paul and I came to Houston for the weekend to celebrate with him. Last night, at a gathering of about 35 family members and close friends, Dad was toasted by quite a few people. He spent a good part of the evening standing up with various people as they spoke about him. And, at the end of each toast, he made a charming, often funny, very personal comment about his relationship with each of the people who had spoken.

While I thought for a long time about what to say to and about my father, and discussed some of it with Paul, I did not write anything down. I generally work better without notes. It was a successful toast: everyone laughed, and my mother (among others, apparently) cried.

What follows is, of course, not exactly what I said last night. All of it is what I feel.
————————————————————————————-

My father wanted to be an architect from the time that he knew what the word meant. His passion for his calling - that’s what architecture is for him - has been unwavering for sixty years. His love of architecture has been matched only by his love for and dedication to my mother, my sister and me.

My father began his attempts to lure me and my sister into architecture when we were in elementary school. He would come home from the office with an envelope full of small colored paper squares and rectangles, which he would dump out onto the coffee table. Sitting on the floor with us, he would explain that the red squares were classrooms, blue the library, green the cafeteria, etc. How would we want our school to be arranged? What did we think was important? We had no idea that this was part of the preliminary design process. We were playing with Daddy.

As we grew up, we were included in his love of architecture in other ways. We visited construction sites for his projects on weekends. On vacations, we went to look at buildings. In high school, my sister and I each spent a summer working at his firm.

But Melanie and I did not want to be architects. We had other plans. We went off to college, studied other things. My father assumed that neither of his daughters would be an architect.

I had been out of college for a little over a year when I called my father to tell him I was thinking of going to architecture school. Two weeks later, I received a box of architecture books in the mail. Here is the first lesson of architecture learned from my father: There’s no such thing as too many books. A corollary of this: The best books have pictures.

A year after I graduated from architecture school, I spent a month in Europe with a couple of college friends. I realized during that trip that I had learned another lesson of architecture from my father: Buildings and people can coexist in photos, as long as the people are behind the buildings. I took 400 photos. I had to ask my friends for copies of their photos of us, as mine were all of buildings.

However, the most important lesson about architecture that I learned from my father is this: Buildings are for people. No matter how beautiful a building may be, if it does not work for the people who use it, then it’s art, not architecture. Buildings serve people, not the other way around. This idea has been at the heart of my father’s practice and teaching of architecture. It is the best lesson that he, that anyone, could have ever taught me about being an architect.

Sasha and Sergei are brothers. Well, probably half-brothers, but from the same litter. Feline reproduction is funny that way. At any rate, they have always been extremely attached to each other, and have an almost daily napping/ wrestling/ grooming routine. On this particular day, Sasha was doing all of the wrestling and grooming. Sergei just wanted to nap.

“You’re hangin’ with the cool kids…” was the message from Paul when he emailed this article from the New York Times to me today. Yes, all the news that’s fit to print today included an article on Friday cat blogging. While I have only recently begun the practice (at Philip’s urging) of posting photos of the cats (at least) once a week, it has apparently been a trend in the blogosphere for a year and a half or so.

“It brings people together,” said Kevin Drum, who began the cat spotlight last year on his own blog, Calpundit. (www.calpundit.com) …

“I’d just blogged a whole bunch of stuff about what was wrong with the world,” Mr. Drum said. “And I turned around and I looked out the window, and there was one of my cats, just plonked out, looking like nothing was wrong with the world at all.”

Grabbing his camera, Mr. Drum photographed his cat, Inkblot, and posted the picture (calpundit.com/archives/000597.html). He soon began doing it each Friday, attracting fans who just wanted to see the felines….

As often happens in the blogosphere, other people latched onto the idea and ran with it.

If you don’t want to deal with the NYT’s online registration, but would like to read the article, click here: (more…)

Sunday afternoon, Nina and I had a 4C celebration of her birthday month. I supplied the birthday Chocolate and homemade Chutney; Nina used her coffee card from this wonderful place for our Coffee: a heavenly smelling espresso/vanilla/orange/cinnamon concoction for her, and the very best mocha that I have ever tasted for me. The fourth C? Conversation, of the wide-ranging, “what were we talking about before we went off on this tangent?” sort. I love those kind of talks, and Nina and I fall into them easily.

At some point during the conversation, I told Nina that my plans for the rest of the day were a date with Paul for a movie, and then homework.

“A date and homework. That sounds like high school,” she laughed.

“Oh, god, not high school! Let’s not go back there.”

“OK, then college. Undergrad? Or maybe grad school. Sounds like grad school?”

Grad school is more what it feels like. Although, when I was an undergrad, I was dating Paul… which tended to get in the way of my homework more than being married to him does now. (I had lousy study habits, and was a lot more hormone-driven then.)

My homework for tonight’s writing class was to write critiques of three 5-15 page pieces written by fellow students. I struggled with this assignment. For most of my professional life, I’ve been the office copy editor. Coworkers have questions about grammar, sentence structure, word usage, punctuation? I’m the one they see. So my first inclination, when asked to look at someone’s writing, is to grab one of my razor-sharp red pencils and have at it. But that’s correcting, and that’s not the point of these critiques. We were to focus on how the “narrator” (a literary construct created by the author) told the story. Structure, narrative voice, scenic development, characterization, dialogue; these were the topics to be critiqued. I put my red pencil away, pulled out a purple pen, and started making notes in the margins, rather than on the text. This is a completely different skill. It took me longer to do this sort of analysis than it would’ve taken me to clean up the writing. I finished at lunchtime today.

I have three critiques to write for each of the remaining classes this quarter. I hope I’ll get quicker at it with practice. If not, you’ll be seeing a lot more pictures of cats and buildings here, and a lot fewer words.

Around the beginning of the year, I noticed planning department signs on several buildings on Queen Anne Avenue, the commercial street in our neighborhood. There were plans afoot to demolish about half a block of old two-story commercial and apartment buildings, and build a four-story mixed-use building on the site. One by one, the restaurants and shops in the existing buildings closed their doors. We worried that our local hardware store, officially an Ace Hardware but clearly of an earlier vintage than the modern suburban Ace, would be one of the businesses to go. Fortunately, that was not the case; the building adjacent to it was the last in the row slated for demolition.

A few weeks ago, the demolition equipment arrived on the site. A few men with modern skid steers and booms and bulldozers can demolish in a week what an order of magnitude more laborers worked years to build. In short order, the site was a mountain of rubble. When the last building came down, the side wall of the hardware store was exposed. And on that wall, covered in grime but still remarkably colorful, was this beautiful sign advertising the Queen Anne Radio & Electric Store and Sherwin Williams Paints. (Sherwin Williams’ logo, then as now: Cover the Earth.)

I am quite taken with “ghost signs”, the faded, peeling remnants of ads painted on the walls of old buildings. While some of these signs advertise products, such as Coca-Cola, that are still available, many are ads for stores or products long gone. This sign, almost too vivid (thanks to long-wearing leaded paint) to be considered a “ghost”, was painted on the very store that it advertised.

The local Ace Hardware was once Queen Anne Radio & Electric. And in the large plate glass window at the entrance to the hardware store, along with photos of and artwork by the owner’s grandchildren, is the documentation of that. There’s a photo of the building, Queen Anne Radio & Electric, taken in the late 1930’s, and a framed advertisement from 1947, in which the name has been changed to Queen Anne Hardware & Electric.

The photo was taken as part of the King County Land Use Survey, a project of the Works Project Admini- stration. From 1936 to 1940, Survey workers identified, assessed the condition of and photographed every building in King County. This project employed several hundred people, and cost a little over 2 million dollars. At the time, it provided a long-needed update to the tax records of King County. Now, the photographic record is an invaluable resource for people who are interested in the history of the area, or just in the history of their own old house. We have a copy of the photo taken of our house for the survey; I’ll scan it and post it here someday. There’s an interesting article on the survey at HistoryLink; the records are now part of the Washington State Archives.

I’m curious about the history of the ghost sign, and this photo tells me a lot. It shows a storefront adjacent to Queen Anne Radio & Electric. (The sign in the window says “Coffee Shop.” How… Seattle.) So I know that by 1936 the sign had already been hidden. Directly behind the coffee shop is the second story of a very typical early-20th-century Seattle house. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, it was fairly common to add this sort of small commercial space onto the front of a house, creating a situation where the family lived behind their store, rather than over it. The house looks older than the Queen Anne Radio building; the storefront is clearly newer. I assume that the 6-block commercial district of Queen Anne Avenue was originally entirely residential. There are still several old houses on the street, all now occupied by businesses.

I think that at some point in the late 1910’s or early 1920’s, a house was demolished to make way for the Queen Anne Radio building. (You know, I could be completely wrong about this. While the store’s brick façade says 1920’s to me, the side wall of the building, on which the sign is painted, is lapped wood siding. The commercial building might be older, with a brick façade that was added later.) Anyway… the sign was painted on the portion of the wall between the street and the front of the adjacent house. (Just think how happy that must’ve made the neighbors!) Sometime before 1936, the owner of the house built the coffee shop storefront, covering - and therefore protecting - the Queen Anne Radio sign.

So the sign was hidden away for at least 68 years, until last month, when the bulldozers brought it back into view. And it will soon disappear again behind a new, much larger building, one that is likely to outlast the old Queen Anne Radio building. So unlike Brigadoon, which reawakens every hundred years, the Queen Anne Radio & Electric sign is probably taking its curtain call. I’m going to miss it.