You Can't Dance with Architecture. But Still...

Today was proofing day at East Village Magazine, meaning that I showed up at 4:30-ish to read my column (copied below) on the table at Gary's cluttered office on Second Street. And to make my little edits. I found only one thing I wanted; I wanted the word "interesting" italicized. Gary says he CAN do anything I request. Whether he WILL is another matter. I love the scraggly-bearded Rip Van Winkle of East Village, who sleeps on a desk in the back of his store-front and for 35 years has been working 14-hour days, seven days a week to get his little paragon of community journalism out.

As I've noted many times before, one feature of proofing day is that Gary sets out a bottle of Bushmills, along with my proof and a pen, and a chipped cup. He knows I like a finger or two when I'm editing. It is one of the high points of my month. We sit there and argue over writing and I drink a couple of fingers and ask him to pour just another finger or so, and we talk about stuff that we both remember. No matter how depressed I am in the morning, by the time I've had a couple of slugs of Irish and an hour or so of conversation with my friend Gary, I feel better about life. Tonight it had to do with John's Mini-Mart, a stop-and-rob that used to sell beer and lottery tickets and bad junk food next to the EVM office. It was torn down and leveled years ago, and now there's just some desultory grass there. But when I lived in my first Flint digs, a walkup on Avon Street right across the street from Gary's family homestead, John's "mini-rip" was a big neighborhood hangout. John, a broad-bellied white-haired con man, used to be a friend of mine, and I'd go over there a lot to buy beer, cheap wine, boxes of mac and cheese, and lottery tickets.

Tonight I told Gary my old house on Seventh Street is vacant. It makes me sad: I lived there for 15 years with my first husband, a wonderful poet and the man with whom I once thought I would live forever. I once thought we would be literary lights and thrive and prosper. For a time, it came true. But something went wrong. We disappointed each other. Booze came between us like a rude mistress, not to mention that when it came down to it there were lots of ways in which we struggled to connect. There is no way to write about this without being overcome by melancholy, by the lingering grief that comes with a relationship that went awry.

But that house...I loved that house. Everything I feel about that house has to do with my first husband, and my hopes for a life of poetry, and a deeply embedded love of romance.

I told Gary I'd just discovered the house was vacant -- a victim of what's going on in this town and has been going on everywhere in the country lately. After my first husband and I divorced he sold the place, capitalizing luckily on a decent market just before the bubble burst. I was happy for him -- I had abandoned my claim to the house out of the guilt of my escape. But the new owners eventually foreclosed. For the first time in its 92-year history, the house is empty.

Gary always says "you can't dance with architecture," meaning, I guess, that some kinds of art defy analysis. He's probably said that to me about two dozen times. I always nod and agree, though half the time I don't know what the hell this actually means. I just googled it again, and it looks like Martin Mull might have said something like that back in the '80s...but actually I think it goes back to about 1918. Gary probably knows and will tell me eventually.

Anyway, even though Gary says you can't dance with architecture, I am very susceptible to buildings. That place at 942 E. Seventh Street is in my heart, in my memory, in my soul -- whatever that is. It hurts me that it's vacant. As Neil Young said in "Helpless," it feels like "All my Changes were there." I'm going to take a break now to think this through more, and then I'll come back to it.

...So, after I left EVM I turned onto Second Street, and then onto Crapo, and then to Court, where I had my turn signal on to turn left to go to the house I live in now, in the nicely manicured and upper-class neighborhood known as "The College/Cultural Neighborhood." We have a big sign and everything announcing this. But when I got down to the light at Crapo and Court, I looked in my rear view mirror to see if anybody was behind me. There wasn't. So I turned right instead, going up the hill to the light at Court and Avon, and turned left. I turned left off of Court at that light for 15 years -- it was so habitual that for about three years after I left I used to turn left there without even thinking about it, coming and going for other reasons. My body and brain thought I still lived in my old neighborhood years after I left. I would go down Avon to Seventh and turn left again. My old house was the last one on the right at the dead end of Seventh. There is a brick gate into a mansion at the dead end. My old house is a solid gray stucco place on the right, NOT a mansion but a lovely, solid square place. An immense maple still arches over the front yard -- a tree I'd written poems about for years, a tree that turns gold every fall and used to send brilliant light for a week or so every October into the second floor master bedroom where my first husband and I slept together for years. This is all I can say now. The memory of that tree, that brilliance, that bedroom where we cleaved and cleaved, is all I can handle at the moment. I have to take another break.

So...I went down to the dead end of Seventh and pulled into the driveway, on the first night after the time changed and it was already dark. The maple tree was leafless, and a three-quarter moon overhead glinted silver into the yard I'd spent many years in.

In a way, it's a gift that the place is deserted. Now I can stop and be there. I used to go by there from time to time, usually when I'd had a drink or two, and sneak a look, but it always felt a bit invasive. Were the new people happy there, where my own life as a poet had flowered? Where my life as a wife had foundered? The place always looked nice. But now there is a sign on the mailbox that says, "Vacant. No Mail" and a paper on the door that says it's managed now by a "Five Brothers" company in another county. I know that because I parked my car in the driveway and audaciously walked up the walk and climbed up the three steps to the front door. After staring at the depressing signs, I turned around and sat on the top step of the porch. I spent many hours on that front porch. Here is a poem I wrote on that front porch once:

Smoking on the Porch, Winter Night

I want just this moment of flagrance.

Breath mingling with smoke, smoke with

breath, no difference. I am on fire and

the sweet air snuffs me. I am beeswax

stolen from church. Leave me alone.

It takes eight minutes to smoke each one.

All eight stretch to my fingers’ tips.

I lift up, up to the relief

of oaks and that recumbent moon. Who

is that woman smoking on the porch?

She is a timer for a small death.

She chugs knifey air like whiskey

to compose herself. She solicits

the blues. She gets itchy waiting, wrapped

in smoke and her good black wool.

Okay, I've reached another moment where I have to stop writing. More later.

This is where I used to...

A peril of being in a place for a long time...one of my themes, day after day...is this odd sense of needing meaning from the architectures I've inhabited year after year. There's a displacement, a recurring mild angst I've been feeling lately when I walk by a place and I think, "my God, I've been walking by this for 30 years."

Walking into the Rec Center last night in the grace of 6 p.m. April daylight, I looked up at the edifice of the Harding Mott building and thought, hmm, is this a beautiful enough building for me? Is it "in" me after all these years? In fact it feels unremarkable, if imposing -- it's a building I walk toward and into time and again and don't feel much of anything. It doesn't lift me up: the predicament being that I have often, often felt ambivalent about myself and my life in the perimeters of this architecture. Wouldn't anyone? Ah, thus it is, isn't it? Does the architecture shape us, or is it we who give the walls and sweeps of brick and mortar meaning? Could a sad and preoccupied woman be unmoved by the arches of Grace Cathedral, for example, a place I've gone with my brother in SF and never failed to be moved?

I did once write a poem about my first husband picking me up at the Harding Mott building after work called "Walking Toward You, October Thursday," and I like that poem. I realize as I remember that poem, a romantic one in which I wanted him to see me smiling as I got to him, that I was in my 30s then and already feeling the lurking threats of domestic predictability, the threat of deadness, the yearning for something special never to end. It was a moment, there in the curving concrete blocks of the Harding Mott building.

And last night, walking toward my yoga class, where I tread in with my yellow ID card and always say hi to the girls behind the counter, and they always say "Have a good workout!" I felt something akin to happiness -- a pleasure in a repeated routine of walking somewhere I always walk and seeing people who always say the same thing to me and of course, knowing that in the unglamorous basement room of the Rec Center I'll be discovering some new muscle, some new alignment, some new challenge, and that when I come out I'll feel...GOOD.

That room always delivers something. Last night Rachelle had us doing a particularly painful stretch, where we pressed our shins backwards against the wall and then tried to straighten up so that our backs and shoulders also touched the wall. I couldn't come close. When she saw us struggling with it she almost yelled, "you've had a lot worse pain than this, people, you've lost family members, you've lost pets, you've had a lot worse pain than this..." I'm smiling as I remember that now. What's a little muscle stretch, what's a pain, even a stretch that made me want to scream? We've all lost shitloads. Take it, she seemed to say, just take it. We've all had pain, pain, pain.

So tonight it happened again. Vickie and I walked by my old house on Seventh Street, the place I lived with my first husband for 15 years. So much happened there -- so many hopes and dreams resided with us there, climbed the stairs every night with us, slept with me, fed me. It was a dangerous place to go tonight. I felt my heart and my throat clench, looking at that house. I couldn't stop looking. It seems so long ago -- ten year now since I moved out on a mild May weekend. There is where I used to live. This is where I used to dream a certain dream, This is where I was thirty, forty, fifty. This is where I stopped being young. This is where I planted morning glories along the back wall and kept a triangular herb garden. This is where I wrote my novel. This is where I wrestled with many demons. This is where I stopped loving my life. This is where I stopped loving that dream. This is where I gave up that dream.

We turned around and walked away from the house. I let Vickie talk about whatever she wanted to talk about. She liked another house, the big one at the dead end. I said I used to know the guy who lived there. It seemed like there were fewer trees, as if the life cycle was up all along the street. One old house was completely gone, the bare lot startling and freshly leveled. I felt sort of hungry, an ache I didn't want to touch, like my thigh screaming against the wall last night. I've had worse pain than that. Take it, just take it.

Eventually we got back onto Avon Street and crossed the little bridge over Gilkey Creek and strode through the park back onto the side I live on now. It was safer being up there, where I have another life, another dream. It used to be when I walked over here I felt unease -- the houses were grander and I felt small and unfulfilled. Now I think I deserve to live over here, where I have matured, where I am seasoned like these solid old domiciles. It's odd the vanities and cravings architecture can satisfy. It's taken me awhile to get here, barely a quarter mile from where I used to live, and I feel something mostly good. I climb the stairs up to bed every night and climb the stairs down in the morning to a kitchen full of light. In my familiar architectures, those that continually echo a nagging past and those that yield beauty and comfort, I'm continually adjusting myself, as in yoga class -- a woman both the same and continually new.

Voyeur at the Round House

Every day when I'm in Flint I walk by the round house. It's on a corner lot down by Gilkey Creek, and it looks very odd in this neighborhood of colonials and small Tudors. Its single story is contructed of dark gray brick and has a flat black roof with two cylindrical brick chimneys, each with a conical tophat, poking up from the roof. There's a tall white fence around the back third. Unshapely, monstrous evergreens obscure all its windows, except for the front, next to an attached garage. Whose idea, probably back in the Sixties, was this architectural anomaly? For months it's been obviously uninhabited and overgrown, a hopeless "For Sale" sign up in front. Lately, somebody's at least trying to do something with it: it's been a big mess, trucks coming and going, a huge dumpster in the driveway. I always crane my neck when I stride by, having a big appetite to see inside other people's houses, but it has always been obscured by the dumpster or vehicles, or the curtains were securely pulled shut.

But yesterday, whoa, the round house sat completely open to view. The curtains were gone and the curved driveway was clear, with nobody in sight. So, after looking furtively over my shoulder, I walked right up to the round house and took a good long look.

What a weird place! Totally empty, inside it looks like a set from the Dick Van Dyke show. The one of the brick chimneys visible from the street is connected to a circular fireplace in the center of the living room, which has a carpeted, semicircular "conversation pit" and a step up to a circular carpeted area around and behind the fireplace. The whole thing is strangely set off by white cast iron railings separating the conversation pit from the rest of the room -- as if the residents or guests couldn't be trusted not to fall off the step down. Off to the left is a dark kitchen that looks more like a bar, and on the far side of the circular living room are big glass doors to -- a small, triangular swimming pool! I'd never have guessed it was there from the street.

What's so cool about peering into other people's houses is the way you can start to imagine a whole new life. What if I lived here? What would I be like?

I tried to picture the sensibility behind the round house -- not the hippie part of the Sixties, but rather something related to Hugh Hefner and martinis at 5 p.m. and men in black suits and skinny ties and glamorous women in tight dresses, high heels and beehives. At one point in my young life, that was how I thought sophisticated adults lived: not like my parents, who didn't drink, didn't care about clothes, kept the same couch for 50 years and favored digging homegrown potatoes over anything having to do with, say, New York.

This is a house from StarTrek, a house from the Space Age. Sixties architecture was fun -- so unlike our parents' predictable block structures, buildings like comfort food. It would be hard to get comfortable in the living room of the round house -- and you'd be quite exposed -- like those damn "open plan" schools that never worked.

Now, though, it looks, well, kookie. Some of it even was called, wasn't it, "Googie architecture" ? The round house doesn't quite ascend to that moniker, but getting a chance to peek inside made me smile. I know nothing about the people who lived inside -- whether they smoked Parliaments and had sophisticated cocktail parties or whether the woman of the house made rumaki and donned a skinny black dress. It does seem, in retrospect, as if the Sixties weren't about being comfortable, but about being...daring. It was fun back then. It was fun being young in the Sixties.

But I don't particularly miss the Sixties, except that I sometimes miss having a young body. And while I enjoyed picturing myself skinny dipping in the very private swimming pool at the round house on a hot Flint Sunday, I don't want to live in the round house. I don't particularly want to push the envelope or wear high heels or grip the cast iron railing to keep from falling into the conversation pit. But it's a deliciously taboo pleasure to walk up to somebody else's house, stare right in the windows, and imagine another life.