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In MemoriamAugust 08, 2008 Yesterday morning I got up in the dark at 4:45. I always notice the days' lengthening and shortening at the other end, but in late fall I'm usually surprised when I start sleeping past 7 because the sun didn't wake me up. Rhodry rarely woke me up either. He wasn't a morning dog, but Fellow Traveller is. For a while there I was waking with the sun around the time he did, just after 5. Then it was closer to 5:30. Now it's approaching 6. So Wednesday night I set the alarm for 4:45. Woke up at 4:39, lay in bed till it buzzed, then got up. Trav was still stretched out on the deck, dead to the world. I woke him up and told him it was time for breakfast. That's unusual. My ferry reservation was for the 6 a.m. boat. The Steamship Authority wants vehicles there half an hour by boarding time. Trav and I were rolling down our road by 5:24, and since there was almost nothing on either Old County or State Road we made it to Vineyard Haven in pretty good time. Can't remember the last time I took the 6 a.m. -- the 7 is my early boat of choice, and it was open when I made my reservations, but I thought that might be cutting it too close: the ferry trip is 45 minutes, the drive about two hours, the service was at 10:30, and I didn't want to blow in at the last minute. By the time the Martha's Vineyard pulled out of Vineyard Haven harbor, the sun was up. When Trav came home at the end of April, he was just a little pup in arms, so this was his first time traveling on the top deck. He spent most of the ride being admired by a family with several elementary-school-age kids. At the McDonalds on Route 28, Trav got a pee break and I got a Sausage Egg McMuffin. OK, so I'm predictable! The drive was uneventful, except I hadn't been to Weston in so long that I missed the exit for 95 -- it doesn't say "128" anymore and probably hasn't for years, but that's what I'm looking for. So I stayed on 495 and headed east on 90, the Mass Pike, shelling out 70 cents for the privilege and getting a taste of rush-hour traffic. Yee-uck. It was backed up more than a mile from the Weston tollbooths. Fortunately I remembered how to get off the pike, and the exits were still where I thought they'd be. I stopped by the house where I grew up and where my father died, mainly to give Trav a water and stretch break. My brother Roger was there, but everyone else was at the church. Newton Street, the main route to Weston Center from our house, wound and climbed at all the familiar places -- heading in the opposite direction it was a glorious long downhill ride on a bicycle -- and I doubt it's any wider than it was 40 years ago, but there are more houses, and the houses are huger. Most of the modest one-story houses my friends lived in when we were growing up have been replaced by "McMansions," with multiple columns and cornices and probably heated driveways and elaborate security systems. When I was growing up, we belonged to St. Peter's Episcopal Church on the Boston Post Road, but in the last decade Dad had gotten involved in the First Parish Church, so that's where the service was. First Parish is Unitarian, but its brand of Unitarianism looked and felt pretty Low Church Episcopal to me, from the big cross above the altar to the order of service. The service, however, was quite wonderful. It was like a potluck, with a lot of people bringing their favorite dishes and all the individual bits adding up to a satisfying and remarkably coherent meal. For instance -- Dad was an enthusiastic singer of campfire songs at beach picnics, so my sister, Ellen, thought it would be cool to include one in the service. We quickly came up with Pete Seeger's "Sailing Down My Golden River," which Dad probably never sang and maybe never even heard, but could have -- and it was all about sailing. The more I went around singing it to myself, the more perfect it seemed. Ellen recruited a guitar-playing friend, Gordon, and her sister-in-law, Mary, to help us lead the congregation. So earlier in the service I was a little startled to hear the minister reading from Ecclesiastes -- the portion that Pete Seeger turned into his classic song "Turn, Turn, Turn." My father was a grandnephew of the philosopher George Santayana; he knew Santayana, corresponded with him until his death in 1952, and over the years has assisted various Santayana scholars with their work. So my siblings were looking for something Santayana to read, and what did they come across but a poem titled "Cape Cod." My niece, Rozzie, read it at the service. It begins:
The recurring line at the end of each verse of "Sailing Down My Golden River" is "And I was not far from home." Both poem and song deal with water and air, life and death, though in very different moods. One of the hymns, "We Who Would Valiant Be," is about being a pilgrim, and the minister picked up on the sailing imagery -- although when he envisioned Dad sailing on his way and eventually arriving where the waters were calm, I did think to myself that Dad wouldn't take kindly to being becalmed and would probably be happier with a spanking breeze. You can't plan this stuff. It's enough to make you believe in the Invisible Hand. I knew I wanted to speak, and I knew I wanted to say something about Jane Jacobs, but I was still thinking about what I wanted to say as I drove north from Woods Hole. It was still coming together as I listened to the previous speakers: Tony Nolan read a remembrance by Ken Fish, Dad's longtime colleague and occasional sparring partner on the Weston Democratic Town Committee; Ted Landsmark, president of the Boston Architectural College, talked about Dad's long (53 years) and deep involvement in the school and its mission; and Chuck Redmon, architect and principal with the Cambridge Seven Associates, spoke about the R/UDAT (Regional/Urban Design Assistance Teams) program that Dad founded for the American Institute of Architects in 1967 and that continues to this day. The common theme as I heard it was about implementing vision in real time and real places, and (of course) about Dad's legacy to various organizations and the people he worked with. So I started by saying that as a kid I often heard Dad say that he'd known from age 10 that he wanted to be an architect; when I was 10, I barely knew what an architect was, but I knew I didn't want to be one. But there was a picture in my baby book of Dad in his cap and gown, holding baby me in one arm and his architectural degree in his free hand, because both the degree and I arrived in the same month, June 1951. So I probably should have known that I wasn't going to escape architecture that easily! As an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, I read Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities for the first time. It wasn't for a class; I'm 99% sure that my father, a great admirer of Jacobs, brought the book to my attention. Penn had recently built three 26-story dormitories, and there was much discussion on campus about the anonymity of the dorms, the vandalism, and the occasional mugging or even assault. I looked at the dorms through Jacobs-opened eyes and saw: the dorms are organized into apartments, and what common space exists is off the beaten track, e.g., on the 26th floor. The only time/place where students interacted with anyone other than their flatmates was while waiting for the elevators. Small wonder most residents didn't know who lived there and who didn't. Earlier in the week Ellen sent around an e-mail she'd received from one of Dad's fellow architects. He noted that it's very unusual for architects to actually build and live in houses that they designed; Dad not only lived for more than 50 years in one house that he designed, but he also spent a lot of time in another one: the camp on Tisbury Great Pond. So I was talked about how Dad had designed both houses so that the individual spaces, the bedrooms, were relatively small and the common spaces relatively large, encouraging people to spend more time together than off behind closed doors. More, both houses are relatively small for the number of people who are expected to use them; the idea is to spend time outdoors and in the wider world, rather than holed up with your next of kin. That, I think, pretty much reflected Dad's approach to the world, and mine isn't far off. What I've learned over the years was that well-designed spaces can't do all the work of facilitating community, but they can sure make it easier, while poorly designed spaces can block and undermine the best human efforts. So that's what I said.
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