the parsley.blog.landscape.life

Suppose he’d listened to the erudite committee,

He would have only found where not to look;

Suppose his terrier when he whistled had obeyed,

It would not have unearthed the buried city;

Suppose he had dismissed the careless maid,

The cryptogram would not have fluttered from the book.

- W.H. Auden, “The Lucky”, from “The Quest”

streets of Paris

we’ve finally coined a term for an odd family habit.  well, I never thought it was all that odd; seems perfectly normal to me.   but my sister’s husband, and the husband I used to have, both have spoken rather feelingly about it.  it’s now known as the “mystery errand.”

streets of Seattle

my ex used to complain about my habit of wandering off at random in public places; he saw the genetic link immediately when my dad was visiting, and he found himself watching father and daughter both drift off on some eccentric orbit of their own.

now, it seems to me that wandering is the most natural possible thing to do in any environment, but most particularly an urban environment.  and not looking back is a very healthy habit to have.  except, of course, when it gets you completely lost.  (not to mention forgetting where I parked my car, a frequent habit of mine.)

streets of Denver (that's NOT my car)

is getting lost a productive habit? it’s not my favorite thing, when I’m late for a meeting.  my sense of direction, always dodgy at the best of times, can become completely unhinged when I’m under stress, and cause me to make a disastrously wrong turn at just the moment when minutes count.

but when I’m on my own time, getting lost can lead to Discoveries, not otherwise available.  in fact I’d say in those instances, getting lost is the end in itself.

I don’t think I totally lack a sense of direction; what I often lack is the ability to focus on cues to orientation, usually because I’ve been distracted by something just over…THERE…that I feel absolutely compelled to go and see.  “must remember, I parked my car at the corner of….ooooh, shiny!”

streets of Philadelphia

there is another member of the family who may be germane to this discussion.  her name is Caroline.  she joined the family a couple of years back.  she belongs to my dad and stepmother, and she is, in fact, a talking GPS device.  while my dad may be a pedestrian wanderer like myself … when he’s in the car driving somewhere, he really wants to get where he’s going efficiently.  that’s Caroline’s job.

strange to relate, I very quickly got into the habit of referring to Caroline as a person.  she comes along on trips.  when everybody was visiting me last summer, Caroline came too and rode along in the rental car.  I was in my own car, but I always heard later about how Caroline got confused trying to pronounce La Cienega, or how she reacted when I was in the lead and decided to correct course with a hugely illegal U-turn in the middle of Pico Boulevard.

streets of Washington DC

I’ve thought about getting my own Caroline, strictly for the sake of not being late for meetings; but then I wonder if my Caroline would destroy the serendipity of my weekend and vacation wanderings.

actually I wouldn’t get a Caroline; mine would have a male voice, and I would name him something very manly, like Chip or Chad or Brent.  the nice thing about Brent, or Chip,  would be that I could completely ignore him whenever I chose.  maybe turn him off altogether.

but then there always comes that point when you are just plain worn out, footsore, overloaded, and no longer in the mood to make discoveries.  at that point, Chad would get me safely home, my mystery errand for the day accomplished.  he would never judge me for the many times I ignored his advice.

streets of Los Angeles; the LA Public Library, my spiritual home

originally posted November 17, 2008

a couple years back I spent a long day wandering up and down the Mall in Washington, DC as part of some more general wanderings up and down the East Coast. I know Washington pretty well, as my dad lived there for years before he retired.  but since I hadn’t been there in a while, there were some new things I wanted to check out.

the World War II Memorial was quite new at the time, and especially stark in the winter weather. I asked the friend I was staying with what he thought of it, before I headed out to see it myself. he’s not an architecture geek like me, and had to think about his answer for a while: “It didn’t make me feel anything.”

I saw what he meant when I arrived there. it was certainly impressive, but when you go up to it, you feel like a bug on a driveway.  I spent some time watching people in and around it, clearly trying to figure out a way to interact with it.

it seemed that the place people were most likely to huddle was in the little rounded balconies that jutted off the main colonnade. there, at least, there was enough of a little enclosure that people didn’t seem to feel so loomed over and exposed.  I saw a lot of people take each other’s pictures inside the balconies:

it turned out there wasn’t much else you could do, besides take a few pictures of the impressive architecture. you can’t even make a wish:

in the course of that day, I visited a number of the other memorials along that end of the Mall – the Lincoln, the Korean War, and the FDR Memorial (which I’ve posted about previously)…and of course everybody knows this one:

I saw it soon after it initially opened in 1982.  at the time, I was on a trip to Washington with a children’s group that supported the nuclear freeze, and we were taken to see the memorial.  I can still remember the initial impact of walking down the ramp next to the wall as it got taller and taller and the volume of names grew and grew.

there are a lot of things one could say about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and I won’t try to get into all of them here. but for now, just consider the question of human scale and human contact. there is a boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead that we can’t cross, but this is a place where there is just a thin wall between the two.  we can touch the wall, and leave messages there.

originally posted October 25, 2008

“I never forget that I live in a house owned by all the American people and that I have been given their trust.”

a little thought to contemplate at this crucial moment in our history.  the picture was taken at the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, which was designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin.  several outdoor rooms contain various sculptures, reliefs, and inscriptions that recall the four terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt. the sculpture above is a tribute to FDR’s Fireside Chats.

Another quote by FDR is below, form another part of the memorial.