Friday, June 24, 2005
The Rock Garden
I came home from the conference downtown on a saturday midafternoon, tired and worn and glad to be home. I dropped my messenger bag in the foyer and ambled back to our bedroom, where a radical and unwelcome change met my bleary eyes:
Our bedroom overlooks the backyard, except that the backyard hasn’t ever really been ours - Oma, who lives in the garage apartment, had claimed it as her domain long before we ever moved in. Her bitter scowl and monolingual cantonese harrangues were more than enough to dissuade us from any more than the most fleeting sojourns into her emerald quadrangle. Rather, we enjoyed it from above, looking out from our windows over the lawn and its slim border of fruit trees and flowering bushes. Every few years I’d venture down to pluck a few plums, but otherwise I avoided the region goverened by Oma’s ancient claws and unwavering glare of disapproval.
Well, when I looked down at the backyard this particular saturday afternoon, it looked different: the grass was gone. Utterly gone. Not mowed, nor rototilled nor burned away - it had actually been paved. The border remained, a hollow oasis of color and life, but the entire interior of the yard was concrete - grey and petrified. Two small carefully-formed rosettes of earth remained in the middle as “features,” to be hemmed in with some scalloped pink borderbricks laid out ready for installation. Half the yard had been tiled with large textured square pavers, giving the impression of the public walkways at a local government center; more pavers lay around, awaiting installation. Over it all, the wind blew coldly.
It made me think of treasures buried and the ellimination of beauty from a too-coarse, too-hard world, thoughts that stayed with me as I rode the bus to work two days later. The ride, as always, rolled past my bank’s downtown branch, and past the alabaster-clad shell of the building across the cross-street where the bank used to live. When this now-empty building housed my bank, it was the epitome of mid-60s modernist antihumanism: a flat featureless facade, white as bleached bones but less friendly, 20 stories of vacant glass eyes staring catatonically like a drowning victim hoisted on a gaff at the wharf. The bank offices on the ground floor were devoid of all personality, and the rest of the building was worse - it actually seemed to suck personality away from the street.
A year or so ago the bank moved to another nearby building, one with some vestige of architectural significance. The old offices sat vacant; then, not long ago, scaffolding went up and something amazing started happening: the sheets of tired white siding that had clad it for so many years began to come down. I’d had no idea that there was another building hiding inside the one I knew. This new, old building that I finally saw being exposed, piece by piece, has a handsome red brick and rusticated sandstone facade, with modest ogees curling in at small insets a few stories up and a deeply ornamented semicircular arch over the entryway - a petrified garland, surmounted by an oculus window, currently boarded and probably vacant, but surely soon to be restored, all hidden for generations, hidden from generations, and only now finally re-emerging to share its handsome details with the dirty preoccupied street.
MORAL: What is covered, will someday be divulged. That backyard I never visited? It’s still down there, and it will eventually return. My job will be to make better use of it once it’s back - and, in the meantime, to see the other gardens that shelter under the featureless stone.