He designed medical dental offices,
suburban bank branches,
a some modest houses,
nothing monumental or heroic.
But he had his heroes,
the twentieth century moderns
like Frank Lloyd Wright
and Le Corbusier.
He even worked briefly
as a young architect
for the distinguished
San Francisco firm,
Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons.
I have travelled to some
monumental, historic places
over the last couple of
decades. Gothic cathedrals,
holy sites in Jerusalem and Nazareth,
the jungled temples
of Angkor Wat, the gilded
and lacquered temples
of Luang Prabang.
Wept at the monuments
to the fallen, the 58,000 names
inscribed on the plunging black
granite wall of the Vietnam War
Memorial, and the 2,982 names
on the parapet of the 9/11 pits.
I bring Dad with me, in my heart
or on my shoulder, like
what do you think of this, Dad?
I wish you were here to see this.
And I know that he’d weep too.
I know that’s a gift from him.
We cry easily and freely
in the presence of spirit
and beauty wrought in stone.
We’ve just returned from a tour
to Spain and Portugal and
we went to many cathredrals,
palaces, museums, memorials.
Some are visited by so many
people that you need a ticket
to join the throngs of visitors.
Santiago de Compostela,
the final destination
of the Camino pilgrims, and
the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s
wondrous unfinished cathedral
still under construction,
what he intended to be
a Bible made of stone.
Dad liked cathedrals, chapels,
the simple and the grand.
I wonder what he would have
thought about Frank Gehry’s
pierced titanium-skinned
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao?
Architects as heroes, I know
he would be impressed and
we could talk about it in a way
that we could never talk of other things.
Those crowded places have
a power you can feel,
the presence of God or even
just the accumulated awe
of the millions who have been there.
For me though, the quiet places,
the six hundred year-old
side altars in the Cathedrals
of Barcelona and Leon, paintings
and sculptures dimmed and faded
by centuries of candle soot,
a parish church in Lisbon
or Obidos, a lesser church
in Santiago Compostela,
this is where I carry Dad.
I don’t remember ever being
in a church with him when
I was growing up. He never
spoke about his faith.
Unless we were talking
about architecture, that’s
when he lit up.
There was one time when
he got to be a heroic architect,
a designer of a beautiful church,
St Margarets Episcopal Church
in Palm Desert, California.
It’s a simple exterior, a classic
cruciform footprint in plan,
but with tall windows, hammer trusses
to support the high roof
crowned with translucent glass
that bathes the interior with light.
The window behind the altar
is clear, not stained glass,
with the rocky slope of
the desert mountain rising
up behind it. Dad, you got to be
a visionary in full, that time.
