Walking with Dad

My father was an architect.

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.