On 7 July, I learned my job as director of communications had been excised as of that day. I had an inverse reaction to this sudden surgery, not unlike what so often happens in a shiva house, the bereaved comforting those who come to offer comfort. How could I not? - the person bearing the blade was the one I'd followed to EBDI for the most satisfying job I ever had outside of my own enterprises.
I worried how we'd communicate to our residents minus the newsletter. Not well, I was told, his continued clinical delivery a cover-up, not an incapability, to care - about me and about the void-to-be. Less is not more when the most is sometimes not enough for those caught up against their will in the re-imagination of the part of the world they happen to call home.
I traveled light, relative to my professional and emotional investment, needing to gather not much more than a 1954 Jacob Glushakow pen and ink portrait of a collapsed rowhouse at Monument and Bond streets (black on white, yet somehow full of colour); a circa 1880s coffin top for a New Home sewing machine, the company's name still big and bold in Eastlake lettering across the front; and the RE-INVENT YOURSELF tank top found in a thrift store an hour after learning the EBDI job was mine. The shirt sports the number 8 - a mobius, an endless ribbon, a mark of infinity; I pondered the symbolism as I hung it in my sewing room above a pile of unfinished patchwork, strangely thrilled to have been pushed off a cliff, grateful for the enormous opportunity at my feet, and oddly relieved that nothing less than the full complement of my creative resources would be required to conjure and fuel a new adventure, one ideally based from home.
EBDI's relocated residents were also pushed, but with apparatus not only to cushion the blow, but at their option, to go home again, too. On my last full day at EBDI, I had the pleasure and that aforementioned satisfaction of photographing a mother and child do just that.
21 July 2009
26 June 2009
North and South and East and West of Your Life
That’s the second line of "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?,” best-recorded by Barbra Streisand and the title of my post on this date last year, my most favorite thing I’ve ever written. I hadn’t planned to post again this 26 June, referencing, or not, the man from whom I inherited a great love of old buildings, but today, on what would have been my daddy’s 80th birthday, I ran into Bill Struever and lucked into a tour of another personal number one, and his masterpiece, the American Brewery, now home to Humanim, a visionary healer of humans and now maybe a neighborhood. I was the keyholder for the American Brewery when I worked for the City of Baltimore and unexpectedly first toured my beloved building three years ago on 9 May, the anniversary of my daddy’s death in 1973, the year the building was last used, but am absolutely astonished tonight to learn the American Brewery was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on the day my daddy died.
In 2006 the magnificent mansard-roofed towers were declared near death and with them would go years of dreams and schemes. From my window at Baltimore Housing I watched and I prayed because I knew if Bill Struever couldn’t save this building, no one could, and moving on to EBDI I more closely witnessed that for which I and so many others waited, crying when the scaffolding came down and the bandages came off this asymmetrical, eccentric, outrageous old lady, for she was perfect.
Today from the top I looked north and south and east and west and saw maybe this city’s craziest quilt of streets crashing into each other at the oddest of angles, only adding to the sense of dysfunction, yet I also easily picked out and prayed for those who have staked their proud claim as this city stitches its fabric back together, needle and thread poised at the ready, waiting for EBDI, already lightly but securely patched with running stitches to Oliver and Johns Hopkins and Patterson Park, to send progress bolting straight up Gay Street.
In 2006 the magnificent mansard-roofed towers were declared near death and with them would go years of dreams and schemes. From my window at Baltimore Housing I watched and I prayed because I knew if Bill Struever couldn’t save this building, no one could, and moving on to EBDI I more closely witnessed that for which I and so many others waited, crying when the scaffolding came down and the bandages came off this asymmetrical, eccentric, outrageous old lady, for she was perfect.
Today from the top I looked north and south and east and west and saw maybe this city’s craziest quilt of streets crashing into each other at the oddest of angles, only adding to the sense of dysfunction, yet I also easily picked out and prayed for those who have staked their proud claim as this city stitches its fabric back together, needle and thread poised at the ready, waiting for EBDI, already lightly but securely patched with running stitches to Oliver and Johns Hopkins and Patterson Park, to send progress bolting straight up Gay Street.
20 January 2009
A Mile A Minute
Arriving home Friday from work, I was greeted by/confronted with an invitation to join the former American Association of Retired Persons, now the AARP. At that moment, with my 50th birthday only six months and two days away, I somewhat irritatingly murmured Robert Frost’s most famous line about miles to go before I sleep. Doesn't AARP know 50 is the new 30, or for someone like me, newly untethered, maybe the new 20? With 401Ks in freefall, the concept of retirement doesn’t even seem feasible, but at this awesome occasion in history, long-overdue and so rife with hope and possibilities, it’s nonetheless unimaginable for those of us intent on guaranteeing this as an era of significant social change.
I thought about the week that was at EBDI – the high of Citi Foundation granting $100,000 on MLK’s real birthday to help us more affordably renew and green up classic rowhouses, and the challenges and sometimes intense emotions accompanying seismic neighborhood transformation. I suggested January 15th as the event date to commemorate the riotous response to Dr. King’s death that devastated and then for some, in an instant, defined a large segment of East Baltimore. And today, a day after an MLK federal holiday many of us would agree was by far the most moving and meaningful ever, at noon, in an instant, we’ll witness a major piece of Dr. King’s dream come true - though in reality, it happened in the calendar year 2008, when 40 years after cataclysm, America rose up in revolution, forcing history into uncharted but certainly glorious territory, and selected Barack Obama as the incoming leader of the free world. I pray the souls of slaves are somehow resting more easily today. Should I be blessed with the great gift of good health, there’s too much to do to rest, or retire, anytime soon.
I thought about the week that was at EBDI – the high of Citi Foundation granting $100,000 on MLK’s real birthday to help us more affordably renew and green up classic rowhouses, and the challenges and sometimes intense emotions accompanying seismic neighborhood transformation. I suggested January 15th as the event date to commemorate the riotous response to Dr. King’s death that devastated and then for some, in an instant, defined a large segment of East Baltimore. And today, a day after an MLK federal holiday many of us would agree was by far the most moving and meaningful ever, at noon, in an instant, we’ll witness a major piece of Dr. King’s dream come true - though in reality, it happened in the calendar year 2008, when 40 years after cataclysm, America rose up in revolution, forcing history into uncharted but certainly glorious territory, and selected Barack Obama as the incoming leader of the free world. I pray the souls of slaves are somehow resting more easily today. Should I be blessed with the great gift of good health, there’s too much to do to rest, or retire, anytime soon.
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