Trinity Parish Chapel in Southport, Connecticut. 1872. It’s Gothic Revival, but it’s a certain sort of that genre.
I always read old books so it’s always “Gothick” to me. Please stop me if I refer to China as “Cathay.” But besides being Gothick, it’s Carpenter Gothic. Carpenter Gothic is a loose term for a type of rude gothic decorative embellishment that was made possible by the powered fret saw –the scroll saw. It aligned itself with an urge for authenticity in church affairs, driven by a British and Northern European sensibility about things “popish.” There’s nothing Mediterranean here.
It’s a lot harder to put embellishment like this on and in a building than you might think. It’s crude, almost brutish, but there’s a light and airy quality to it too. A castle or a cake; you decide.
People gathered together in fellowship, in simple but not unsophisticated surroundings, with the feeling of a serious purpose.
They didn’t just come to stare in awe at the stained glass rosette window, did they?
You’ve got to bring your own awe to such a place. It’s what’s missing in even the awesome places now. “Form follows function,” the most abused and misunderstood architectural adage there is.
This sort of place testifies. I’m not sure its occupants do any more.
I sees the shadow of the whole crowd in the bowl hanging over me. I can hears the animal roar, the lust for another man’s stuffin’. They’d have cheered me like me own mother if I stood over the rubbish of his corpse and the referee raised me fist. Now it’s jeers.
All fours. He hit me again when I was on all fours. Hit me low. Bit me. Spit at me. It signified nothing. I’d have killed him for the money. I’d have climbed from the ring and killed his family for a finnif. I’ll kill him still in the alley like a git-em-up guy for the money if I get the chance.
All fours and the blows stop. There’s a ringing but I’m jerry too. There’s a light in my eye that ain’t shining but I’m blind with it. I can feel him standing over me. His sweat is dripping on me. If I put one foot flat on the canvas he’ll hit me like a train; if I roll over the referee will end it.
The crowd is like lions when the zebra stumbles. They’re on me too. I never been beaten before. I don’t know what to do. How to act. They teach you to be a loser at school but here you only get to learn it the hard way.
There’s a long time in the tick of the clock. I remember the nuns all those years ago and the drowsy hot afternoons. My head is like that, with the buzzing. They tried, oh they tried to get the numbers and dates and spelling into my head, but I couldn’t listen ’cause I was born a gone gosling. It all swum in front of my mind’s eye like a carousel at night. They said that boy’s gonna grow up with no ideas but bad ones but there’s nothing for it he’s a dynamiter at heart.
One thing I remember from them dusty old books: Come back with your shield, or on it. A mother of Sparta was Irish, I guess, and who knew?
If they carried me out of here dead after the head and head game was settled I’d rest a thousand years no worries. But there’s no mercy in it like this. I’ll live and the little faces will arrange themselves around the table tomorrow, and the wife, the loogan’s wife, she’ll look at me hangdog and the bowls empty, and say nothing. If she said something we could shout and break the furniture over me winding up back of the fifteen ball again, and maybe I’d feel better. But the faces are all mute. I’ll whisper I’m a dirty nose over and over to myself but she’ll never say it. She don’t have to.
I look up into the glare. There’s a halo around his head like a stain glass window when you need confessin’. The referee is bringing his arm down like a poleax, over and over, with the counting. How many? I don’t hear. He only calls the fouls after the blood is drawn, but now he’s all business and he counts like a clock ’cause he’s a hunnerd percent heel.
I look up at the johnny-come-lately face in the halo. He’s afraid I’ll get up. I’m afraid to stay down.
We’re simple gardeners here at the Sippican Cottage. While we share your admiration for those whose gardens are overburdened with exotic cultivars, and on whose lips Latinate names trill, we just don’t want to pay too much attention to what we’re doing.
There’s more to it than that for me, perhaps. To be an expert, you have to know so much about something that you can’t even look at it for the pure joy that’s in it anymore. If you’ve ever been in the office of a really accomplished specialist doctor, you can always spot them looking at you — eventually, if not right from your greeting — as the bundle of bones and guts you are. As they say in the mafia movies, it’s not personal, it’s strictly business.
I worry about doctors that take too much of an interest in me personally anyway. I’d be in a tavern if I wanted commiserating companionship, after all. And the medicine in the tavern is more efficacious, generally. The best and most competent doctor I ever met told me the worst news in the most businesslike manner, and left the room to leave me alone with my wife. He tended to his business, and left us to tend to ours. We need more of that, and not just in the medical profession.
I can’t enjoy recorded music if it’s a selection I’ve learned to play myself. I see the bones and the guts of it, arrayed like cadavers in the music morgue, when I should be getting the lilt. I have gone way out of my way to avoid ever deconstructing any of the music of a certain soul singer, because I never want the magician to show me his trick after he performs it, and I don’t want to peek either. I don’t want to ruin it by understanding it.
I don’t want to ruin it by understanding it. Hmm. Music. Gardening. Love.
It’s a geranium. It not the genus Pelargonium of the Kingdom of Plantae of the Division of Magnoliophyta of the class Manoliopsida of the order Geraniales from the family of Geraniaceae.
I think when the sun comes out, I’ll sit with my wife on that brick step next to the pots of geraniums, and open the window a little so we can hear, indistinctly perhaps, Al Green sing on the box.
Trinity Parish Chapel in Southport, Connecticut. 1872. It’s Gothic Revival, but it’s a certain sort of that genre.
It’s a lot harder to put embellishment like this on and in a building than you might think. It’s crude, almost brutish, but there’s a light and airy quality to it too. A castle or a cake; you decide.
They didn’t just come to stare in awe at the stained glass rosette window, did they?.jpg)
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