One of the top songs on my own list is the one sometimes called “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” sometimes called “Twelve Gates to the City.” I listen to the Pete Seeger version often, one of my favorites along with the soaring Kathleen Battle operatic performance I fell in love with first. I collect favorite songs too, an enthusiasm I picked up from my dad, who had recordings of every known cover of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life”-ironic, I suppose, a lush life the one I decided to no longer pursue.
Your intersection with the story of your brick is happenstance you’re not certain if your residence makes it yours.
ME-VENTORY: You imagine the brick in its proper place, part of a structure that’s not yet been broken, here before you came, a story still taking up space. I interrogate all of what feels like mine. Any cubic space in the world is a brick of multiple histories. I don’t believe in the Christian version of God but I do believe in the spiritual wonder located in material presence. My inventory/my me-ventory/our we-ventory, one might say-an everyday assessment of the invisible collections residing beneath and within. Step Four is to make “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Step Ten is to continue “to take personal inventory” and when we are wrong to promptly admit. I haven’t been to AA recently, but when I used to go every week I loved the inventory step meetings. I learned in AA to call these kinds of inmost collections my inventory. I collect memories too, all kinds, some that might fall into the category of demolition garbage, what might be too sharp and embarrassing to keep out in the light.
#INVISIBLE CITIES EXCERPT FULL#
I have shelves full of this stuff, little artifacts of the beautiful/not beautiful city. My brick, but only because I’ve taken it as my own, to collect, among my menageries, set alongside small shoes made of mottled glass and rusted railway spikes and silver-clad icons sold to me by aging nuns in old-world churches I’ve visited. Shey knows I like old broken things, history things, as much as I like things that are new.Ī brick-shaped piece of architectural rubbish. Who brings Chicago demolition garbage home to the wife? People like us who keep changing the names of things? The city shifts, and so do our bodies, like the way the two of us have been trying out new pronouns for Linnea that hold both the she and the they, the now and the then. One side, covered with ceramic tile, looks like it came from a kitchen or bath-room wall, memory’s powder room, or that’s what I think. If I tossed it through a window this object would behave like any other brick, but it’s not a brick exactly. I do, in fact, call this object my brick.
#INVISIBLE CITIES EXCERPT CRACKED#
I will eventually keep Linnea’s gift on a shelf in my workroom, a hunk of concrete and cracked enamel, the shape and weight of a brick, a broken artifact I cherish for all it carries. One day, on the waterfront, a block from where we live now, in the trench dug out to make space for the rerouted bike trail, Linnea finds an old brick and brings it home to me.
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