Measured Spaces, Measured Lives

Many of the childhood Christmas projects I remember most fondly required very little in the way of materials, and even fewer tools.  When we wanted garlands for the tree, we’d string cranberries or popcorn with nothing more than a needle and some thread.  Everyone likes a little sparkle, so we shaped aluminum foil around thimbles and tied up our “bells” with ribbon.  Silver, crystal and gold swags were breathtaking but far too expensive for our parents’ budgets.  Knowing this, we satisfied ourselves by finding our scissors, cutting slim strips of paper and then gluing them together into chains. Red and green construction paper was best, but even magazine or catalogue pages would do, and in only an afternoon we could drape mantels, doorways and trees with festivity.

This year I found a new project, one that requires even less in the way of material.   All that’s needed is a measuring  device and a little imagination.  A good tape measure is best – the kind used by carpenters or contractors – metal, twelve feet long, able to be locked while someone calculates on a pad or 4×6.  If you don’t have a metal tape, any sort will do. Perhaps you have a delicate, purse-sized cloth tape like those preferred by dressmakers and crafters, or a slim, three-foot pocket tape given out as an advertising promotion. If you don’t have any tape at all, a ruler is fine, or even a piece of 8-1/2″  x 11″ paper.  Precision isn’t important here, only the ability to measure.

Once you have your tape or ruler, find a place in your home that seems about 10′ x 10′ square. If you aren’t certain what 10′ looks like, do some measuring.  Reel out the tape across a living room or bedroom floor. Get a feel for the space, and then find a corner of your apartment or house where 10′ x 10′ can be easily visualized.

My own 10′ x 10′ space is my dining area. It’s exactly that size,  if you don’t count the little built-out alcove I have china tucked into, and can imagine walls extending through the openings that lead to the kitchen and living rooms.  Facing the east wall, I sit at a lovely teak computer desk with an open hutch, the printer and scanner tucked neatly beside it. To the north is my window, my ever-changing vision of water and sky.  Behind me is the oak dining table that graced my parents’ first home, and two press-backed chairs caned by my mother.  Small enough for two, it can be extended with leaves to comfortably seat as many as eight, or ten very good friends.

Behind me on the west wall are two shallow, glass-fronted china cabinets, mission-styled and made especially for a small room. To the south, against the half-wall that separates dining and kitchen areas, a small mahogany Chinese tea cabinet holds cameras, candles, a few skeins of yarn, and cloth napkins in its two drawers. I spend most of my at-home waking hours here, reading, writing and dreaming, surrounded by some of my favorite possessions: a print of cowgirl Helen Bonham, a collection of oil lamps, an abalone shell, the china wash basin the cat curls into for sleep when the weather warms. 

It’s a lovely, comfortable room, but in the end it’s only a room – one of five in my apartment, 100 square feet out of 840.  Granted, I’ve lived in spaces that more nearly resemble this room than my full apartment.   The sailboat I lived aboard for a year might have had 100 square feet of living space, even though it could sleep four in a pinch.  “The Place”, my beloved cabin out west, held everything needed for a comfortable stint in the country  - woodstove, bed, chainsaws, table and chairs - in an expansive 196 square feet of space.  But those were temporary living quarters, even when “temporary” was measured in months rather than weekends.   For much of the world, 10′ x 10′  isn’t a getaway but a way of life, a routine, an inescapable reality. 

In an extraordinary collection called 100 x 100,  German photographer Michael Wolf recorded the lives of 100 residents in their 100 square foot flats in Shek Kip Mei, Hong Kong’s oldest public housing estate.

Located in Sham Shui Po, one of Hong Kong’s eighteen Administrative Districts, Shek Kip Mei was the first resettlement estate built after a tragic squatter fire on Christmas Eve, 1953 left approximately 50,000 people homeless. Refugees from Mainland China, they had been living on mixed agricultural and Crown land just north of the Walled City of Kowloon, itself the site of a squatter fire in 1950.  While there is some disagreement about the nature of the government’s response to the tragedies, there’s no question the beginnings of Hong Kong’s current housing policy can be traced to the Shek Kip Mei fire.

Completed in two phases during the middle 1950s, Lower and Upper Shek Kip Mei Estates comprised 42 blocks of 6, 7 and 13 storey buildings.  Redesigned, reconfigured and rennovated over the years, Shek Kip Mei became more livable, but remained what it was in its inception: minimal housing for the maximum number of people.

 

 

In April of 2007, shortly before residents were to begin moving out in advance of Shek Kip Mei’s demolition, photographer Michael Wolf and a social worker began knocking on doors. An accomplished urban photographer who worked extensively in Hong Kong, Wolf had focused exclusively on building exteriors. At the urging of friends he moved inside, and in the space of only four days compiled one of the most compelling portraits of urban life possible. In an interview with the New York Times’ Valerie Lipinski, Mr. Wolf said,

“I had the methodology worked out. You open the door, and you put the camera with one foot of the tripod inside. I used a small flash to bounce off the ceiling. I wanted to see into every corner. I took three or four photographs and moved on to the next one. If someone said no, I didn’t waste any time trying to convince them. In total, I photographed 118 rooms. When I had them all printed, it was almost a new looking at these interiors, because while I was photographing, I really didn’t have time to look really at what I was seeing.”

While the visual impact of the homes’ small size and clutter can be overwhelming, the words of the residents need to be heard as well.  As he took his photographs, Mr. Wolf asked each resident a few questions:  how old they were, how long they had lived there, what they did for a living and whether they liked living in Shek Kip Mei.  While the ages and length of residency varied, over and over the same good qualities were mentioned: convenient transportation, friendly neighbors, low rent, dependable air conditioning.  It all sounds so very, very familiar.

 

Today, Shek Kip Mei is gone, nearly all of its residents re-located into slightly larger living spaces within the same District.  A single block (Block 41, Mei Ho House) has been left standing and will be transformed into a youth hostel, preserved for its historical value and as a reminder of the resourceful people who lived out their lives within its walls.  Luckily, Michael Wolf arrived before Shek Kip Mei was gone.

Pondering Mr. Wolf’s photographs, I wonder: how did these people measure their lives?  From my perspective, a world and years away, it’s difficult to know. But looking into their spaces, I’m reminded how the measure of things changes over our years.  For now, I have space and light, the luxury of privacy and freedom of movement.  But just across the road, in a local nursing home,  residents are living out their lives in hundred square-foot rooms,  limited by age and illness as surely as the residents of Shek Kip Mei were limited by poverty and displacement.  Crowded into tiny trailers and rented rooms, survivors of Hurricane Ike continue to rebuild their lives, one square foot at a time.  Squatting behind a concrete block wall, three homeless men huddle out of the wind, not daring to light the fire that might give away their location.

Suddenly, in my own hundred square feet of space, I feel the richness of life, just as I find the coming of Christmas as simple to conceive as a childhood craft.  Lighting an oil lamp far older than my years, I move it to the middle of my parents’ table.  Clearing a stack of papers from the ornate Chinese tea chest, I set out two bare-branched metal pines, their branches tipped in copper, and three green glass votives.  My grandmother’s ceramic angels peer down at me from the hutch and as the cat sighs with pleasure, I put a new, warm sheepskin across her bowl.

Watching as a fine mist blows down the fairway and obscures the view, knowing that the evening darkness will come early and there are chores still to complete, I slide the tape measure into the drawer and smile.  You can do a lot of living in a hundred square feet.

 

Many thanks to Dolce Belleza, who first made me aware of Michael Wolf’s work.  His Hong Kong: Inside/Outside is available from Peperoni Books.                                          Comments are welcome.  To leave a comment or respond, please click below.

Sisyphus and the Word-Rocks

I never can remember where I’ve left my car keys.  It slips my mind that I’ve been told to stop at the grocery for milk. I forget to swing by the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions and occasionally I forget to feed the outside cat.  I’m always forgetting this password or that, and I’ve completely forgotten the names of some of my high school chums.  People who claim to know about such things tell me this everyday-forgetting is unremarkable.  A little more age here, a few things more interesting to ponder there, and the mind wanders off, unconcerned with milk, kitties or keys.

Most recently, I very nearly forgot I’d promised Ruth, of the lovely blog Synch-ro-niz-ing, that I’d accept her invitation to join with a group of bloggers and write about the beginnings of The Task at Hand ~ more specifically, how it received its title.  It’s a story I’m happy to recount for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the sheer pleasure of remembering those first, halting steps onto the path called “writing”.

In late 2007, a project or two brought me to the point of wanting to learn how to post images to the web. Simply in order to have a place to “practice”, I began a  blog at Weather Underground.  It wasn’t an obvious choice for a blogsite, but I wasn’t a blogger. I simply was messing about, exploring and experimenting.  My first entry was a pecan pie recipe. My second, about a trip through the Texas Hill Country, suddenly veered off into memoir, and I was writing.  I posted again, and then a fourth time, amazed to discover people  reading and enjoying my words.

Two months and a few posts later, on a whim, I joined the Bay Area Writers’ League.  I certainly never had thought of myself as a writer, but I was curious to see what people who defined themselves as writers might look like.  As it turned out, they looked pretty much like me: in love with words, with stories to tell and more than willing to spend their time listening to the first, halting efforts of beginners or the polished, compelling presentations of published authors.

At the January meeting, I was introduced to the concept of “flash fiction” and decided to participate in the monthly contest.  The challenge was to respond to a photo posted in the group’s newsletter with a hundred words (or fewer) of either poetry or prose.  When I saw the photo selected for the contest, it took less than a second to recognize Sisyphus.  Too clever for his own good, Sisyphus may have brought his punishment upon himself, but images of that punishment have compelled artists for centuries.  Unfortunately, I had no idea how to cross the gap from image to words without falling into cliché.

 

Three days later, while working on a boat and thinking about not much in particular, the first line came to mind, fully formed.  The title came next, and then days of shaping words for meaning and sound.  In the end – and quite to my surprise – I’d written a poem rather than a piece of prose.  It’s title? The Task at Hand.

 The Task at Hand  did win the little “contest”, and from the beginning it seemed so right, so truth-filled, there was no question it would serve as the title for my first “real” blog at WordPress.  A non-writer, I’d written a writer’s poem, with room for all of the discipline, all the surprise, all of the faith and clenched-teeth perseverance that writing requires. Did I know it then? Of course not.  Even now I only know it only in glimpses, in fits and starts, and in those passing moments when a “right word” appears.

At the Bay Area Writers’ League, it’s the custom for the winner of each contest to read their poetry or prose aloud at the next month’s meeting.   After I’d read The Task at Hand, a fellow came up to me.  ”So. This your first poem?” he asked.  ”Yes, I’ve just started writing.” ”Let me tell you something, then. That poem’s like a suit of clothes that’s two sizes too big. That’s ok. Don’t worry about it. You keep writing, and in a few years, you’ll start to grow into it.”

I’m like a kid that can’t wait.

 

 

The Task at Hand

Even the right word takes effort.

Quarried from a crevice of the mind
it stumbles into context from a surprised tongue
then slips again toward silence.

Breaking chains of metaphor,
pulled from its page by the gravity of doubt
it defies usefulness,

heaving past frail allusion
blocking passage after passage
with its heavy presence
until turned and nudged and tried again
for perfect fit
by one who never tires ~

the Sisyphean poet.

 

 

Comments are welcome.  To leave a comment or respond, please click below.

The People, Yes…

One of my amusements during the holiday season is people-watching.  Particularly in situations where crowds, lines and captive children are the norm, amusement is easy to find.

During a Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving swing through a local grocery, I landed behind a child and his mother in the checkout line.  The boy might have been three or four, and he was fussy.  Hanging on to his mother’s skirt, he circled around and around until he found safety, tucked between her and the cart.  Turning to look past us to the vibrant displays of merchandise across the aisle, he pointed to something, tugging on her skirt to gain attention.  Busy sorting through her purse, his mother ignored him – a mistake she would come to regret.

Falling Acorns, Rattled Nerves

 

Flung across the  landscape by the rising winds of autumn,  acorns bounce and tumble toward their destiny, the sound of their fall exploding into the air like riffs of small arms fire or the percussive chatter of  firecrackers.  If you happen to be standing near a car when the first gust strikes and an acorn-laden oak decides to let her seed-crop fly, the noise created by the collision of nature’s irresistable force and a human’s immovable object is astounding.  If you open the car’s door, slide across the seat and close the door behind you, the amplified sound is deafening, the storm of green and brown pellets less destructive than hail but no less impressive.

I experienced my first acorn storm in the Texas hill country, an area of valleys and ridges threaded through with oak.  Live oak is the area’s signature tree, but red, pin, lacey, and bur also root in its soil and history.  Like the sudden swell of redbud in spring, the astonishment of the prickly pear’s extravagant yellow blossoms and the turning of Virginia creeper as it climbs toward true red,  every country event can be an adventure – unpredictable, unique and unexpected – and the acorn storms are no exception.

Saving Mr. Val

 

The sense of presence slid gently across the cluttered desktop, palpable as sunlight. Nudging past my elbow, it rippled up my spine and chilled my shoulders, staking its claim to my consciousness like a squatter moving into a deserted house.

Suddenly attentive though not yet uneasy I turned, expecting to see my calico scowl of a cat peering at me across the dining table, irritated with my absorption in my work, intent on drawing me away for a bit of play. But the cat was nowhere to be seen.  When her name and a gentle, trilling call brought no response, I stretched and looked, unwilling to move from my chair.  She wasn’t under the table, not hidden in the plumpness of sofa cushions.  No sleeping cat lay draped across the wooden chair, her paws kneading at the air where they rested between turned spindles.  

Perplexed by her absence as much as by the vague promptings that had unfocused my attention, I turned back to the computer, ready to dismiss my unease and settle back into my work.

Invention and Necessity

 

Finding a copy of The New Yorker magazine in the middle of the West African bush never was easy.  In Liberia in the 1970s, it nearly was impossible.  In those days, living 120 miles inland from the coast and being limited to markets and shops that specialized in canned mackerel, Russian toilet paper and beer preserved with glycerin, browsing the newsstand wasn’t an option.

Occasionally I cadged a copy of the culturati’s Weekly Reader from expatriates living in Monrovia who had connections to the embassies or international agencies.  Now and then a Peace Corps volunteer would  have an issue to share, and there always was the possibility someone would step off PanAm 1 at Roberts Field with a copy tucked under an arm.  But in the end, mail from the States was my most dependable source.  The fact that the ”latest” issues might be three months old wasn’t a problem.  A story is a story, after all, and even essays and columns develop a strange, timeless quality when read so utterly out of context.

A Different Kind of Horror

 

Halloween is the season of horror.  Goblins, ghoulies and ghosties skulk around the edges of consciousness.  Television movie channels pull from their graves the remains of plots that refuse to die ~ Psycho, Vertigo, Rebecca – while Hitchcock’s Birds wheel through the air.  The little ones may delight in dressing up as princesses, pirates or warlords, but blood drips and body parts pile up for the vampires, zombies and other assorted creatures of the night who seek to displace chainsaw-wielding psychopaths as the epitome of evil terror. 

Everyone understands ”there’s gold in them-thar dismemberments”, and across the country everything from neighborhood haunted houses to Universal Studios’ famous Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando is trying to take a bite out of the consumer.   We love to be entertained, and we love to be scared when we know it  doesn’t count.  With its witches’ brew of  Dia De Los Muertos skeletons, decorated graves, black cats,  and whacked-out pumpkins, Halloween is our perfect holiday.  All those sugar highs are lagniappe.

 

One of the most unlikely purveyors of horror might be the American poet, Carl Sandburg. He’s not much in favor these days. He’s too common, too plain-spoken.  He wasn’t considered “literary” in his day and today he’d be left out of most symposia and cocktail parties.  But he had vision, and he understood people. Like Whitman before him, he acknowledged his debt to the workers and builders, the families and businesses which knit this country together.

Furnishing Our Stories

 

I suppose there are as many reasons to blog as there are bloggers.  Curiosity about the world, a willingness to accede to Durrell’s conviction that reality can be “reworked to show its significant side“ and the pure pleasure of shaping words all have played a roll in developing and sustaining my personal commitment to this strange new phenomenon of our time.

One thing I particularly enjoy about blogging  is the response I receive from readers.  Comments have ranged from challenging to congratulatory to caustic, but no matter their form, I always find them stimulating and engaging.   To my taste, good blogs exhibit a certain tentativeness, exploring rather than defining the subject at hand, and good comments reflect the same qualities.  Writers and readers work together, inching their way forward through thickets of allusion and argument to reach provisional conclusions.  Occasionally they unearth a real, if unexpected, treasure.

Virginia Throws Open the Window

 

It began quietly enough, with a certain restlessness, a reluctance to re-establish routine, an inability to focus on the tasks at hand.  

I’d been traveling, wheeling across the Mississippi Delta for days, peripatetic as a dream, imbibing the sheer movement, the joys of impulsivity and intense expectation like some heady, intoxicating brew.  Eventually, the party ended and it was time to sober up.  Home again at my desk, I barely could turn to look out the window at the familiar view I love so much.  During our separation it had transformed itself from placid scenery into a token of my discontent, a nagging reminder of how many paths remained to be traveled. 

Back to the Scrap Heap

I love researching the pedigree of  blog awards.  It’s a grown-up, vntary version of the forced march our 6th grade Catechism class made through the book of Genesis.  Just as following those Biblical “begats” back through the generations carried us to wholly unrecognizable worlds, tracking the progress of blog awards can lead to strange and mysterious places, not to mention unusual or quirky companions.

When Andi of AndiLit graced me with the Honest Scrap Award, I did what I often do. I worked my way backward: through Courtney at Everything in Between to In the Mainstream, and then on to Allison Writes, where the easy trail grew difficult. No matter. I’ve never been able to make myself keep going on and on down the path toward the origin of an award, partly for fear I might end up somewhere I don’t care to be, like Armed Females of America, and partly because I fear capture by blogs capable of killing my every spare minute of time.  Stop by Neatorama and you’ll see what I mean.

Prowling and pawing around the Honest Scrap heap, one thing I did notice is that no one seems quite sure what the award means.  As Andi put it, “The Honest Scrap Award is – well, I don’t know what it’s for…”  That sentiment’s been echoed by innumerable bloggers who’ve received the award and it was my own first response to the honor.  My second response was curiosity,particularly since scraps have been an important, if unexamined, part of my life since childhood.