Time again to drag out that hoary old saying about children growing up fast, which is true only in the same sense that one’s entire life goes by fast, once you’ve reached the point of having lived most of it already.
Regardless, this week Ann turned 23, now a grown woman, fully employed, etc. That doesn’t mean you can’t have birthday cake, however.
Earlier this year, I had the privilege of visiting the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri.
The dedication.
That includes Grandpa, 309th Engineer Regiment, U.S. Army.
After the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen we headed for Park Ave., location of a famed Byzantine revival Episcopal church. Before we got there, we noticed a much smaller church, not actually part of the Open House New York event, at 5 E 48th Street.
Church of Sweden in New York
We’d come to the Svenska kyrkan i New York, where services are still held in Swedish. Not only was the church open, there was a cafe on its first floor. The sanctuary is on the second floor. Elegant little place, suitable for the small congregation that Swedish services might attract.
Under the Historik section of the church’s web site, you’ll find this helpful information: När svenskarna började flytta till USA och hur Svenska kyrkan på olika sätt velat vara närvarande i New York. A fuller history in English is on the Wiki page.
St. Bartholomew’s Church
St. Bartholomew’s Church, an Episcopal congregation on Park Ave., was participating in the Open House. That meant it was sure to be not only open, but lighted. The first time I went there, many years ago, I compared it to a cavern. Later I visited when more lights were on. Twenty years ago I wrote: “This time, it was better lighted, the better to show off the church’s superb Byzantine-style mosaics.”
During my 2025 visit, now joined by my nephew Robert, we were able not just to gaze at the lit sacred space, but we had the benefit of a knowledgeable docent, a woman of a certain vintage with a hobbled gait and a raspy voice. She knew the history of the congregation, and its slice of Manhattan. She had the artistic detail down cold. She knew her ecclesiastical styles. From the depth of detail about the many artists who worked on the church, it sounded like she knew some of the artists personally, though that couldn’t be literally true for most of them, since the church was built more than 100 years ago, with certain later design additions.
At the direction of the docent, Geof unveiled the altar for a moment.
It might have been interesting to know Hildreth Meière. Hers was an astounding career: “Working with leading architects of her day, Meière designed approximately 100 commissions, both secular and liturgical,” the International Hildreth Meière Association says. “Her best-known commissions include Radio City Music Hall, One Wall Street, St. Bartholomew’s Church, Temple Emanu-El, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. She also decorated the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., and the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis.”
The mosaics didn’t photograph well – that is, I’m too lazy to carry around a better camera – but good images are at the association web site.
Emerging from St. Bart, we agreed that heading back to the cafe at the Swedish church would be a good idea. It was.
Sated with Swedish-style open-faced sandwiches, our walk soon continued, up Fifth Ave. to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was its usual crowded splendor. I think I spotted some new, or newish murals, just inside the nave. A wedding was in progress. One must come after another every Saturday not in Lent, with ropes closing off a large part of the nave, making for extra crowding in the side aisles.
We didn’t stay. Not far away was a church far less crowded but with its own splendor.
St. Thomas Church
Namely, St. Thomas Church, another major Manhattan Episcopalian congregation. Inside, lights were low. The reredos stood out in the dark, a glowing presence above the altar populated by more than 60 stone carved figures, I’ve read. A Christian crowd: saints, prophets and reformers in an ivory colored stone from Wisconsin. I’d have needed a telephoto lens to have any hope of identifying any of them, but that didn’t make them any less striking.
Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson designed the church, completing it in 1914. They were another of those prolific architects now out of living memory who seemed to design a long list of churches in a short time. The duo did St. Barts, too, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, just to name a few famed sacred spaces of near-palatial character.
Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church
Just steps away from St. Thomas, as real estate press releases like to say about two close buildings, is Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. It was our last Open House church for that day.
With its auditorium style and balconies, it reminded me of the Moody Church in Chicago, though Fifth Avenue Pres is much older: 150 years this year, as it happens.
A hallway and some rooms extend beyond the front of the nave, including a columbarium.
Waiting for occupants. All it will take is time.
In Japan, it was never necessary to have a car. In theory, one could wish such a condition for North America, but I wouldn’t want to give up the option of getting in a vehicle and driving a few hundred miles at a go, or further, to seek out fun roads.
There are probably similarly engaging roads in Japan, but I prefer trains there. We took quite a few during the recent visit. Some were crowded, as subways in rush hour tend to be, but none required the assistance of white-gloved train employees shoving passengers into cars – an image known to gaijin lore as much as the vending machines that sell weird items, but one I never saw at any time, even during rush hours in the ’90s. (And the vast majority of Japanese vending machines sell drinks.)
Scenes on the trains.
Almost everyone was paying attention to their phones, but not quite everyone. Still, the fellow reading a book – maybe manga – was a rarity this time around. Thirty years ago, half the car would have been reading physical books.
The train from Kamakura to the seaside spot of Enoshima runs along the ocean for a while, inspiring some passengers to take pictures of the scene.
Unfortunately this time there was no time to visit that most beautiful of cemeteries in Japan or anywhere else: Okuno-in at Koya-san, which is about an hour’s train ride from central Osaka. But there was a cemetery near where we stayed, a more ordinary one in the far reaches of suburban Osaka. I don’t know its name.
It is essentially just a sliver of land not dedicated to anything else. Around it is a short fence.
Around that is a neighborhood.
It also happens to be the location of my mother- and father-in-law’s memorial and ashes.
RIP, Enomoto-san.
There was some grumbling about the fact that the ISU graduation ceremony, at least the part that involved Ann, had been scheduled for the evening. Old timers, that is me, remembered the fine spring Friday the 13th in Tennessee long ago when VU held its graduation, and its late morning start.
But ISU’s schedule had an upside. The four of us stayed in a hotel room in Normal that night, which was an extra expense, but also enjoyed a leisurely Saturday morning in our room and at the hotel’s no-extra-charge breakfast, which wasn’t bad. Leaving just before noon, we got a look around the property, whose theme seemed to be faux chateau.
How about making it look like a cake? One of those square multi-layer ones, with some French accents. That may have been the thinking during the design phase. And don’t forget bronze lions.
Ann wanted to spend some time on campus taking pictures at specific spots where she has fond memories, so that’s what we did. A few sites were inside a few of the buildings. We also spent some time, under a very warm sun, at the ISU Quad. Not our first time there.
I did what I do, wandering off for quick looks at this and that. Cook Hall is an old favorite.
In front of Cook Hall is “Ruins IV.”
“Ruins IV was created by Nita Sunderland, an art professor from Bradley University,” notes the ISU web site. “The Ruins IV sculpture reflects stylized medieval imagery and is part of a series that Sunderland said stands as ‘a statement about our relationship with history and former societies,’ as well as the importance of learning from mistakes and experiments of the past.”
If you say so, Nita. Is it ever just enough to say, this sculpture’s got some really cool shapes?
No one else approached the plaque-on-rock memorial to William Saunders (d. 1900), the horticulturalist who designed the lawn, but I did. Nice work, Bill.
Of course we had to visit the Old Main Bell.
All together, our ISU amble took about an hour. Then it was time for brunch at some distance from campus, but still in the greater Bloomington-Normal metroplex. We enjoyed some of the following wonders and more, at middle-class prices.
What a fine day.
Children grow up fast, according to the cliché. Yet I feel that it was an age ago that I wrote, “About three weeks ago, my second daughter, Ann, was born.” A good age, but an age nevertheless. This weekend I had the pleasure, along with her mother and sister, of attending Ann’s graduation from Illinois State University.
Commencement took place at the school’s CEFCU Arena on Friday evening.
She was among the sea of mortar boards.
The crowd was spirited, so you couldn’t quite hear everything everyone said, but so what? I’m glad to report that none of the speakers, all people affiliated with the school in one way or the other, spoke at any great length. That’s another cliché, that commencement speeches are completely forgettable. That one happens to be true, with vanishingly few exceptions (say, Churchill). But it was good that no one spent a long time being forgettable.
At times like this, in the funk that comes after a long trip, I ask myself, did I actually do that? An odd question, maybe, but long travels have that odd effect. Somehow such a trip seems less than real. Also more than real. Those are essential features of the intoxication of the road, and hangovers follow intoxication.
Ponder this: Over roughly the last five weeks, starting on February 8, in a series of eight airplane flights, a small number of intercity train trips on either side of the Eurasian land mass (including one of the fastest trains in existence), a large number of bus, subway, streetcar and even monorail rides, a few taxi rides, other car rides provided by friends and relatives and a hired driver, a bicycle rickshaw ride — and you haven’t lived and almost died (or at least felt that way) till you’ve taken such a conveyance in Delhi — climbing a lot of stairs and using a lot of escalators and elevators, and taking more than a few long walks, and many short walks, on sidewalks and cobblestone streets and railway station platforms, I went around the world in a westward direction, from metro Chicago to metro Chicago, by way of Japan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the Czech Republic.
All that effort for what? To see the world, of course. That and skip out of much of winter in northern Illinois.
How did I have the energy for this, here at the gates of old age? How are the logistics possible?
But it really isn’t that hard. This is the 21st century, and travel is mostly by machine, and part of a mass industry, so even old men firmly from the middle class can go. Retired and semiretired old men, who find themselves with more free time than in previous decades. Moreover, the logistics were the least of it: all you need in our time is a computer to set things up.
I’m convinced that the hard part, for many people, would be finding the will to go. Luckily I have a practically bottomless supply. My always-eager-to-go attitude toward seeing point A and then points B, C and so forth also meant I was completely persuaded that buzzing around the world was a good idea. Tired as I am now — and boy am I tired — I haven’t changed my mind, though I need to rest up a bit at the moment.
Japan: my first visit in 25+ years.
It felt familiar — I did live there for four years — but the passage of time also infused the place with a feeling of the unfamiliar as well, a strange combo sensation indeed.
India: A major lacuna in my travels, now just a little less so.
A friend who goes to India sometimes on business told me last fall, “India makes me tired.” I might not have been on business, but I ended up feeling the same way.
And yet — a phantasmagoria unlike anything I’ve seen, especially the teeming city streets. Teem was never more an apt verb, in my experience. Yuriko came as far as India with me, after we visited Japan and her family and friends there. Then she headed back eastward to Illinois.
I went on alone from India to the UAE.
In an even less familiar part of the world, a city of towers somehow rises on the edge of the Arabian desert. Just that is astonishing in its own way, but there is plenty else.
Then to Germany: An old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time, since about five golden weeks in my youth. A long, long time ago: the last time I was there, there were two Germanies and two Berlins and a Wall and the Stassi and Trabbis and a firm living memory of the cataclysm only 40 years earlier.
Berlin was the focus this time, where I joined my brother Jay for the visit. We’d been kicking around the idea of traveling there together for a while, and ultimately didn’t want to wait till either of us got any older. He had not made it to Berlin in ’72.
A major side trip from Berlin was to Prague. Not quite as old a friend, but old enough.
Yuriko and I visited in ’94, but it was new territory for Jay, another slice of the former Astro-Hungarian Empire to go with his early ’70s visit to Vienna.
Actually, when you visit a place you haven’t seen in 40 or 30 years, it’s like you’ve never been there. I had that sensation in both Berlin and Prague. The old memories are packed away, only loosely connected to their setting any more, which has changed partly beyond recognition anyway.
Now I’m back. Unlike Phileas Fogg, I didn’t return a day earlier than I thought I did (we have a stronger awareness of the International Date Line). But I did manage to miss the no one-likes-it spring transition to daylight savings time, just another little bonus of the trip.
Time to take the rest of the winter off. Not from living my life (I hope), but posting. Long enough to be a genuine hiatus: back in mid-March. Of course, it won’t really be spring in northern Illinois even then, but the odds of a blizzard will be low.
Where did that word come from, anyway? Hiatus, that is. Latin: opening, aperture, rupture, gap.
But I always like to go back a little further, if possible.
*ghieh-
Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to yawn, gape, be wide open.”
It forms all or part of: chaos; chasm; dehiscence; gap; gasp; gawp; hiatus; yawn.
Till then, a selection of items, in honor of the chaos and gawp of the next month or so.
I snipped this a few months ago when pricing a room. Maybe things have changed since then, though I doubt it.
Yea, a $90 room! Competitive with a motel. Wait, not so much. Why would I stay at a random peer-to-peer room unless it’s either competitive on price – the original deal with the tech, as I recall – or so interesting or well-located that it’s worth the extra fees? Talk about drifting away from what made the platform attractive, once upon a time.
A view from the Getty Center about 18 months ago. Wonder what I’d see now.
One more mid-century scan: my mother and brothers, before I was born, at the Colosseum in the mid-50s. Must have been a chilly day in Rome.
I stood there myself, maybe at that exact spot, but not till 1983. Call it the Flavian Amphitheater, my henna-haired high school Latin teacher Mrs. Quarles would have said. 
Once upon a time, as recently as the early age of photography, it looks like you could wander right in. Those were the days.
As scam text messages go, this one needs work. Mostly literate, but the tone is off.
I don’t think the tollway authority has a bit of girlishness in it. Or boyishness either, or any particle of human emotion. It functions as a machine: in its own small sphere, a calculating, persistent revenue-generating engine. Then again, I guess it’s fitting that the text message is likely machine produced.
That’s pretty heavy. Something a little lighter.
Floral studies by my father.
Some years ago, I scanned some of my father’s slides from the 1950s and posted them, including family pictures in London, one of the lost and lamented Penn Station in NYC, and on the Texas coast in 1958. I didn’t lose interest, exactly, I just never got around to doing any more.
This time around my nephew Robert, who also visited San Antonio when we were there, took some of the slides back to New York for scanning, and later shared the results. I hadn’t seen most of them. Such as at Jay’s fifth birthday party, which would put it in 1957.
You could call it Mid-Century Birthday Party. Next, my brothers playing with balloons.
And the two of them in cowboy getup.
By the time I could remember, cowboys were becoming old hat. Spacemen were the thing, though I never dressed up as one (but I could have). The Woody-Buzz dynamic originated in that changing taste.