SOS Gab & Eti 1.12

“Two seconds of honest laughter is an eternity of freedom.” Gabriel Orgrease

So you say, what in bloody Godiva does a goose egg have to do with historic
preservation? In search of the hermeneutic one-right-answer, the unified
field of preservation, the rules of conduct, Secretion of Interior Standards,
do no harm (The priest, expostulating rules again, said, no no, to do no
whoopee! Back, back, down boy, down, no pun, no fun, get to the point and off
the pot.). Cogitating conservators seriously endeavoring to turn turtle scat
to plastic. Direct deposit, early withdrawal, timed interest, a non-cash
economy. Conceptual history, the ugly about it is that all history is equally
conceptual regardless of the lecturer. Then there is the craftsperson.

Tell me another story, again, and I will tell you a better one until the
fluorescent is morphed in a dawn light service and we stagger off to our
separate cubicles beneath the wet mist, again.

I am filled with stories the builders, my mentors, have told me about their
lives. Sitting around the jobsite past quitting time, or on drives to project
meetings, they would hand down the oral tradition of the builder culture,
replete with all its tales of hardship and triumph, loss and rebirth. But now
there is no one left who can verify my memories, who heard the exact stones
they told me, or can add to them, detract, or preach to me which details I've
got wrong. Few things I've encountered have made me feel quite so alone.

The morning after Nowhere Man finds the technical problem to mend your local
history, say, duplicating the patina of the copper flashing on Walt Whitman’s
birthplace’s brick chimney, just another old house stuck between a shoe store
and a leather goods, particularly the rain day after Holloween, take a look
at your front door and see if there is the lingering sign of the dashed egg.
The shell, loose and oozing albumen and white skinned over, unresponsive like
a slug on a herringbone Filthydelphia walkway anticipating your sudden
bootfall. There is the craftsperson.

It was never meant to be funny, Emmet Kelly commanded his rings against a
black abyss. We shave across with the plane dis pear, plank molding, a
jim-jambed fruitwood to frame an M. O. to rival Montezuma’s Revenge. Curls of
fragrant sweet wood falling to the sawdust floor. Deft hands outlining fall,
a leaf of pungent celery sprung up from the black muck earth, an irreverent
growth. Onion fields. Cabbage and pumpkins. Our stories are marked by
departure and longings, by frustration and this pair, G & E. There is the
craftsperson.

Old buildings, old buildings, I have for sale old buildings. See them, feel
them, touch them. Taste the paint and bat guano, breath the musty attic
spoor, fall through the floor while the room shakes the West Coast mellow
from your booties... remove a hefty splinter from your big toe. Par-boil an
oat-fed rat before it has an opportunity to roam your brain. Warts and
eelgrass abound along the shore. The breeze is pleasant as old souls rush up
the chimney, built, forget not, by hands. Hands, old, young, all hands
here... there is the craftsperson.

To be continued..... history of the building, Orgrease Egg Packing Plant.

Copyright 1997 Ken Follett
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