 |
Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday June 16, 2003 Volume V Number 29 |
FOCUS - Buckingham Fountain
Just after lunch, a beautiful lunch in a fine hotel conference room, a business lunch, there was just enough time for a brisk walk outside before the next session began. On the elevator, a fellow attendee from New Jersey said, “If I see you in the lobby in ten minutes, we’ll walk together, otherwise, don’t mind me - I’ll take off on my own. I’ve been sittin’ too long.”
“Me, too,” I replied. “Either way, I’m going to do the same.”
And the elevator door closed on Al’s floor. I went off to my room up another couple floors.
In the lobby, there was no Al. I looked this way and that, knowing that Al was in no mood to be sitting there waiting. So once more, I paused, and marveled at the grand old hotel entry, an elegant, courtly entrance hall, with wide marble stairways and smooth oak rail banisters widening at the floor like open arms welcoming guests, and pedestals and statuary, busts in bronze and stone, three dimensional portraits of notables gone before, both historic and mythic (some perhaps a bit of both), and heavy embroidered velvet draperies hanging from brass hardware over the tall pane windows looking down on the busy boulevard below. I wondered, just for a moment, knowing this stately room, with fine art hanging on the walls inside heavy, ornate wooden frames, woven carpets and crystal chandeliers and explosions of living color, fresh flowers in oversized porcelain and china vases, and a ceiling high above painted in patterns and murals by some forgotten artist from another century, was designed and built long before the motorcar. I imagined how the city’s elite might have arrived, dressed for association with local aristocracy, stepping from the coach or carriage, musicians playing up there on the balcony, string and bow, filling the room with the strains of Beethoven or Haydn or Mozart, and what sheer pleasure this room delivered. A delight to the soul. To arrive here. And then to stay. And take it in. A long conversation. Time for reflection. A good book, read in the company of art and extravagance. Association with interesting, cultured people, people of prominence, delivering perspectives and news from far away places.
It is the heart of the city.
But not for us. We don’t savor things like this much anymore. We are in a hurry. We are pragmatists. Utilitarians. A few still dress for rooms such as this. But not many. Even here, guests look like they are at Disney World, ready for a trek through a land of make-believe. Windblown. Tennis shoes and short pants. Dockers, apprarently, are permitted. Loafers. Some of us unshaven. Tee shirts bear logos of every sort over here. Open collars over there. Baseball caps, some turned backwards. Guests schlepping their own bags on wheels pulling on extended handles up and down the halls, in and out of elevators. In a crisp uniform and matching cap, the Bellman stands alone watching new arrivals pass as they wave off his offer of assistance, big brass luggage carts there at the entry, idle.
There was no Al in the lobby, so I took one more look at the vaulted ceiling, and then the enormous spray of fresh flowers at the center of the room, and out the revolving door, to the Avenue, for a walk in the park.
Chicago’s Central Park is called Grant Park (for Ulysses S. Grant, the hero of the North). Around its perimeter are the Museums of Natural History, Science and Industry, the Art Institute and the Planetarium, Michigan Avenue’s prestigious hotels and theaters and restaurants all in a tall brick and mortar row, several universities and a couple skyscrapers, all along the Lakeshore, the Great Lake Michigan, and Soldier Field where the Bears play football as the snow flurries and the wind blows. Just off shore, an airfield, Meigs Field, built on a landfill, dirt and rock hauled in by monster machines over half a century ago, expanding the city’s real estate just enough to provide a landing strip for corporate aircraft transporting the city’s elite in and out, like a launch pad to the rest of the commercial world.
In the Park, in June, a hint of humidity in the still cool air, under gray skies low enough to hide the upper stories of the Hancock Building and the Sears Tower in a gray mist, the wide green lawns, clipped and manicured around colorful gardens, and winding pathways that meander under giant elm and oak trees heavy with leaves, reaching out in all directions, plentiful enough to provide lots of shade on a sunny day, all brought home an overwhelming sense of familiarity. Especially when I turned a corner, and there in the mist, with the roar of rushing, tumbling water, stood the Buckingham Fountain, just the same as when I saw it for the very first time.
The Fountain is the
centerpiece of Chicago’s great park. This is no monument to conservation.
Au contraire. It is a celebration of abundance. It is a conspicuous
public shrine to the basic element that nurtures and refreshes and cleanses the
whole world – fresh, clean, clear water. It must have been a signal to those
European skeptics, cynics looking down from their pedestals over there on the
other side of the Atlantic, sneering at these rag tag, uncultured Americans,
that we, too, could create something magical, something of permanence, lasting
beauty and wonder, perhaps even surpassing the ancient wonderments adorning the
centers of Paris and London and Florence and Rome.
I was, perhaps, four years old when I first saw Buckingham Fountain, and listened to my mother search for superlatives to describe the wonder of it all. I was born just a few miles from here, and toddled around a little Chicago apartment where my parents settled into family life just after the Second World War. They both wanted me and my sister to experience these wonders early on, so we would go for walks. And this was the pinnacle, the apex of all walks. Grant Park. Buckingham Fountain. Rose gardens. Lavender iris and lilac. Green lawns. Breezy Lake Michigan on a Spring afternoon. And the fountain shot water high into the sky, a man-made Old Faithful that never stopped, and all this wonderment came flooding back out of my bank of memories like a gusher as I stood on the edge of the gravel pathway taking it all in. Déjà vu.
My watch informed me that the next session was about to begin back at the hotel conference room, so I turned, reluctantly, heading back to the entryway and the Grand Hall and the elevator in my white tennis shoes and Dockers and knit pullover, a brief afternoon walk ending too soon.
Back at the round table, along with my fellow conferees, Al at the next table (where did his walk take him?), I prepared for the afternoon lecture and the note taking, just a little more alert than I would have otherwise been had I stayed cloistered in my little room during the break.
* * * * * * *
Our Father’s Day this year is celebrated in the rolling hills of Southern Wisconsin. We dressed for church, and drove twenty miles or so down a country road, over the wide river on a steel bridge, bridges that look something like my old Erector Set, around the bend under a deep blue sky, against the green hills. The highway sign instructed us to REDUCE SPEED as we approached the city limits, and then the marker introduced the city’s name, and POPULATION 608.
As a little girl, Carolyn lived here. The population pretty much unchanged since then. I guess there have been just about as many who have come to this town as have left. She attended elementary school here, marched to the Cemetery on Memorial Day where she and her friends repeated patriotic speeches; short, inspiring lines as the town gathered to remember fallen heroes. There is a little country church in town where this weekend we worshipped. It’s a place where the men, particularly on Father’s Day, don a gray or navy blue suit and tie, stiff white collar, polished leather shoes, and the women wear lacey full print dresses, some in hats. Today’s attendance and hymn selections are posted at the front of the sanctuary. The bulletin scripts the program, including the Bible address for a Congregational Reading. I wasn’t able to join in. I brought my own leather bound copy of the Holy Writ, but mine is not the King James Version.
So I was out of step.
When Garrison Keillor refers to Lake Woebegone, a town that time forgot, he well may well have included this quaint little village out on the edge, beyond a cell phone signal, too.
We stood and sang all four stanzas from a hymnal – “Faith of Our Fathers, living still…” in four part harmony, accompanied by piano and organ.
And I reflected on the faith of mine.
I traced the steps of my grandfather this week. He spent his career in the city – officing at the colossal Merchandise Mart. Grandmother shopped at the Marshall Field and Company department store. As a National Sales Manager, Grandpa flew in and out of Midway Airport, flying from region to region on United DC-7 piston aircraft. When he and my grandfather gave up their little farm way north in Canada, seeking a future in the big city, they found a dynamic church at Chicago and LaSalle Streets. And there, together, they made their way down the sawdust trail to make a stand - two years before the stock market crashed in 1929. They embraced the gospel message preached that day, and their lives bore the mark of that commitment for all their years. My Grandfather was a layman who succeeded in business. Everyone knew about his heart for God, and his burden for the spiritual well-being of just about everyone he met. When he caught wind back in the fifties, that a businessman down the hall at the Mart was considering the launch of a magazine for men which espoused a detached, cavalier lifestyle, featuring a photo section of over-exposed, seductive young women. Grandpa walked in and did his best to talk him out of it. The man went on anyway, undeterred. But I’m guessing he never forgot my grandfather. His name – Hugh Hefner. Grandpa thought Playboys were missing the mark, by a long shot.
Sharon is married to our Pastor – Bill. Her father, Frank, recently told me the story of the night he walked to the front of the same church (relocated eight blocks north on LaSalle Street), decades later, during the Eisenhower years. He’ll never forget the man who met him at the front – the man welcomed him with a smile and a warm handshake, the man who talked to him like an old friend, who prayed with him, and ushered him into God’s presence, and Frank’s life was forever changed. It was in the heart of Chicago – a businessman, named Charlie Kemp, that’s who it was, Frank said.
My grandfather.
One day, Grandpa told me something. I think he waited until he thought I was old enough to understand. I suppose I was age nineteen or twenty. He told me that as a child, I was dedicated in that same large church sanctuary by his close friend, Pastor Harry Ironside. Dr. Ironside prayed a public prayer my grandfather could not forget – it was really a tribute to Grandpa Charlie, and then a blessing on me, his firstborn grandson. One fine day, Grandpa relayed the story. I listened. With my mother and father beside him, Ironside prayed, “Great God in heaven,” he held me in his arms, “give this little boy the faith of his grandfather.”
In the thirty five years
that have passed since I studied and worked and courted in the heart of the
same city, a lot has changed. But not so much to eliminate the familiar, the
structures still standing, the skyline, with just enough to make one realize
that some things will outlast me. Years later, it’s like coming home.
And on this Father’s Day, there is a legacy passed by a grandfather to a father to his son.
And standing on the gravel by the Buckingham Fountain in the mist, this father’s day weekend, now a grandfather myself,
It’s my turn to pass it on.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You may be a dad or a mom; if not now, maybe someday. In any case, you are a leader.
The city is a grand metaphor. It is a center. The focal point of decision making and deal making and upward mobility and high stress and lightening fast pace and cutting edge technologies. The city develops a personality, as it melds together diverse groups, all with cultural baggage and varying degrees of sophistication, with high hopes and big dreams. And a deep need.
If you have lived in one, you remember the energy. The non-stop congestion. The impatience. The friendships. The mind-bending structures, scraping the sky.
And the need. A deep need.
On this father’s day, reminiscing up and down familiar streets, with a backdrop of honking horns and diesel engines and sirens and the roar from the “L” and the Subway and the cascade of water over the fountain in the park, I remember my grandfather, and the example he set. I hear his laughter. And I see the love in his eyes for his grandson.
And to this day, I aspire to become something of what he was.
That as time goes along, his faith, passed on to me, just might be passed along to the generations coming on.
And I pray the same for you.
Posted in Spring Green, Wisconsin
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2003
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
|
|