I’ve always loved stories and as a child made myself a nuisance by begging to be read to or have stories made up for my amusement on the spot. Only my father, at home recovering from cancer surgery, accommodated me with the latter. He must’ve been in a lot of pain, but seemingly without effort spun yarns that had a beginning, middle, and end. I was always the heroine, and the story always had a happy ending. The ending was not happy for him. He died, minus a leg, minus a stump, minus a lung, minus most of his stomach, at age 37 in a Southern city far from his Chicago home.
Known as the “Secret City†for its role in the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge, Tennessee – final destination for my dad and first for me – was a magnet for young scientists, or so I surmise, because all the dads on our block were. They’d all moved to Oak Ridge from elsewhere, and they all worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Moms mostly did not work outside the home. If they did, rumors flew that the couple was getting a divorce because of the mom’s slattern or spendthrift ways. Dads were exempt from criticism. The cigar butts and empty liquor bottles sometimes found on Outer Drive had been dropped by vagrants (“bad peopleâ€) we neighborhood children believed. The unlikelihood of anyone wanting to party in Oak Ridge — dry by county ordinance and not even on a map until 1949 – never occurred to us. We speculated as best we could with our limited experience and examined the evidence by taste and feel to better understand it. Such speculations contribute to a love of story-telling, and examining the evidence contributes to its rigor. That means I can appreciate a good story when I hear or read one. It does not mean that I can tell or write one. But I’d like to.
My dad, a chemist, was among the many young scientists lured to Oak Ridge by a job. I’ve no idea whether he enjoyed his work, but I think it caused his death, Department of Energy (DOE) findings notwithstanding. Making radioactive isotopes or at least working in the vicinity of those who do is dangerous work. There’s the risk of exposure to radioactive material and, DOE planners thought, the possibility of air attack. The DOE didn’t do enough to protect workers from the former – as evidenced by $1 billion paid in claims to employees made ill by working in Oak Ridge nuclear weapons facilities – but they did all that was humanly possible to protect workers and their families from the latter. They had the town painted green! Would-be bombers would have had a hard time telling the forest from trees and cemesto (mixture of cement and asbestos) structures we called home. If bombed, your cemesto house wouldn’t burst into flames as readily as, say, frame construction, and you’d be safe.
I recall adults talking about the possibility of air attack and basked in reflected glory. Not everyone lives in bomb-worthy town. Later, living in Albuquerque, I basked in the reflected glory of the “Territorial Style†of architecture. We lived in a stucco duplex, but I loved visiting buildings in Old Town Albuquerque (founded 1706) and Santa Fe (founded in 1608) for their beauty and history. Much later I lived in Nashville, in a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I was among the first to purchase a loft in the former bag factory (circa 1872). Walls were of hand-made exposed brick and floors of oak thick enough for the traffic of heavy wagons. I imagined the workers who had occupied the space that was temporarily mine.
Living in these places and with a dying parent doing his best to share his little time left shaped me and shaped my interest in stories and architecture. Laid off in 2009, I’m struggling to retool and find a career that allows me to pursue my interests. I’m not sure what that career would be. I see parallels between the structure of stories, oral and written, and the structure of the built environment. Both order reality and allow at least the chimera of control in an otherwise chaotic world. Where to focus my energies? Information architecture? Content strategy? Writing? (Is that even possible?) I don’t know. I’m still finding my way.
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