Where are you wandering this Wednesday?
Through workloads, past time-clocks, over desktops, under pressure, are you repetitively, relentlessly opening and closing folders and drawers?
Through dusty, cobwebbed academic library shelves reaching toward an unreachable ceiling, or up and down isles of well-lit, clean, modern public libraries or bookstores, are you searching, studying, pondering, or learning?
Through yards and neighborhoods, homes and gardens, streets and alley-ways, are you walking your puppies on leashes or your babies in strollers, exploring the wild or cultivated places you call home?
This beautiful Wednesday morning I am wandering through mindful as well as mindless passages of memories, hopes, and dreams.
My mind is wandering down the hilly, winding streets where I live to the relatively bustling downtown . . . just a couple of blocks west of State Street, to where a building lies in ruin, decaying daily, brick by brick. I wander around it, circling, listening . . . are there wildflowers growing through cracks in a hidden parking lot behind it? Are those bricks yellow, or brown? Were they once red, or white? Is every window boarded? Could I wander inside? Perhaps there's a rickety staircase in there (it looks tall enough from the outside) leading to a floor where offices once spread above a cafe or book shop below.
I'm wandering around this building in my mind because I've dreamt for years of buying this old, ruinous, frightfully enchanting place. Repairing it by hand, although I know next to nothing about construction, building real buildings, architecture, or real-world design. It's the age of Google! I do know a thing or three about hard work, and if I care enough about a project, I have the patience and determination I imagine might be required to gut, renew, and beautify something that ancient and brimming over with history.
Why would I ever dream such a ridiculous dream!?
Well, it's really not the first place I remember singling out for my dreams. I believe the first was an empty lot near where I lived from ages 10 - 16, in what felt like a small town, compared to Salt Lake City, about 20 minutes south of where I live now. I dreamed of building a small house there, just spacious enough that my childhood friend from North Carolina, whom I missed so dearly, could come there and visit me! As I grew up I dreamed that I would someday ask the city who owned the overgrown, malnourished little corner lot, and could I buy it for a steal? Could I build a little playhouse there?
I later dreamed of purchasing the small duplex in Spring City, North Carolina, where I was born at home in 1985 . . . my sister and I visited the place around Christmastime in 2005 or '06. From pictures and stolen memories, the town and the house hadn't seemed to have aged a day, let alone 20 years! I thought, if I could just buy it someday, I wouldn't even have to live there, but I could rent out one side of the duplex, and have the other side available whenever I wanted to return to visit my birthplace!
I've also dreamed of purchasing the House in the Avenues, or the House on Kensington -- two familiar homes from my childhood where my Grandparents and an Uncle, Aunt, and four cousins had lived. I could fix up the House in the Avenues, live in part of it, rent out the basement to a local family, and rent other rooms to students attending the University of Utah! The home was so huge to my memory, so cavernous, with towering shelves piled to the ceilings with musky-scented books, nooks and crannies everywhere for crawling out onto the rooftop, hiding notes and letters, or playing hide-and-go-seek. It was a kid's paradise . . . there were even cherry trees in the front yard, a trampoline in the backyard, grape vines along the back fences, and swings rigged to any tree on the property that might hold them! There was plenty of room there to have multiple renters, which could help pay a mortgage. The House on Kensington had a trampoline as well . . . there really are too few families with trampolines in our sue-happy modern times.
There was another empty lot that called my name in my early twenties, on maybe 500 East, just north of 400 South in downtown Salt Lake. I wondered every time I passed the place,
how could such an absolutely prime area in downtown not be claimed, not be owned by someone, somewhere, who wanted to develop it? Of course someone, somewhere, certainly did just that . . . there's no more empty overgrown fire-hazard of a lot there, but a sparkling new condominium complex next to the renovated Burger King on the corner.
So, why indeed would I set my dreaming sights on this old falling-apart building near the downtown post office? Of course it wasn't once owned by any family member, and I didn't dream of building a playhouse there. I suppose you could say it's just the one that happened to catch my eye one day, when I was walking down that street, daydreaming about the possibility of opening a Community Center in Salt Lake City for the non-religious people of Utah.
I was interning at the old Utah Pride Center, around 300 South and 300 West, and I was thinking how completely amazing it would be if the Atheists, Humanists, Freethinkers, and Skeptics of Utah had a similar community center. A place where they could meet for tea & coffee, chill together in a comfortable lobby surrounded by walls filled with books on every non-religious topic in the world - humanistic thought and philosophy dating back to the Founding of America, then further back to the Greek and Roman philosophers, and including philosophical thoughts and ideas from around the world, from all cultures and places! People could play games, read science magazines, have group meetings, and host open-mic nights, book clubs, and lecture series. The upper floor could host board meetings, and be opened up into an interactive, modern office space where group leaders could meet frequently to plan meetings & programs to benefit the community in as many ways as we could come up with.
So today, I'm still wandering over there in my mind . . . running my fingers over the crumbling bricks, considering if a place like that could be built into a community center to celebrate reason, science, philosophy, and free-thought. Could a community of diverse-minded people come together to purchase an old, run-down place like that? Could you herd the cats of "non-joiners" to believe passionately in creating that space? Could they provide the man-and-woman-power required to rebuild and craft a place like that into something spectacular?
Because I could wander over there and run it. I could be there, 12-14 hours a day, pausing only for sleep, planting gardens, painting walls, replacing roofs and windows, scrubbing and making it shine.
Where would you wander this Wednesday, if you could?
