Transient

When it comes to the physical world, I tend not to notice things. I can drive past the same bench for years, and have no idea what it looks like. (Still.) And it doesn't matter how many times I drive to a place; I can still find a way to get lost. I don't know why this is. Faces stay with me, and I'm very good at matching colors, but geographical landmarks fade into the background and I don't notice them until they change, very dramatically.

Right next door to where I work. a whole building just came down and I barely noticed it. I'm lucky enough to sit by a window; and a few weeks ago, I looked outside and noticed a backhoe moving back and forth, rhythmically gathering piles of debris from one spot on the site where the building once stood, and moving them to another spot. I understand now why 4-year old boys like to watch the action at a construction site. It's very entertaining.

But now a building that's been there for the whole almost year that I worked next door to it (and presumably much longer), is just gone, shoveled away like piles of dirty snow.

I don't really care about the building at all. I have no idea what it contained and I don't even remember what my office view looked like when it was still standing. And I'm not worried about what's going to take its place. Things change.

Last year, I read Maeve Brennan's The Long-Winded Lady. Maeve Brennan moved from place to place when she lived in New York. She lived in hotels and efficiency apartments, and she went out for dinner almost every night, eating at the same restaurants over and over. She never seemed to stay in one apartment or hotel for more than a few months at a time, but she still complained about the pace of change in New York. Every time she looked out a window, or walked around a corner, an old building was coming down, replaced by a high-rise office or apartment building. Brennan herself moved constantly, but she wanted New York to stay the same; that is to say, the same as it was when she found it.

*****

I've never been to Paris, so I've never seen Notre Dame. All of the Americans I know who are mourning its near-destruction are attached to a building that they saw only a handful of times. But I understand. There are lots of places, important and obscure, that I love as much as Parisians love Notre Dame. And they're all temporary--the 800-year-old cathedral, and the 100-year-old beach town, and the neighborhood pool and the who-knows-what-it-was building outside my office window. Nothing man-made is permanent. Nothing.