We had just finished lunch and Jansen was still drinking a second highball when he looked out the plate glass window across the restaurant and told me he had been moved by buildings. “I know it’s an odd thing to say, moved by buildings,” he said, “and I don’t know that I’ve ever said it out loud before. But through the window across the room I’ve been watching the side of a building I know nearby, and I can only see a section of its west side through the branches of that tree, but that section has changed dramatically over the last ten minutes. I mention it as a way of apologizing if I’ve seemed distracted. Though I suppose I also think you might understand.”
Lunch that day was the first time I had seen Jansen in over forty years. By understand, then, he referred either to my career in urban planning—in which I’ve evaluated the relative merits of thousands of real and proposed structures while building one of the largest urban planning consulting firms on the East Coast over the last few decades—or to the fact that he and I had been roommates and friends while attending a prestigious liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, in the late 1950s, and that somehow that bond had held, and there we were, eating lunch together in the twenty-first century. I followed Jansen’s gaze out the window to a five-story building a few blocks away that loomed over the smaller one- and two-story structures that filled the rest of the neighborhood. “The brick apartment building?” I asked.
“It’s been raining most of the time we’ve been here,” he said, nodding. “But ten minutes ago the sun broke through and hit the side of the building. See how the brick looks almost impossibly red?”
“Like a stage set,” I said.
“But it’s real,” he said. “The brick is actually that red. I noticed it while you were talking about your brother. When I see a building like that, especially in the low-angle sunlight we get in the afternoon this time of year, it reminds me of a person facing a sunset, the way that last daylight flatters human features. So while we’ve been talking, I’ve had a sense that four blocks away, that building is waking up—as if it’s on the verge of speaking.”
told him it looked like a nice building. “They don’t make them that way anymore,” I said, and Jansen agreed that, no, they didn’t.
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