Anitra's Other Baby

Besides the Union garden, Anitra "With the Lettuce in Her Hair" Freeman also maintains the decorative plants in the entrance-way to the thrift store next-door to the Union. They're pretty. Click on the image to see them in more detail. This image has not been Photoshopped, except to reduce its size.

Post-911 Photography

Now that I've committed to posting an alley per week, I realize that I have to hurry up and take pictures of 50 of them before the short Seattle summer ends. So the plan is to go on long walks on good days and get as many alleys in as possible. Today in two hours I got pictures of 9 of them. I also experienced my personal first camera-related post-911 paranoia incident.

Naturally I wasn't just taking pictures of alleys. I see something, I take a picture. It's amazing how being able to take pictures changes your sight. For instance, I never really appreciated this window of 1st United Methodist on the Marion St. side so much before.

On my way to Uwajimaya I suddenly realized, camera at hand, that the sidewalks around this rounded triangular wall don't actually go anywhere. I went to the apex of the triangle, marveling at it. I'd been by there maybe half a thousand times, but I'd never thought of it before I could photograph it.

The post-911 paranoia incident occurred as I was taking this picture of a decoration of the 605 Union Station Building. The building houses offices of Amazon.com among others. I was struck by this use of the circled cross (several times along the length of the building) which is a popular pagan sun-sign and also regarded as the prototype of mandalas.

And, it's a favorite symbol of neonazis! Usually it appears thicker, as in this flag of the Swedish Neonazi Party.

Anyway, as I was preparing to take the picture, I heard a voice behind me, saying, "Sir? Sir!" I knew it was a security guard that had just passed me. I first took the shot, pretending not to hear, and then said, "Yes?"

He said, "Photographing this complex is not allowed."

I said, "Really?! Why is that?"

He said, "Since 911, you know -- it makes them nervous."

So I said, "Oh. Sorry." And walked away. With the camera. With the dangerous picture on it. And now, I've put it on the internet!

Anitra's Baby

A view of Union Hotel Garden, worked mostly by Anitra, from above:

Here's another shot of it from the side. Click on it for a bigger version. Kale, sugar pod peas, nasturtiums. We've been eating the nasturtiums, they're yummy. The garden is 70 square feet, roughly in the form of a right triangle, about 10 feet and 14 on its sides.

The Smith Tower & Hitler

Two blocks from where I live is the Smith Tower. Named after the typewriter Smith, whose family was also into gun manufacturing, it was built in 1914. In fact, its 94th birthday is tomorrow. At the time it was completed it was the 6th tallest building in the world, and the tallest west of the Mississippi. I just want to call attention to a detail of its ornamentation. First let's see it as it appears from the park next to the King County Courthouse. The upper edge of the south side of the Morrison is at lower right.

Next, let's get closer to the top of the lower section of the building. See the frieze just below the top?

Oh my God! Interlocking swastikas! Seattle's beloved iconic landmark has a Nazi design!

It's Too Hot III

It was too hot again yesterday so I took another walk, trying to find shade and a breeze. This time I walked around the International District.

The ID is another reason I like living at the Union. We're right up next to it -- its northwest corner is literally just beyond our back yard.

Most people think of 4th and Jackson as the main entrance to the present day ID. It's also the site of the old Union Railroad Station, which is surely not an accident. (Consider who built the railroad.) The first picture is a view from the station's entranceway, off Jackson, into the lobby. I walked through the lobby out the other side toward 5th and King St., because it's air-conditioned. In fact, if the weather gets any hotter I'm going to spend my days in Union Station.

5th & King is the site of the recently installed Chinese Gate. It brings back memories of Taiwan for me. I remember seeing a similar gate that was built to frame the rising sun on the eastern coast of Taiwan. I've seen it in my dreams since, and now there's this one four blocks from home.

The view from nearly underneath:

Two blocks further east, at Maynard Street, is Hing Hay Park.

One of several Asian markets in neighborhood.

After doing some shopping I ended up back in the Pioneer Square District on 2nd Avenue Extension across from the Union Gospel Mission (no connection with the Union Hotel.) In this shot, the Mission is the brick building at the right. To the left on the other side of Washington Street is a gray building with pink trim and clay tile roofing over some windows. Somewhere I read that it is the last remaining building of the original 1800s Chinatown. At any rate, it sits on the block just west of home.

It's Too Hot II

It was way too hot when I got home at 6 this evening, so I took the new used camera for a walk outdoors. It occurs to me that when I talk about the apartments I live in or life in downtown Seattle, one or two of you may have no idea what that looks like.

I hate living at the Union for the noise and the patronizing management, but I love it for the location. The Pioneer Square District in Seattle is a great place to look at and walk around. And contrary to what people who don't live here think, it's not all that dangerous. I feel much safer here than in condo-ridden Belltown.

I started the walk out back of my home, the Union Hotel Apartments. This is the view from 4th and S Washington. The Union Hotel garden, all 70 or so square feet of it, is the tiny bit of greenery the other side of the fence to the right of the bus shelter.

Here's the same bit of garden viewed from the south looking northwest from 4th Avenue S, showing how the garden is a foot or two from a precipice dropping to the railroad tracks leading to the Seattle railroad tunnel.

It was so hot I went to the water. This was shot 3 blocks west of the Union Hotel at 1st and S Washington, looking north along the east side of the street. When I was last homeless the sign advertising rooms for 75 cents was hard to take, knowing that it's just an antique. If there really were rooms for 75 cents a night, I wouldn't have been homeless.

I love alleys. And look: someone's art perpetually looks on this one. Between 1st and Alaska at Washington, looking south.

I spent some time at the Washington Street Waterfront Park, then moved a block north to Yesler and headed back east.

Creative use of wall space at Alaska and Yesler.

Gentrified saloons, saloons turned into fancy restaurants, saloons turned into sports bars, saloons turned into art galleries, and then, sometimes, saloons turned into saloons...

Not a half block further, a mural decorating the beautiful southern entrance to Post Alley from Yesler.

At 1st I jogged over to Cherry so that I could get a shot of my favorite building adornments.

Then south on 3rd to get a view of the Morrison Hotel, another subsidized apartment building run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center. Fellow editorial committee member Stan lives here. It also houses the DESC shelter on one floor.

Back home, I prepare to ascend my throne, the red chair, with My Blue Friend behind me.

The Closed Captioned Preschooler

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened the week following my fourth birthday in 1953. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The name/word problem was frightening. I was isolated as it was. The thought that I wouldn't be able to learn new words as needed was unbearable.

I consider my solution my greatest achievement. It came in three steps.

The first step came to me when I remembered having seen a crude picture of a cat. I drew a copy of it in sand outside, with a stick. Looking at it, I suddenly realized that the picture was standing for cats in general to me. The word "cat" still could not be anything but the name of one cat, but the picture could do the work of a general word.

The second step, and to me the one that was brilliant -- I'll never be this smart again, ever -- was to think, "Why don't I let the word 'cat' be the name of the picture?"

It was a little awkward. When hearing the word "cat" I would have to recognize it as the name of a picture in my memory, and then that picture would refer to the general class of animals being referred to, and I could proceed to use the picture to organize my thinking about what was being said, and when it came time to say something about the creatures referenced by the picture, I could just use the name ("cat") for the picture, and no one would need to know the extra steps involved.

I would seem slow, because the process would take longer than normal speech processes, but it was better than not being able to learn new vocabulary, and being totally cut off from social intercourse.

The third step came when I encountered a relatively abstract word I didn't recall knowing before, and I realized it would be very difficult to assign a picture to it that wouldn't be arbitrary. I don't remember the word now, but suppose it was "arbitrary". What would you picture to represent the concept "arbitrary?" Pretty much anything I can think of would be easily mistaken for something else.

What I needed was what we call in the math biz a canonical method for generating new pictures. I wanted a machine, in effect, that I could use to crank out pictures without having to go to all the trouble of inventing new pictures out of thin air for each new word.

It happens my parents were both readers. I hadn't started to learn to read yet. My mother had tried to get me interested by reading children's books to me, but I was into memorizing them and reciting them along with her reading. My memory had always been too good to need to learn to decipher the chicken scratches on the page.

But as I was pondering the problem of coming up with new pictures I had a flash of insight. I ran to my Mother to test the idea I was having. I said, "Mommy! Is there writing for every word you can say?" "Of course, silly." "Every word? Even words I don't know yet?" "If it's a word you can say, you can write it down."

That was the final step then. I could get my parents to show me the writing for each new word. That would be the picture that would constitute the actual word for me. The written form would represent the concept that ordinary people used the sound to signify. For me, the sound of the word would be the name of the written form, by which I could reference the concept.

In speaking and listening I taught myself to imagine English written subtitles under every scene -- and I'd never seen a subtitled film! We didn't have a television, and I'd never been to a movie of any kind.

It wasn't hard to learn. I had it down in a few days. At first, it was painfully slow, and people began to say I spoke to slowly, and get impatient with me. I had to do it consciously. The process was similar to speaking in English through translation back and forth from another language without other people knowing.

Another Crappy Birthday

OK, it wasn't as bad as the first. It was even better than the second, which wasn't celebrated at all, since animals don't get birthday parties.

It began with my Father getting his photographic equipment out. He set up a tripod in the middle of the living room, and a dining chair was set in front of it.

I was placed in the chair. He had to focus the camera. He measured the light and did his calculations to set the exposure time just right. He had to hang a sheet up to block sunlight from the window.

Then the big moment came. My Mother handed me an oblong object and my Father said, from behind the camera, "Here it is! Here's the ball!" I was excited! I looked around for the ball. I didn't see it, but I was sure it was there somewhere. I was happy, and there was a flash, as my Father got this picture.


After the picture was taken I said, naturally, "Where ball? What ball?"

My Father said, "It's in your hand, silly"

How is a football a ball to a 3-year-old who has never even seen a football game?

I've often wondered how bad it would have been if we were a normal family, and my parents hadn't tried to kill me on my first birthday, and I hadn't only just recently begun to bond with my Father again.

The way things were, it just symbolized everything that was wrong. I had a Father who couldn't see me unless he was imagining me being him. If I couldn't be identical to him, I was disposable. My Father was a football fan. I must be a football fan.

Even before I started crying, my Mother said, "I told you he wanted a round ball." I burst out in tears, and my Father said, "It's a ball! What's wrong with him that he can't see it's a ball!" "It's not a ball," she said. "It's a football." "A football is a ball!"

It took several minutes for my Father to calm down. Mother talked him into promising to get a real ball soon. I was talked down out of my sobbing, as I gradually was convinced that the next time wouldn't be just like this one, and the next "ball" wouldn't be shaped like a donkey, or the Eiffel Tower, or a stupid coat hanger.

Another present was brought out. I got a "kelepona", a telephone. It was a toy telephone with a spinning dial, just like the new one that my parents had recently got, replacing the old wall model.

Below are four photos. In all but the one on the lower left I was Kona. My Mother said something mean about me just before that shot was taken, and Alaka'i came out, protecting Kona from hearing the insult. You can see anger that Kona wouldn't have had. My Mother said to my Father, "See? See what I've been telling you? Look at him. You can see he's different! I told you the freak's got a split personality!"

My father told her she was crazy. "There are no such things as split personalities."

Believe It

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, properly dated, because I can. -- wes]

There’s some pictures on floor L I think about a lot. Paul Dorpat, who does the “Then and Now” feature at the end of Pacific Northwest Magazine, gave us the photographs on the walls down there, including the shots of the women at the Union Hotel Laundry posing for pictures around the time of the Spanish Flu of 1918. You’ve probably seen them hundreds of times. They’re posing with happy smiling faces in this one; they’ve all got their masks on in that one, so we can’t tell if they’re still smiling, but I like to think they are.

One of the things I think about is that the Spanish Flu wasn’t from Spain. They called it that because Spain was one of the few countries of the Western World that wasn’t involved in WWI at the time, and they didn’t have wartime censorship. So it was reported heavily in the Spanish press and hardly at all in other places, because the governments at war didn’t want each other to know how sick their people were. Actually it probably started in the United States.

The masks the people in the pictures were wearing were made of gauze and meant to keep infectious microbes from passing through the air from person to person or from a person’s face to their hands. I don’t know if the masks were required in Seattle but I’ve read that some California cities required people to wear them in public. Stanford University has a website that reports this pathetic jingle was posted as a reminder: Obey the laws /And wear the gauze / Protect your jaws / From Septic Paws.

At the time scientists thought the Spanish Flu was a swine flu. Most scientists now think that the Spanish Flu was a bird flu that became a human flu, just like what everyone is worried about now. Many scientists now also think the gauze masks our ancestors wore during the Spanish Flu didn’t do a bit of good, in fact may have made matters worse.

So to put all of this together, the Spanish Swine Flu was really the Kansas bird flu, the laws requiring gauze masks for everyone’s safety were actually for everyone’s harm and inconvenience, and while I’m looking at these pictures and thinking this, every five minutes I’m blasted by sirens that are supposed to be saving lives.

Sure they are.