Beauty and Silence

I cannot separate thoughts of beauty and silence from thoughts of Alan.   And I want to continue to reflect on these things because they are so central to my heart and my well being -- silence, beauty and Alan.

I first met Alan on Good Friday in April of 1981.   The day is embedded in my life not because it was the day I met Alan.   It was a day that marked an end of an era in my life.  And interestingly it had to do with what I perceived as an enormous, unforgivable betrayal by a man I loved.   Appropriate for Good Friday.   I never thought about that before.

In those days I always allowed the imperative to be polite to override my own intuition.   So I allowed myself to be dragged to Alan's architectural office.  Penthouse offices on Park Avenue at 34th Street.   In those days I was living in a basement "apartment" in New Rochelle, doing peace and justice work at the College of New Rochelle, and doing graduate work in religious education at NYU.   I was suspect of money and ostentation.  Everything about Alan and his offices exuded both.  I was not pleased to be there, and not about to be caught up in his hospitality and flirting.   He offered me a job that day and on many occasions afterward much to my dismay.   He persisted and months later I agreed to have dinner with him.

We were an odd pair -- he was 20 years my elder.   He was conservative, imbedded in the country club life that I found boring at best and the "root of evil" at worst.  He was playful and elegant.   I was serious and sad.   For him politics and religion were for cocktail conversation.   For me they were central to my life.   I was deeply religious and spiritual.  He was a self-declared atheist.  Yet we began to reach across those divides to come to know each other.  

He couldn't figure out why I would work so hard at a job for so little money.   He insisted that the most important thing in life was to have money and I insisted it was to know love.   I think we taught each other a great deal in the fifteen years we had together before his untimely death in 1996.

So back to beauty, silence, Alan and money.   My older brother Joe was living in Houston and I missed him in a fierce way.  Alan had an architectural project in Houston and traveled there on a regular basis.   In early September of 1981 he offered to take me to Houston with him to visit my brother.   I was suspect.  "And what do I owe you for that?"  I asked.   I hardly knew him.  His response was that he had to be there over a weekend and all he wanted was the pleasure of my company.  He wanted me to go to a restaurant on a pier in Galveston with him over the weekend and he wanted me to attend a business dinner with him while he was there.   Other than that my time was my own.  My desire to see Joe overrode my apprehension and off we went to Houstonl.

The trip changed my life forever.   I learned why it was worth having money.   Because money could buy me silence and beauty.   For a working class girl from Brooklyn who really only found silence and that deep beauty in church or alone in nature, living in the midst of that kind of elegant silence and beauty for days at a time was transforming.

Alan was kind, gracious, caring and true to his word.

For the first time in years during that trip I heard the sound of my own laughter again.  My heart, frozen with sadness since my teen years, was thawing and opening in the presence of someone for whom hospitality and playfulness was so real.   And someone who was genuinely interested in me.   In who I was, in what I thought and in what he called my "presence". 

So my life began to change.

Here he is years later with my dear friend Cathie at my dining room table!

 and forever and always I will associate Alan with all things beautiful, silent, gracious and creative.

With thanks for all he brought me!

Donna