Today I offer "Home as Cultural Icon."  I trust that your Advent is going well and that you are looking forward to continuing reflection on the import and meaning of the moment, now and to come . . . .

Home as Cultural Icon

Sitting on our family’s bookshelf, the big bookshelf in the main part of our home, the sturdy wooden bookshelf that my ever resourceful father built into the wall of the dining room, was a set of books about British literature.  In them were listed every British writer and poet of any note, along with a sampling of their most significant or memorable works, beginning in the sixteen century and continuing into the early twentieth.  It was a five volume set.  Each volume’s cover was a different color.

We rarely looked inside these books.  Our parents were pretty familiar with British literature and could talk to us about most of it at will.  Because of where I sat at the dining room table, the side furthest from the wall in which the bookshelf was set, I saw those volumes every night.  I could not sit down to dinner without noting them.  Even today, I can envision that shelf, envision the massive Webster’s dictionary, the equally massive OED, Lewis Mumford’s The City, a book called American Past, various books of Ansel Adams photographs (my favorite was his Yosemite) and, stacked next to the Webster’s, the five volumes, their different colors creating a sort of cloth collage, of British prose and poetry.  (Of course, there were many other books on this bookshelf—it was eight feet all, as tall as the ceiling, eight shelves in all—many of which I remember, too, but I mention the ones I have because they were closest to the volumes of which I now speak.)

As my brother observed when we were cleaning out the house, “Those volumes are iconic.”  Quite.  None of us can think about that bookshelf without thinking about those books.  We can’t remember our childhood without remembering those volumes and the way they sat on our family’s bookshelf.

We populate our home with icons (and iconoclasts); we fill our lives with mementos.  Though at the time we do not know what will become an icon and, subsequently, iconic—how could we?—we always end up creating them.  We make what we set in our home, whatever and wherever home is, iconic moments, palpable iconic moments around which we shape our lives. 

And the longer we stay in our home, the more iconic these moments, these points of memory become, the more compelling and uplifting they show themselves to us.  They grow into us, we grow into them.  We make them our culture, our culture of home.  We first see them as items.  Later, we call them artifacts.  Eventually, perhaps, we make them icons.  And as the decades continue on, we see these icons become remembrances, bracing remembrances of what has been, remembrances that enrich us with poignant and expansive vistas of memory and song.

And beginning points for what is to come.

Icons need not be in our physical home only.  Some years ago, how intrigued I was, when reading a biography of Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (one of the late Charles Manson’s “girls”), to realize that she had spent a few years in a home not too far from mine.  In fact, the biography stated, she even inscribed her name in the concrete around the lamppost in the parkway of the house in which she lived.

The next time I was in Los Angeles, running, as I often did, from my parents’ home to the ocean and back, I mapped my return so as to reach Fromme’s old street.  I slowed down, checking each address, scanning each house.  Then I saw it.  The number fit.  And there was the lamppost.  Gingerly (I didn’t want to seem like a loiterer or intruder), I walked to the sidewalk and looked.

There it was.  Direct from a young Squeaky Fromme:  “Lynette Fromme, 1960.”  A little girl she was, innocent as I, happily (according to her biographer) growing up in the oceanside suburbs of Los Angeles.  A little girl who attended some of the schools I attended, a little girl who lived and played where I played, a little girl writing her name on the sidewalk, her words now immortalized in the drying concrete.  Not writing with chalk, as my siblings and I did on the sidewalks of our street, but writing to last.  Writing, as it turned out, for posterity.

Iconic indeed.  And it wasn’t even in our home.

Many years after 1960, Dad built a workshop behind the garage.  His first task was to lay a foundation.  In order to do so successfully, he had to remove our own concrete icon.  In 1960, coincidentally the same year as the young Lynette penned her words, Dad had all of us, all four of us, place our hands in some freshly laid concrete behind the garage, to make our marks for the ages. But when he began building the workshop, Dad realized that he would need to rearrange the concrete behind the garage. He would need to remove some of it before he could lay the foundation for the workshop.

Although Dad had most of the offending concrete carried away, he saved the piece with our handprints on it.  We still have it today.  Its iconic moment now sits in the pleasantly appointed garden of my northern California sister’s backyard, its little prints still preserved for anyone to see.  When I visited this sister (I have two) a few years ago, I of course took time to stroll into her backyard and look at this memory, this icon of many days past.

It was time to be home.

Just a few miles north of my childhood beach is the community of Venice.  Venice, Venice, funny little Venice.  Parked on the ocean, full of little beachside houses, famous Gold Gym on its boardwalk, its population of iron and weight lifters doing their thing in full view of passerbys, and dozens of “hippie” shops, Venice had long hovered as a “freaky” place in an otherwise affluent stretch of California shoreline.  I had always liked hanging in Venice, loved its flowers, its boardwalk, its people.

And I really loved Venice’s beach.  I spent many afternoons on that beach.  Friends would come, and friends would go.  We did fun thing, we did crazy things.  One day, the women swam topless; another day, the men smoked pot openly on the sand.

Reading Fromme’s biography, however, I learned something else about Venice’s beach, something darker, something which was to color it in my memory forever.  On its sands, its silky yellow sands, in the early Sixties, Charles Manson approached Lynette Fromme for the first time.  Sensing her loneliness and teenage angst, and entirely convincing and persuasive, he talked to her about running away with him.  And she did.

I can’t now visit Venice’s beach without thinking about Charles Manson and Lynette Fromme.  And Manson’s recent passing and Fromme’s release from prison in 2009 only sharpen my sense of something gained, lost, and then found again.  The beach is a memory of memory, a moment of moments, a life and existence gone.  An icon and speech of a time long over.

I also think about the sidewalk.  I think about the writing, I think about the lamppost.  I remember the days, I recall the times.  I marvel at what happened, I weep at what has passed.  I mourn lives lost, lives fallen to suicide, lives eviscerated by drugs, lives snuffed out in Vietnam.  And lives destroyed by Helter Skelter madness.  I ponder the icons that remain.

I have the books of British literature and poetry on my bookshelf today.  I don’t look at them a lot, but I do look at them.  Occasionally, I even look at the biography of Lynnette Fromme.

Not so many years past, my son and I traveled to our beloved Sierra Nevada mountains to climb Mt. Whitney which, at nearly 14,500 feet, is the highest point in the lower forty-eight states.  I had climbed Whitney forty years before, and think often about the photo someone took of me on top.  So tired was he that he missed the top of my head; I’m a smile without eyes.

When after three days of hiking, my son and I reached Whitney’s summit, I was amazed:  in forty years, nothing, really, had changed.  The vistas were the same, the sky still hung overhead, the tattered rocks on the summit were still tattered.  And the plaque marking the high point hadn’t moved a bit.  I looked at the glaciated lakes, shivering under the thunderstorm venting far below, and gazed at the rows and rows of peaks thrusting up to the west.  And I thought about forty years before and me alone on the summit, two hours alone on top of the nation and, thanks to a weary photographer, without a top to my head. Never had I felt so much at home.

I treasure the photograph I have of my son and me on the top of Whitney.  Not only because I can see all of our heads, but because it is for me a home, a home of a home.  An icon of yesteryear becoming an icon of today.  In the photograph I can remember, remember then, remember now.  I can think and recall, I can meditate and ponder. And I can see, see the stormy day we had, the way the lightning slashed across the empty sky, the sleet that fell as we hiked out of the lake basin, the amazing view we had on top.  It all fits.  It all fits into the home I found, the icon without a head.

And now an icon with a thousand faces.  Always at home.