Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Steeples

"Would you call that a steeple or a tower?"

While driving through the city, my sister and I were seeing tall, pointed steeples; short, square towers or stubbs of steeples and everything in between. There seemed to be no standard. The topic arose because I had pointed out that small churches, built in the last 50 years, often have the vestige of a steeple on the roof; a little, silly, pointy cap, intended to identify the structure as a church. Larger, modern churches sometimes have a sculptural structure, not necessarily rising from the roof, which serves as a bell tower. My sister commented that she'd like to survey all the churches in one area and photograph those that had "real steeples". But what IS a real steeple?

The Oxford English Dictionary definition: A lofty tower forming part of a church, temple, or other public edifice (often serving to contain bells); such a tower, together with a spire or other superstructure by which it is surmounted.

The word, steeple, comes from the old English word "staup" which (not surprisingly) means "steep". Architecturally, a steeple is defined as having three parts: the base (often a squat, square tower), a spire, which is the tall, pointed part, and a cupola which connects the two, and which often serves as the belfry. So what we thought of as a "real steeple" is actually the spire. It's not unusual in north-western Ohio, where we were driving, to see county churches with only the base of a steeple. It's a good bet that there was once a spire. It may have deteriorated or been blown down, and proved too expensive to repair or replace.

In the days when the church spire was the tallest structure around, it served as a landmark, a marker for getting oriented geographically. It was also a watch tower and a signal tower, a la Paul Revere. A steeple-chase was originally a race on horseback, across the countryside to a distant steeple, overcoming all the obstacles in between. The term, steeple, can be applied to anything that has a tall, pointed shape.

So what IS a real steeple? That's up to the beholder. But my definition would include a tall, narrow spire, architecturally integrated into the roof a church, and preferably containing bells.

Monday, January 30, 2006

High Tech?

After navigating a bizarre, on-line registration process a couple of months ago, I wasn't sure I was actually enrolled in the web design course. There had been no reminder. But I went anyway, and found myself the only female in a class of five. (As it turned out, I was also the most experienced with .html coding.) Nobody took attendance or asked for our names.

The teacher spent the first half hour of the class attempting to get the big screen at the front of the room to work, and finally gave up. Awhile later, the lights in the ceiling of the room went out, and this happened intermittently for the rest of the class, leaving us with only the light from our computer screens to type by and to take notes by.

In one exercise, we were supposed to insert a sound file into our practice web pages. That's when I discovered the speakers on the computer I was using, didn't work. It took the teacher and another staff person to find the right connections.

In spite of all the technical glitches, the teacher did a good job, and we all learned how to create a basic web page. Much of it was a needed refresher for me, but I also learned some new things and gained the confidence to go ahead on my own.

And I also learned that even here in Silicon Valley, high tech is not always reliable, and people are still very important.

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Standardized

While sorting through old letters I had written in the 1960s and 1970s, I realized that in those days, I used interesting stationery, and I recall the pleasure of choosing a new box when I'd used the last sheet from the old box. I tended to favor a thin, pebbly kind of paper, tinted in pale colors. Not for me the letter sheets with pictures of cute kittens or bouquets of flowers.

Of course, these letters were all hand-written, usualy in ink with a fountain pen. Following the example of an aunt who wrote letters in distinctive green ink, I mixed green and black to achieve a kind of Loden green, a popular fashion color at the time --- no common blue or blue-black for me. The ink came in glass bottles with a dipping resevoir molded into the rim.

My reason for going through the old letters was to photo-copy them in preparation for transcription into digital files. It was not possible to use the sheet feeder of the copy machine since the sheets were different sizes and different kinds of paper, so I went through the tedious task of placing the sheets on the glass, one at a time. I realized that nowadays we all use 8 1/2" x 11" ( or A4) paper. We've been standardized by the computer and the copy machine. Even legal-size paper (8 1/2" x 14") is uncommon; lawyers no longer use it, and it's almost impossible to find binders for this longer paper.

If you have a sophisticated printer, look at the settings for different paper sizes: letter, legal, executive, monarch, and index cards, as well as European sizes in metric measure, and Japanese sizes with exotic sounding names. Then stack the paper feed with good old 8 1/2" x 11".

Sunday, January 01, 2006

Remembrance Day Poppies



Armistice Day is no longer observed with much emphasis in the U.S., but it's still an important period in England; after all they were much more directly affected by the war. The day itself, and the following Sunday, are marked with wreath-laying ceremonies, veterans wear their service medals to commemorative services, and everyone wears a red paper poppy.

This past November I observed Remembrance Day for the second time, and began to understand what it means. This day is the English equivalent of Armistice Day in the U.S.: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, marking the signing of the armistice that ended World War I. This was the War to End All Wars, but as we know it didn't. Remembrance Day now also memorializes the dead from all the wars since then.

As a child I remember that in school, we stood for a few minutes of silence at 11:00 am on November 11, and members of the American Legion were on the street corners, selling red crepe-paper poppies. The money collected went to benefit disabled veterans.

Many people are now unaware of the symbolism of the poppy. Following the second battle of Ypres during the First World War, Major John McCrae, a physician in the Canadian army, wrote a poem that begins:

"In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row. . . "

The crosses marked the graves of soldiers killed in the bloody battle that had taken place in the area called Flanders Fields. Some people noted that the poppies bloomed more abundantly than usual the year after the battle, perhaps taking nourishment from the blood and bones that were buried under the soil. There are other poetic meanings associated with the poppy and you can read more here.



We were in London the week after Remembrance Day, and I walked to the Cenotaph, the war memorial standing in the middle of Whitehall Street, near the government buildings, and not far from Parliament Square. This is where the Queen and representatives of all the members of the Commonwealth lay wreaths on Remembrance Sunday. I was amazed to see the pavement covered with red poppies.

Further along, the sight at Westminster Abbey was even more remarkable. The grass was covered with row after row of small wooden crosses, each decorated with a poppy. Each cross (or Star of David, or Crescent) was inscribed with the name of a person who had died in the defense of their country. The crosses were arranged by regiment, and a map showed where the area where each regiment was located.

In an alcove of the Abbey, there was a Poppy Workshop where anyone, for a small contribution, could create another cross. I spoke with the man at the Poppy Workshop and he explained that the crosses remain in the yard for a week, and are then taken away. They seem to be saved for the following year, and it looked like a person could ask the Poppy Workshop to make a cross and plant it in the appropriate place.

The man at the Poppy Workshop also told me that they had supplied poppies to television productions filmed ahead of time, to be broadcast on Remembrance Day. I had noted poppies worn by the actors in a dramatization of a P.D. James mystery story that was set during this time period. If you're a sharp-eyed-royal-watcher, you may have noticed Prince Charles wearing a red poppy during his November visit to the U.S.

Next November, if you see a BBC newscaster or a British celebrity wearing a poppy, you'll know what it's all about.