Sunday Morning

Since I'm fasting from religion during Lent--note, please, that the issue is religion not belief or faith--Sunday mornings remind me of the sixteen years I dropped out of religion between my sophomore year in college and my inexplicable return in 1979. I suppose a primary alternative to church is the New York Times, if you happen to have developed the Times habit over the years, as my wife and I have. So we read the Times. We have brunch. Because I'm not serving on an altar, I don't have to spend most of the day in the church, returning late afternoon with a kind of fatigue that I feel after no other work or activity. It isn't hard to do something different--when the weather's good, take a long bike ride as I did yesterday--although I must say that reading the New York Times is hardly an edifying experience or a ritual that leads to spiritual insight. (My wife says for her it is.)

But then a church service often fails to be edifying or spiritually insightful as well.

Well, this morning I was watching the workmen in the lot across the street from our apartment as they completed the erection of a fifteen-storey crane with an arm that reaches another ten storeys into the air. They began the work yesterday at dawn (the workers arrive at the construction site every day before dawn, even on the coldest days). Building has been going on at the site for a few months now, with interruptions of one sort or another. I know nothing about these things, so I can't say why there are delays. I assume it's about the arrival of materials. Watching the crane go up this weekend, I expect to see flat-bed trucks arrive tomorrow with long steel girders. The workers will then proceed to put the girders in place and erect a condominium skyscraper, the Platinum Tower, that will block a good part of our apartment's southern light. But that's just a fact of life in New York. Light will be blocked by buildings.

Anyway, as I've observed the workmen at the construction site over these few months, and seen them this weekend, I've been struck by how much of their time seems to be spent wandering around somewhat aimlessly. I can see a dozen men walking about in the morning, perhaps carrying something, but seldom do they seem to stop to do anything. Their motions appear random, and then at the end of the day the site has changed. There are walls, platforms rising out of the concrete bathtub in which it all rests. On Friday, there was not a crane, and then on Sunday there is. A few men were on the girders of the crane, some on the ground held ropes (I think). The whole thing balanced on a slim pile of steel seemed improbable. One man crawls out on the extended arm 100 feet up, without a safety belt, his feet balanced on the girders. The height doesn't seem to bother them.

It's a possible answer to the question, Why is there anything at all? Stuff mills around until it comes together and then you have something.

This morning they started up a smokey engine at the back of the platform on which the crane operator sits, enclosed in his glass casing (nice in this cold weather), and try out various moves. The man on the crane arm stays there while it is moved this way and that. Others crawl around on another platform above the operator's cab doing who knows what. Every now and then I look up from the Times to see how they are doing. They are standing or wandering or looking.

I mention to my wife that it's hard to think of these men in their hard hats as typical guys from the Bronx, say, with beer guts, whose views I am unlikely agree with, when I see them in this effortless motion erect a structure that does not look like it can stand. But it does. They're not in church either, of course.

It occurred to me that life is a bit like this, random motion or effort, that may or may not feel purposeful, but in the end, who knows. A few guys show up and after a day leave a twenty-storey crane behind. They go to a bar maybe, have a beer. No big deal. The main thing is the crane doesn't fall down. Amazing.