Woke up to the news about new Supreme Court decisions that gave no thought to those affected and wondered about the Haitian woman whose life my son had saved by being able to speak her language and translate for the paramedics. All the people like her. Have we no compassion?
Somehow that led to… I had been curious for some time whether the church I grew up going to had been rebuilt after the fire that caved its roof in.
And the answer is, not yet.
The fire was November 2023. Last December it was finally torn down.
Someone videoed the entire thing.
Destruction of something dear to me, but also something that I knew would be rebuilt, it just felt like the day for witnessing that. I scrolled quickly forward at first, then slowed down and watched for far longer than I’d intended to. I read the comments for explanations here and there: they can’t just smash the thing down all in a go, the force of it would damage every building in the neighborhood. Oh.
Note that a certain infamous Supreme Court member lives around there.
All. The. Rebar.
Those steps that I ran up and down so many times as a little kid: molded concrete and rebar, and clearly water had gotten in because there were rust stains as the machinery crunched it–but only on those 76-year-old outside steps.
My father-in-law and his father had helped build that building as volunteers.
It was amazing to watch the dragon’s head of the thing chew on the concrete to separate it from the metal, which went in its own dumpster. The concrete turned to dust and water spray tamped down the smoke from the force of it. I watched with the sound off; I can only imagine how loud all this was in person.
And there’s where the woman’s restroom was…
Suddenly a large industrial-looking sink appeared and I thought, They still had that ugly thing after all these years?! I didn’t like it when I was a kid, either! But then I can understand not replacing it for the sake of, literally, vanity; an ugly sink never sank a soul, that’s not what a church’s mission is about. Still. This is a ward that got admonished by the Church that even if you’re hosting Washington DC and international bigwigs, sterling service and china for –was it 100?– was not the mission of the Church, which made them sell it.
Video Part 9, one hour 48 minutes in: the elegant Relief Society room, with the viewpoint suddenly swinging to street side as you see the wall and window go. I knew the chapel roof had fallen in but the timbers in that room were black, too. They still had those purple-pink chairs. More modern style, though. (Oh well, gone now.)
Behind the side door and above that restroom were the steps where there was once a swirl around me of low voices in the crowd as someone came up–actually, a bunch of people with him–while I was going down; I found out later it was a guy running for President. George Romney.
The chandeliers: were they still in there under that fallen roof? Must have been, because the building had been deemed unsafe and no one had gone inside since the fire. I used to watch all those little crystals shimmering in the air movement and listen to them when I was bored, which pretty much means every Sunday when I was little and I still did as I got older; they were so beautiful to look at and so exquisite to listen to.
Those frequencies have been gone from my hearing since my teens.
But I have found that if I am in a very quiet place and there is a crystal chandelier and I am looking up at it, my brain knows those sounds by heart and it brings them back to me still.