A chance mention by someone that a James Taylor concert was coming to town sent me to Amazon’s Alexa to listen to Taylor once again.
The first song I heard proved a memory awakener: Taylor sang “Up On the Roof,” the singer’s mellow cover of the Drifters hit from the ’60s, written by Carole King (who played piano on the Drifters’ recording) and Gerry Goffin (King’s first husband who once called this song the most satisfying he’d ever written). King’s suggested title for the song was “My Secret Place,” but Goffin, inspired by the haven imagery of rooftop culture in the musical West Side Story, settled with “Up On the Roof.”
One of my cherished childhood memories is gatherings of family and relatives atop the four-story apartment building where my Aunt Eva and Uncle Nat occupied fourth-floor rooms. Just one flight of stairs above them the roof provided a plaza-like lookout over Park Slope in Brooklyn. In the days before home air-conditioning was ubiquitous, roofs provided an escape from summer heat and expansive space for sitting and snacking among the tiny grove of television antennas sprouting from the roofs of the city. My aunt made almost daily climbs to the roof to hang laundry on the clotheslines woven atop the roofs in the neighborhood.
My only memory of another uncle, then the bachelor Mason, during his visit from Newfoundland, is captured in a photograph of a family together on this roof. The picture shows me as a toddler alongside my uncle. I believe this was his only visit to Brooklyn, and he was dead before I made my first visit to Newfoundland four decades after that photograph had been taken. My parents named my older brother after Uncle Mason, my mother’s younger brother, and my wife and I named our youngest son Mason after my oldest brother and my uncle.
As a late teenager, I had the joy of spending time with Uncle Mason’s daughter, a teenager like me, during her maiden visit to the States. As if carrying on a family tradition, she had been named Sylvia after my older sister.
Unfortunately, I don’t recall any gathering up on the roof with my cousin, but we spent delightful time visiting the New York World’s Fair on a rainy day, a magical excursion when the Fair became a quiet and nearly empty playground and refuge of joy for us.
So many of the rides at the fair that day made me feel that the Flushing Meadow fairgrounds had become our private shrine embracing us in friendship and joy. She later married a U.S. airman stationed in Newfoundland and eventually settled to raise her own family in Minnesota.
James Taylor’s recording always takes me to my memories of rooftops and the strange quietude and joy of the rainy World’s Fair grounds, lifting my spirit “when this old world starts getting me down.”
How we enjoyed those family times up on the roof; it was an urban sanctuary of love and peace. So too, the World’s Fair on that wet, empty, magical day of pure joy and peace.
I’ve never used any rooftop as a getaway, but my memory of relatives up on the roof keeps me wishing I had. James Taylor awakens my need for reflective sanctuary.
Over the years, I have sought periodically to find my spiritual sanctuary.
From Thoreau to John Muir, from St. Simeon Stylites to St. Benedict of Nursia, I have read of many who sought meditative sanctuary for personal growth and spiritual instruction, often in odd or challenging places, and at times characterized as “the dark night of the soul.”
For me, Jesus stands as a supreme earthbound model. He frequently “went apart” from the crowds, be they disciples or seekers, to commune with the One who sent him.
Christians are encouraged similarly to follow their Master, be it in daily devotions, “quiet” time, meditation, contemplation, Lectio Divina, intense Bible reading, or meaningful silence.
I have struggled with such admonitions and exercises of faith. I’ve tried praying in empty chapels and empty classrooms; sitting in gardens; seeking “away” places such as a belfry stairway; purposely eating in crowded restaurants or cafeterias away from home, where I was alone with the white noise of dishes and clinking silverware; finding dark places where the stars are visible (city boys hardly notice stars); parking at beaches or on piers to view the vast ocean; walking beaches or forest paths or climbing small hills; riding in trains and subways where the din of travel and noisy commuters provides a muting background; or sitting alone in my most comfortable chair at home (with or without a book or a laptop).
How I yearn for that sanctuary “up on the roof.”