Intelligent Design

Blueprints are wonderful things.  You can’t beat a system that lets you make your mistakes with pencil and paper, first, before moving on to structural steel, concrete, bricks and lumber.

Gone are the days of long and tedious hours at a drafting table, just to render how some seemingly insignificant HVAC blower motor assembly will fit into a larger heat exchange unit.  Now, with AutoCAD on your laptop, you can design how the entire freaking utility system can play nicely with everything else, with a few well-placed clicks and drags.  The programs are so intuitive that they almost anticipate what you want.

In this day and age, you have to wish we could have the same system for people.  

I’m sorry, did I write that out loud?

Anymore, real blueprints are like the stock certificates you once saw in your parents’ lockbox.  They were a thing of beauty in and of themselves and their level of workmanship and investment of creativity echoed that of the finished product.  

Not long ago, I was wondering where the cafeteria was located in our Fairview, before the additions of the early ‘50s gave us the one we remember, vividly, if not lovingly.  Wouldn’t you think anyone who was there in the ‘30s, ‘40s or early ‘50s would know?  That silly thought helped me come up empty, when I asked more older alumni than I care to mention.  Most kids only had half an hour for lunch, but they would have been there most every day, no?  Was the experience so traumatic that it has been wiped from their hard drives?

I let that fool’s errand lie dormant for several years, only re-visiting it when I would meet  anew someone who went to Fairview at the appropriate time.  Thinking that would remain one of life’s mysteries, along with understanding cold fusion and fathoming the female passion for shopping, I came across a cache of blueprints, while excavating the Cretaceous and Tertiary boundary layer.

The only obvious conclusion I had before this evidence, was that all trace had disappeared when the additions were made, and that alone did not move me to the head of any class.  This image, while not quite the Holy Grail or “X”-marks-the-spot, gave me much more than I had so far.  

Even if you’ve never read one of these diagrams before, you quickly get a sense of what you’re seeing.  It’s not like anyone is trying to keep you from figuring out where the pot of gold is.  No terra incognita or “Here be dragons.”  

There are several nice clues there for the taking.  First, your highly trained eye might suspect those are windows along the top wall of the space.  Secondly, the two entrance/exit doors.  Too bad there isn’t any “north” arrow or labels to indicate what is to the bottom, left or right.  For me, however, the best tell was there in the upper left corner of the drawing, where it appears that the wall continues up, rather than to the left.  Since the early Fairview was shaped like a “U,” it lead me to think it might have been next to the smoke stack, and those doors that came in from the teachers’ parking lot. 

But that room was just dinky little classroom 122.  Trust me, I know.  I spent a lovely junior/senior summer there baking my way through Mrs’ Rowe’s Civics and Social Problems.  It was a special kind of hot, accompanied by a total lack of any breeze, the likes of which I wouldn’t know again until my all expenses paid vacation at Fort Benning, Georgia.  While I do remember that the chalkboard was green and not black, as in the adjacent rooms, it wasn’t like you could still hear the cries of generations of lost souls crying to be released from their torment, nor was there any residue of ketchup stains on the ceiling.  And believe me, in her class, you didn’t have a lot of time to admire architectural detail.

So, yes, interesting clues, one and all, but not quite enough that I’d feel comfortable betting your next Social Security check on it, much less mine.  It wasn’t until a visit to a bazaar specializing in obscure antiquities in Amman, that I came across a scroll containing yet another blueprint with the clues needed to be sure.

And there was all the evidence a blind man would need to see clearly that the kitchen and cafeteria had been in what we remember as rooms 121 and 122.

blow-up of room 122 area from drawing above

You can see that a new wall was added to create the two new class rooms.  There are several references to removal of the various bits and pieces of kitchen infrastructure.  Sure enough, that round thingie above the room is the smoke stack.  The windows and the spaces in between them even match that area on the earlier kitchen drawing.  

If I wanted you to call me a liar, I’d tell you that I remember seeing that the brickwork in the hallway coming in from the parking lot showed evidence that there had once been a doorway there.  You can put that in the same category as looking really hard on the blueprint at room 101 across the hallway to see Miss Herbst preaching one of her Humanities sermons.

So, there you have it, or, as we would have written at the end of a proof for Mrs. Rinehart, Q.E.D.

Now, because my favorite stylistic device in these stories is to use the end of the tale to wrap back around to the beginning, I can’t help but think that maybe there was something of a blueprint in place to help us become who we are.  

But perhaps a more worrisome thought is why that no longer seems to be the case.