Junior

My dad calls me Junior.

It’s not a joke, although it gets a laugh every time. We don’t share a name, just a nickname. It’s his first and last initials that happen to be mine too, and that part wasn’t an accident. It’s a tradition in my family, my grandmother and grandfather passed the same two initials to my dad, my dad passed them to his kids. Wait, are you named after your dad? In a way…

I’m named into something bigger than just him. I’ve never minded carrying it. I think I’ve spent most of my adult life slowly understanding what it actually means to.

He was a builder in Little Rock, Arkansas and he was only a teenager when he started building houses. While just a kid, what made my dad unique is he was equal parts builder and the designer. Both of which I didn’t fully appreciate until I was old enough to know that those are usually two different people, two different rooms in a firm, two different signatures on two different documents. My dad was both signatures. He drew the houses and then he built them. I watched him draw all the time when I was a kid.

The first house he ever designed sits in Little Rock, a few decades old now. I have never been inside it. I’ve never met the people who live there now, or the people who lived there before them. But what I do have are two photographs, taken years apart, the same house in different light, one in late summer with the trees still full, one under snow with a car buried in it up to the windows.

In both photos, the house does something similar. A steep gabled wing rises on one side, sided in vertical boards that pull your eye straight up to the peak. On the other side, fieldstone, a little heavier and older-feeling, grounding the whole composition. The two halves shouldn’t work together, but they somehow do. There’s a skylight near that peak, and even from the street, even from a photograph, you can feel it before you can see it, light doing something up there that you understand without being so obvious. This is a pretty rare (and bold) gesture…

Most people don’t quite feel a skylight until they’re standing under it, looking up. My dad built a roofline that tells you it’s there before you’ve gone inside.

I think about what it takes to do both jobs, the imagining and the making. An architect can spend a career drawing buildings other hands will build. A builder can spend a career executing visions other minds conceived. My dad never had to hand the drawing to anyone. He carried the whole thing, the idea and the execution, in the same set of hands.

I didn’t grow up thinking of this as remarkable. It was just what my dad did…He called me Junior and I never thought much about what the name was supposed to mean, beyond the obvious. It’s only now, writing a publication about architecture and the people who understand buildings at a level most of us don’t get access to, that I’ve started to understand he was one of those people the whole time. I just called him Dad instead of architect.

We share a nickname, not a name, just two sets of initials that happened to land on the same two letters. He calls me Junior, which I’ve never minded, and these days a lot of people just call me CC, and I’ll be honest, I give pretty much everyone the option (Chirstyna OR “CC”). The nickname happened the way good things usually happen…without a big formal announcement, until one day you realize you’re walking around with a piece of someone else’s identity folded into your own.

I think that’s what a house does too, if it’s built right. Somebody folds a piece of themselves into it, a roofline, a skylight, a decision about where the stone wing should end and the siding should begin, and then they hand it to a family who will live inside that decision for decades without ever knowing whose hands made it.

I still haven’t been inside that house in Little Rock. I don’t know if I ever will be. But I know the roofline. I know the skylight. And I know now that the eye behind both of them didn’t stay in Little Rock either. Some of it came with me.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Thank you for building things that last long enough for your daughter to write about them.

-Christyna