That Fountain Isn't Broken, You Are

A lesson from Gyumri, delivered without mercy and only a little sympathy.

I read about that fountain in Gyumri this morning, the one that stood upright while everything around it fell to pieces, and I put the paper down and said out loud, to nobody in particular: of course it did.

Not because fountains are special. Because people make the same mistake every time. They see something survive a disaster and they treat it like a museum piece. Rope it off. Let it rust. Stand in front of it and feel things. That is not preservation. That is just guilt wearing a historical marker.

Here is what I know about Gyumri. That city took a blow in 1988 that would've finished off places with a weaker spine. The earthquake killed tens of thousands of people and knocked the city flat. And yet this fountain, this one specific fountain, stayed standing. Which should have told the people around it something. Not something mystical. Something practical. That thing was built right. You do not leave a thing built right to sit dry and corrode. You turn the water back on and you drink from it.

But no. People would rather mourn a thing than use it. I have seen this in Harrow Corners more times than I can count. We had a neighbor, Mr. Thompson, who kept every broken appliance, every warped board, every cracked tool he had ever owned, stacked to the ceiling on the theory that he might need it someday. When the storm came, his roof didn't fall because of the storm. His roof fell because he had been building the conditions for that collapse for thirty years and the storm just showed up to sign the paperwork.

The difference between Mr. Thompson and a city that lets a working fountain rust is mostly a matter of square footage.

Now, I have a third porch step that is not there on Sundays. Has not been there on Sundays for going on twelve years. I do not ask why. I do not put a sign up. I do not hold a community meeting about it. I step over it, and I go about my day, and on Mondays it is back and everything is fine. That is the correct response to a thing that does not behave the way you expect: you work with what it gives you and you do not make it everybody's problem.

The fountain is not a monument. It is a water fixture that works. You want to honor the people who built it? Run the water. You want to honor the people who died when the city fell? Build the next thing as well as that fountain was built, and do not wait for another disaster to find out if you managed it.

The fruitcake I have been receiving every Christmas since 1954 has outlasted four marriages and two different postal routes through Harrow Corners. I do not eat it. Nobody eats it. It keeps coming back. I have never once considered leaving it on the curb, because it was made with real effort and real intention and those things have a way of holding their shape. That fountain was made the same way. The city around it was not, or it would still be standing.

That is the whole lesson, and it fits on a notecard.

If you built it right, use it. If you did not build it right, build it right this time. And if you are standing in front of something that survived everything you threw at it, still functional, still structurally sound, still capable of doing exactly what it was made to do, and your response is to let it sit there and rust while you feel sad about the past, then the problem was never the fountain.

The problem is that you got so busy grieving what fell down that you forgot to be grateful for what didn't. Disasters do not discriminate, and they do not wait for you to finish processing. They move on to the next thing. You should too.

Fix it. Run the water. Stop treating survival like a tragedy.

Keep your hands useful and your porch honest. -- Aunt Dot
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