Writing for Beans

By and large, I do not have many regrets in life.  I try to own up to my choices, to accept my failings and mistakes as my own, and come to terms with the fact that no one can have all things.  That's not to say I like every choice that I have made, far from it.  But those choices lead me down the path to the life I have today, and on the whole I don't have a lot to complain about when it comes to my life.

But right now, I regret not having taken the chance to visit the Duke Gardens.

You see, it's entirely my fault.  I live in the next town over, and have been within easy access of the gardens for seven of the last ten or so years.  I cannot use the excuse that I did not know about them, because I did.  We even looked at a house just outside of the Duke Estate before we found our current home.  But, you see, I took it for granted.  I'd had opportunities to go see, to get a guided tour by people that I know.  And I did not take them.  I lived so close to a marvel, one nearly a century old, the kind of thing that truly exists because in times past people dared to dream beyond themselves.   This past weekend was the last of the tours.  By the time that I realized that my wife and I were not booked through the weekend, like we've been overfull with activities for the past several months, it was too late to get tickets to go through the gardens.

And now they are closed.  Forever.

I would say that I have no one to blame for this, but that's not true.  You see, I do blame someone, or perhaps someones.  The people who are closing down the gardens.  Closing down gardens that are rightfully the cultural heritage here in the GARDEN STATE!  They are closing them down, so that they can redevelop the land for different  gardens.  Their gardens.  Their ideas.  To replace the heritage of what Ms. Duke herself personally chose to bequeath the world, one of her parting gifts.  It's clear that the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation wants to dislodge itself from the heritage of its past, of where that money they get to dole out comes from.   That would be like the Vanderbilt family deciding to get rid of the wonderful historical buildings that their family created in times past.   Yes, the world is different.  Yes, conspicuous consumption on that level is no longer held up as the crowning achievement of American Society. (Or has it really?)  I believe that it is precisely for that reason, that such places would be impossible to design and build in today's world, such unique edifices that only wealth and power of days long gone by could have given birth to are worth preserving for that historical fact alone.  The Gilded Age is a part of our nation's history.  

I do regret that I never made it a priority in my life to go visit the wonder next door.  I shall endeavor to correct that complacent failing in myself that allowed me to falsely believe that such things will always be maintained for posterity's sake alone.  That there will always be time to quite literally stop and smell these particular roses.

I will not, however, allow myself to regret not saying something.  I will add my small voice to those before me at www.savedukegardens.org with whatever small hope that it might not be too late to make a difference.  I suppose I may have to be content to view the gardens, through the wonders of flickr, and those people who had the chance, and the generosity to post up their own photos of the marvel that will soon be dismantled forever.