You may have heard – an enormous creature has been growing in the forgotten wilds of South Bend: a great and amorphous being, full of cathode rays and thistle. It subsists on hand-me-downs, left-behinds and the newly borrowed and breathes the warm air of well-wishes and enthusiastic help. Oh, it’s lovely, really – untarnished by decades of fluorescent lights and poison ivy. It was born of common talk among friends – meeting one another on the plane of a mutual desire: “You know what would be so awesome…” But it was born of older things as well, dreams that stretch from the minds of the single-parent to the un-parentable teenager, the artist to the concerned citizen, the restless child to the hungry soul: “Wouldn’t this be a better place if….” Its name? That’s the convenience of coincidence: Over those amicable heads was a sign, a placard for a classroom door – LANGUAGE LABORATORY, you know – LangLab. And so time passes and the stuff of dreams and talk actually becomes reality. Not without a lot of labor, of course. Pushing through numerous heavy doors, peering down and testing alternate routes and, of course, finally coming to rest in the passing on of the baton. (Buildings, unlike people, are most certainly creatures capable of reincarnation. The folks who previously existed at 1302 High Street, and who truly made possible LangLab’s current existence there, went by the name Environmental Technologies. A wonder. I think you can still find them – on N. Sheridan and on the internets.) Right now, you’d find LangLab sleeping under the all-night lights of soda shipment. A well-deserved sleep after busy, busy days: replacing pipes, scraping floors, weeding sidewalks, scraping windowsills, cleaning messes – did I mention there was scraping? And kind food. And coffee. And music. And lots of people who all left noticeably dirtier, but also gratitude in their wake. Tomorrow I hope to bring back photographic evidence of this bountiful beast, but really you got to see it to believe it…afternoon is when it’s most active. Oh and bring a friend along – who knows what will come of the conversations you’ll have. Of course, no rush really – I have a feeling it’ll be around for quite some time.
