Crazy Stable

Tree-trimming just in time for Christmas—Crazy-Stable-style. The guys from Urban Arborists came over to give the Ent a health check-up and a light pruning. This costs many hundreds of dollars, and we skipped maintenance for a few years. But during the darkest, wildest hours of Hurricane Irene, I bargained with God:

"O Lord, who has the power to topple this gigantic silver maple and squash our house like a bug, I hereby promise that if we are spared, I will get it pruned immediately, and honor Christmas in my heart all the days of my life, and sponsor a Central American orphan, and fast strenuously until I lose 20 pounds." I figure God only expects you to do the first thing on the list, but that you really ought to do that one.

The guys found no evidence of "maple decline" (yes, that's a condition), the dreaded Asian long-horned beetle or any other problems. Rootbeard the Ent is doing just fine, it seems. He got lots of minor twiggy growth hacked off, and a soaking with fertilizer on his mighty roots. I paced nervously in a third-floor window as the fellow nimbly let himself down on the tackle.

Here is a litany for the monstre sacré that grows almost out from under our porch:

Devourer of water pipes... (have mercy on us)

Sorcerer who turns topsoil into Brillo...(have...etc.)

Beneficent screen of ugly view across street...

Provider of blessed shade...

Endless fountain of compostable leaves...

Superhighway for squirrels and raccoons...

Condominium for starlings...

Mighty future coffee table...have mercy on us!

Job done, the branches got fed into a noisy shredder. This weekend, we'll trim a tree more conventionally—inside, with lights and ornaments.

Meanwhile, the Christmas cactus, having been knocked out of its pot by a cat and left to languish for weeks, has still received its inexplicable signal to burst forth in bloom, like the pink candle on an Advent wreath. I repotted it in guilt for having managed to survive my neglect. Sort of like the Ent.

By fits and starts, I'm getting there—winnowing, curating, and conserving family treasures, all washed ashore from several households into the shipwreck cove of our third floor. Today, I found myself communing with three generations of Girls in White Dresses.

Above: the christening gown worn by my Aunt Rosemary in 1912, my mother in 1913, and me in 1957. I don't know who made the gown, but that's undoubtedly Irish lace. (Note the embroidered shamrocks.) The delicate fabric has shattered in spots. My mother packed it away with the wee satin booties and lace cap that I (and my own daughter and goddaughter) wore for baptism.

The Wedding Gown! My grandmother sewed it, from ivory Skinner satin; my mother wore it, in 1949, when she finally married my dad after an epic 15-year courtship; and I wore it on the same date (October 15), 34 years later, with virtually every seam let out to the max (I was taller and broader-shouldered than Mommy). This meant my mom had to rip out her mother's stitches, a wrenching task. She also altered the neckline at my request; a French seamstress from Saks' bridal salon consulted on turning demure high-necked buttons to decolletage. Mommy's Juliet headpiece is in perfect shape, whereas my flowered one is yellowed and ratty.

And finally, the First Communion Dress, a dotted-swiss beauty made for me by my mother in 1964. (She refused to buy "a frilly lampshade.")

I was a rather spindly second-grader, and the dress was too small for my own, more robust child; at her First Communion in 2003, she wore my Confirmation dress (a mod white number with bell sleeves), sewn by my mom in 1970.

All the white dresses got shaken out, wrapped in acid-free tissue, and laid into an archival box ordered just for the purpose from these folks. My mother would have been a wonderful designer or textile conservator; she would have enjoyed the garment trade far more than her stressful decades of office work, but she never saw the chance for a different life. Later, her creative outlet was making beautiful things for me. I don't have her patience or talent, but we did work together on my daughter's christening gown; I did the easy parts and she sewed the maddening pin-tucked bodice.

That gown is in another box, with my daughter's name on it. Paring down her baby clothes is a task for another day. The hidden agenda in this third-floor project is to curate only delight for my own daughter, not melancholy. My mom hung onto a few other little outfits that my grandmother, who died six months after my birth, sewed for little me. Under a shell-pink corduroy baby coat was a note in my mother's hand, "Last thing Mommy sewed." I almost discarded it as too damn poignant, but couldn't do it.

I wrapped the box in a cotton sack (yes, that is preferable to airtight plastic) and slid it under the guest-room bed. It was dinnertime; my daughter blew in downstairs, a hungry teenager immersed in the present and fixed on the future. With all the white dresses safely stowed, I turned off the light.

Not one but two book proposals lurk on my computer, waiting to be tweaked and submitted to an (as-yet-to-be-identified) agent. Both books will rock, I believe. But today, leafing through The New York Review of Books, I had a ghastly crisis of confidence--prompted, not by their high-end reviews, but by those numbingly awful vanity press ads. You've seen them: cheesy two-page spreads from Vantage or XLibris "publicizing" their "authors" with blurbs so execrable they call to mind H.L. Mencken's description of the prose of Warren G. Harding:

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.

These books, created at their unloved authors' expense, hew to a few recurring themes: Blowhard autobiographies. Manuals for saving the world. Religious conversion stories. Heartwarming tales of a hero cat/dog/ferret who saved the author or his child from the abyss. Romans à clef by angry survivors of modern-day conflicts. Bizarre historical novels, usually with a sci-fi or fantasy twist. It's an ocean of quirky, cranky bilge. Amusing myself, I am suddenly horror-struck: One of my ideas is explicitly Christian, the other is a historical novel.

Oh God! What if my book proposals sound like one of these pitiful vanity blurbs?

Now I can't be stopped; I torment myself with visions of a desperate future self, rejected countless times, convinced that digital really has made self-publishing a whole different world now, and blowing the Child's college savings. Intellectuals leafing through The New York Review of Books will pause, between lapping up a post-mortem appreciation of Christopher Hitchens and sighing over a roundup of tomes on post-Obama America, to guffaw at my opus; I will rot in obscurity, with the cranks, the ferret-biographers, the semi-literate zealots, all the poor sods who had a dollar and a dream.

I had to snap out of it, before I opened folders and trashed the beginnings of one hell of a good novel and an intriguing spiritual memoir. Put anything in the XLibris template, I realized, and it sounds like insane crap. To give this theory a whirl, here are three potential "best-sellers" from XLibris, where you can "write your own success."

The tragically unique story of Stingo and Yetta's big pink house. Who is the mysterious Sophie and what is her secret? How will she make her Choice? Deep in the chasms of history lie the answers, where love and danger are common-place and haunt the lovers of today. You will never forget the psychologicle tension of this unforgettable masterpiece.

 A manifesto for eaters! Find the truth behind the ugly rumors and learn how to eat real food, mostly plants, not too much, for health forever! You will find the way to absorb nutrients for a more enlightened era of health and human enlightenment with this scientific revelation of nutritionism gone wild.

Can young Irishman Steven go to encounter for about the one-millionth time the reality of experience, and can he forge within his soul the uncreated consciousness of his race? This very brilliant fictional story will supply the answer, or at least asks the questions.

ORDER NOW!

Top: Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp

Howard Carter and team break open the tomb of TuthankhamenThings have been too deep for blogging lately.

On September 2, we "celebrated" the twenty-fifth anniversary of closing on the Crazy Stable. Things are not, alas, much advanced beyond the last big anniversary.  The next landmark looms on October 1: A quarter-century of living under this roof. (Well, okay, under the roof we had torn off and replaced with this roof.)

Overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, I chose my time-honored head-clearer: Throwing stuff out. And what stuff! I have lately cracked open several Rubbermaid storage bins that lay virtually untouched since my mother moved in circa 1987. The trigger was getting a big Ikea cabinet in the pantry--a job we'd postponed for, um, 25 years.

Brooklyn Museum, Luce Center for American ArtSomehow, the interior dimensions of this cabinet had expanded in my mind. Like a Tardis, it was vastly bigger on the inside. Like the Luce Center at the Brooklyn Museum, it would hold and display the accumulated petty-bourgeois treasures of two lifetimes, mine and my mother's. The cut glass, the silver, the ceramics that would be unearthed from their attic exile and displayed!

Instead, the longed-for cabinet filled up instantly with a few big pieces and a lot of pseudo-Tupperware. (I spent weeks rearranging the canned goods, however.) This left tons of stuff with no home except our already tchotchke-crammed surfaces. Frankly, much of the stuff was Mommy's taste, not mine, and bags of it will be on sale this Saturday for the World's Craziest Porch Sale here. Mom's been gone a decade now--it's time.

But other stuff...ah, ouch, agony of decision. Help me out here. What do I do with:

* The glass strawberry we bought on one of our rainy-day gift shop excursions in the Poconos when I was little?

* Two antique crucifixes, both broken beyond repair? (Note to crucifix-makers: The arms are clearly a weak spot.)

* An assortment of silver serving pieces, when I hate to polish silver--and hear my mom's harsh judgment about my polishing neglect every time I take them out of storage?

* Several pickle dishes, when we never really serve pickles? (They do, however, work for Mallomars.)

* Half-a-dozen demitasse cups, when we don't drink espresso?

Except for the Mallomar dish and the strawberry (which brings back the smell of deerskin moccasins and cedar trinket boxes), all of the above may be available on Saturday at shockingly low prices. But I'm especially conflicted about this Belleek sugar-creamer set. 

Not only do we have 3 other sugar-creamer sets...this one brings back Irish Mother Belleek-o-phobia. That's a syndrome triggered by seeing the feather-light, translucent, pricey porcelain, marked by trembling, flushing, and barking loudly, "WATCH OUT for the Belleek! Do you know how delicate that is? That belonged to your grandmother, don't you be the one to break it!" I love this set, really; but if I screech at my family about breaking Belleek, it will have turned into the Horcrux and I into Voldemom.

Maybe I will put it back into its bubble-wrap and just take it out for St. Paddy's Day, with soda bread and Irish tea. Maybe I will toss it, Zorba-like, in a declaration of independence from maternal/material things. Maybe you can pick it up on Saturday...carefully, dammit!

This was the scene post-Irene: one Ent, still standing at its post a foot from our front porch, and leaves and branchlets littering the front yard. That's it. We were spared the wrath of nature. No power loss, roof damage, or flooded basement. This week, life seems suddenly very sweet and precious and good, in the most arbitrary of ways.

When you live in a century-old, freestanding wooden box with a five-story maple growing out from under it, you take Apocalyptic Hurricane Warnings (AHWs) seriously. Heck, our next-door neighbor nailed up plywood over his front windows. We opted for a strategy of cowering and watching lots of television. About 3 a.m. Sunday morning, when the AHWs ramped up from "tornado warning" to "tornado watch," I went a little nuts. Because (a) we have had a tornado touch down a block away, and (b) my fear of tornadoes is morbid, even by scared-of-scary-things standards. And thus did I do what I formerly sneered at: I packed a "Go Kit."

The "Go Kit" has been a long-standing joke in the Crazy Stable. Years ago, Spouse obtained one somewhere; it contains, among other ludicrous articles, a cheap rain poncho and a Band-Aid. Whereas I have always felt that the only Go Kit worth having would contain firearms and a lot of cash. Now, as the winds swooshed outside, I seriously contemplated what to take to the basement if we might emerge to a pile of boards and wet rubble. And what about rounding up the pets? After a direct hit; what do we do with two carriers stuffed full of four idiot cats? Ask FEMA for kitty litter?

I flung a few days' worth of clothes into a bag along with my camera, a flashlight, and some of the one zillion D batteries I'd scored on Saturday. I added my bedroom slippers, picturing myself in a shelter and comforted by their presence under my cot. Grabbed my few good rings; couldn't find my one good necklace. (Burglars, don't even bother.) Jammed in a zip-lock bag of important documents, including our passports so we could move to a less eventful country if need be. (How about Luxembourg? Nothing seems to happen there.) 

But what about the other stuff I'd always thought I'd grab in the proverbial fire? Our wedding album? My box of family recipes? A few precious tchotchkes? Curiously, none seemed very important. I did tuck in my dad's old Latin/English Catholic missal, and his New Testament still lightly pencil-marked from his convert studies. And, as when I take a plane, I put his "miraculous medal" around my neck. Even from the next world, my dad makes me feel protected.

I insisted that Spouse and I take turns sleeping and keeping a vigil for tornado warnings. (This after an argument about whether Flatbush had secret tornado sirens.) One reporter, Tony Aiello, passed within blocks of our house in a live-TV van, which was strangely reassuring. As Irene's less-than-apocalyptic bluster became apparent, we both dozed off, awakening to a mere lashing rain storm followed by whipping winds and clearing skies. The Ent's massive trunk swayed like a ballerina's supple spine; the roots that torment my gardening efforts held fast. We were protected. No cat carriers, basement huddle, bottled water or D batteries needed.

Now, with the videos of heartbroken folks who lost everything, comes the mingled relief and unease. What if we hadn't gotten off lightly; would God be to blame? Or my dad, for not stepping up and interceding? How much could I lose, and still remain friends with the invisible force that gives and guides my life? The wedding album, the house, even the cats, okay, but what of those I love? These questions are even scarier than the $25,000 hurricane deductible that I discovered in our State Farm policy.

Now it's time to rake up branchlets. And to wonder again why faith isn't as easy as it is in Doctor Who. Click the clip to see how it ought to work.