Crazy Stable

Sneaky Spouse: On the day before Mother's Day, he scored me one of these gorgeous little square ginkgo votive glass thingies at the Bklyn Designs fair in DUMBO. It was just about the one thing amongst their sometimes too-quirky and too-designey offerings that I would have picked out for myself (that and the goody from Jacques Torres chocolate). Happy lucky mom and Stablemistress (who loves ginkgo leaves as one of nature's great designs, as does designer Aviva Stanoff). We lit a candle inside the votive on our kitchen table and it
glowed and glimmered.

 I am glad Spouse was not taken instead by these designey lamps from Site-Specific Design. They reminded me of Bestfriend's  warning: "There's a thin line between an outfit and a get-up." This is the lamp version of that maxim. Besides, it reminds me too much of some things that have emerged in the basement during heat waves and sewer clean-outs. Curiously, these lamps are part of a collection dubbed "Childhood Memories" by designer Rui Docouto.  Good luck with the therapy, fella!

It's spring, really spring, when it's time for my annual Woodstock experience: the members' preview of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden plant sale. Every year, perennial-crazed garden wonks mob the gates before opening, with the well-equipped already toting conveyances and the hapless, like me, struggling to score a red wagon for our purchases. This year was as bad as ever, although the crowds waiting to pour into the Cherry Esplanade were orderly.

Why wouldn't we be, when we had to wait amid the Japanese peonies? This display gets more fantastical every spring; the tree peonies in a rainbow of shocking colors are starting to look more like anime flowers than real ones. 

This year, I was oddly Zen about my purchases; I just wandered around one area and picked some stuff I liked, instead of fretting over plans for "winter interest," "succession of bloom," and other garden-magazine goals that I never achieve anyway. I craved a new variety of non-invasive bamboo, but it was $57 a pot; for that price, it should invade Iraq. I got cheaper bamboo, in the hopes it would invade the "back 40," where nothing grows anyway. Got my tomato and eggplant babies, although I have nowhere to plant them (their bed was annexed by raspberry bushes). In a triumph of hope over experience, I scored two delphiniums. And after years of yearning, I fell off the sustainable-rose wagon and bought another hybrid tea: Fragrant Cloud (oh, it is).

But really, it was all about slogging through the checkout and getting to the lilacs. The Child patiently accompanied me on this religious pilgrimage; I think she may be a convert.  First, we decide which one to sniff first. Then we sniff lots more. We remark on the subtle variations in perfume. We nuzzle the clusters, remark on how edible they seem, like buttercream frosting. We take our glasses off to look at the individual flowerets. And finally, Child looks out for a guard while I lie on the grass underneath a bush and look up at the sky, completely filled with lilacs.  Reassured of the existence of God, we go home, dragging our wagon full of hope.

 But not before greedily sniffing the apple blossoms in the last rays of sun.

The century-long saga of the CrazyStable Electrical Service continued yesterday...but did it conclude?

To recap, here is a quick history of our troubled relationship with Mr. Edison's excellent utility:

1910 or so: CrazyStable is built.  It is piped for both gas and electrical lighting, in case this whole newfangled electricity business doesn't catch on. Inside, the wiring is insulated with cloth and laid alongside the gas pipes to the lighting fixtures; between the house and the street main, it is insulated in lead ("lead sack") and buried in a pipe.

1986: Gullible and delusional young couple buy ruins of CrazyStable. Sensing danger from 70-year-old original wiring, they hire affordable "electricians" to rewire it with updated service. However, "electricians" never have job approved by Con Ed, claiming this is not necessary. 

1990s: Chronically overwhelmed homeowners learn that "electricians"  hooked up new service to original "service" from street main. Otherwise, job was not badly done ( if you don't count swags of exposed BX cable hanging in basement, above, along with butchery of plaster walls in every room). That's why they didn't need an inspection. Lights occasionally flicker, but go for years without event.

February, 2008: Explosion rocks CrazyStable; fire shoots out of manhole cover in front of house. We lose power, are given temporary "jumper service" through a scary wire swagged across the street from a lamp-post, and are told we must abate the chunks of asbestos pipe sleeve near the service box before the gentlemen of Consolidated Edison will enter our basement to "pull through" new service.

April, 2008: After interviewing several raving lunatics, we find a competent asbestos abatement contractor who removes the pipesleeves, HEPA-vac's the floor, and paints over the offending areas with white goo.  We fax air-testing reports back and forth, and Con Ed inspects the job and declares it to be good. Supervisor Guy informs us that we will get,  on Con Ed's tab, "all new service" from the street; hopefully this will not require opening street to replace damaged pipe. Manhole-sucking truck arrives to noisily suck out manholes for the second time.

Yesterday:  Crew arrives. They finish the job with surprising speed and deliver the good news that the pipe was fine, they just hooked up our inside service to the existing wire at both ends. What, I say, to the "lead sack"? Weren't we supposed to get "all new service"? The supervisor guys had implied that the ancient service between house and street was part of the problem.

ALERT: UNCHARACTERISTIC FEMINIST RANT AHEAD

Ah. Now comes the interesting part of my cordial dealings with the friendly Con Ed crew: the part where the woman uses complex sentence structure, logic, and curiosity. I explain perkily that I am not challenging their nice job, no no, but I am interested in the inconsistency between what Supervisor Guy said and what they report just having done.  The Con Ed guys' eyes glaze over and shift uneasily. Somebody makes a cell phone call, whose content is never disclosed. I ask again; I am told the lead sack "could last another hundred years."

And then I realize: The fellows are talking to someone else. 

You see, this is me, in the basement with the Con Ed guys, talking "lead sack."

And this is who the Con Ed guys think they're talking to; why is she down here, and why does she care?  

Will the ancient wires keep our lights on and our computer and fridge running for another hundred years? Stay tuned. 

Debutante alert! Ladies and gentleman, allow me to present my very first lilac. So many years before I managed to coax one into bloom; puts me in mind of Thomas Jefferson saying that although he was old in years, he was "but a very young gardener." Of course, it smells exquisite. It is one of 3 twigs that I bought at least 5 years ago at the Philadelphia Flower Show and planted at the side of the porch in an act of sheer delusion. I wanted a screen of tall lilac bushes there, so I simply decided that they would thrive in an arid, high-traffic patch next to our driveway in an impenetrable steely mat of Ent roots. To their credit, the brave trio refused to die, and even grew a few inches each year, but they wisely drew the line at blooming in their merciless parking lot. Last year, I transplanted just one—using Walt Whitman's guidance,* I put it in the closest thing I have to a "door-yard"—and here are the results. I can almost here it saying, "Whew! I thought you'd never figure that out!"

Otherwise, this spring is the Year of the Guilt Garden. I have done nothing, and I mean nothing; I've been totally preoccupied with this, so there are unraked autumn leaves out there, and only one poor rosebush got pruned. To my mingled relief and outrage, everything is growing anyway, and to my absurd horror, the rosebushes have all gone and set buds without any pruning at all. Don't you see? This raises the unthinkable, transgressive possibility that pruning is almost a complete waste of time! They look a little leggy and shaggy, especially the rugosa, but the overall result ain't that bad. Needless to say, no fertilizer or Epsom salts were applied, either. How can they be doing so well without me?

Even the potted guys are thriving on neglect. These alpine strawberries, (which I grew from seed, ahem), are making flowers, raising the tantalizing possibility of a coming micro-snack of actual alpine strawberries. (Something tells me Bagel and his minions will beat me to the harvest.)

And my little rescued Maine pine tree has put out new candles. Note, rescued, not "poached" or "stolen" or any of the other cruelly inaccurate and defamatory characterizations by my family for this act of botanical mercy. This little fellow was sprouting at the very foot of his parent, a towering pine on the coastlands near Acadia National Park, and had no hope of competing as he grew. Look how grateful he is. Someday, when we demolish the useless garage, he will be the towering centerpiece of my imaginary pine grove.

Today would be a perfect day to start belatedly shoveling and pinching and transplanting in anticipation of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden plant sale next week. Instead, I plan to ride my bicycle.

*Walt, the lilacs, please:

WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring…

Passing, I leave thee, lilac with heart-shaped leaves;

I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring,

I cease from my song for thee;

From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,

O comrade lustrous, with silver face in the night.

—Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd,  from Leaves of Grass 

                                          
Shooting day! The first crew members from Law & Order arrived by 6:30 a.m.; soon they had rigged up their generator and started flinging cables and lights around. 

The Child left for school toting her science-fair project past this array.

The scene, for an episode to be broadcast in mid-May, consisted of the two intrepid detectives entering our downstairs hallway and following Carl the Skanky Suspect upstairs to our kitchen, while grilling him on a murder case. Here are the stars in the stairwell: Jeremy Sisto and Anthony Anderson. Both are apparently new to the series (Anthony's first episode hasn't even aired yet), and new to me; Jeremy was on Six Feet Under, I'm told, and Anthony has mostly done comedy flicks. (He was immediately recognized with delight by the school guards across the street as he left the house.) If either of them wondered why our stairs and bannisters are red, they didn't say so. (Answer: The CrazyStable was a Chinese boarding house, and red is a lucky color in China.)

This gives some idea of just how crowded the landing was outside the kitchen. The living room was also piled with gear. 

The director and his assistants holed up in the cat-clutter of the Child's room to watch the monitors and chat between takes. "Jerry Orbach would've hated this scene, he hated doing stairs," one assistant recalled with obvious affection. "He used to do the 'over/under' number, betting how many takes they'd have to do. Over his number, he won, and under it, the house won." The show's crew, many back at our house for the second time, does seem like an extended family, one in which everybody drinks a lot of bottled water and coffee and knows just what to do with rolls of tape and tripods.

The smell of frying bacon filled the house; the Carl character was supposed to be cooking it while talking to the NYPD (although the sound man made them turn off the heat while shooting to reduce bacon noise). They went through numerous batches. I got hungry but couldn't get to my fridge (under a bank of lights, left); so the location guy let me pick snacks from the set catering buffet!  I ate half a Law & Order danish and a bag of authentic Law & Order Doritos. This made me insanely happy.

Everybody was gone by 1 p.m., although the set dressing guys will return tomorrow to replace the furniture and haul off their props. "We have 3 pounds of bacon still in your fridge," a crew lady said as she washed down the counter. "Would you like to keep it?"

Guess what we had for dinner? NBC BLTs!