Crazy Stable

 In honor of All Souls' Day, also known as the Day of the Dead, I'd like to introduce a guy who died right here in the CrazyStable: Mr. Patrick M. Furlong. According to the New York Times, Furlong died at home here suddenly, of heart disease, at age 80, on August 23, 1928; at the time, the CrazyStable was owned by his daughter, Anna B. Murphy, who is the earliest owner of record we've been able to find and probably bought the place when it was new. (Oh, how we wish we knew what it looked like then!) According to his Times obit, he was survived as well by two other daughters, Mary and Jane.

Mr. Furlong has two things in common with your Stablemistress: One, he was fascinated by typography. Early in life he became an "electrotyper," and during the Grover Cleveland administration, he was the foreman of the Government Printing Office in Washington, DC. He was also the originator of the "curved electrotype" (I don't know what that is); at the time of his death here, he'd been retired for three years and was working on a book about electrotyping.

Second, Furlong was apparently a devout Catholic, active in the St. Vincent de Paul and Holy Name Societies, and his funeral was set to take place in our geographic parish of Holy Innocents in Flatbush. I don't know what room he died in, but he seems to have departed peacefully; the CrazyStable has been pristinely unhaunted during our two decades' residence. It feels like an honor to live in a place from which this upright typographer and co-religionist departed this life; may he, and all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace.

Image: Edward Gorey, The Doubtful Guest

We've torn down a lot of walls and never found anything more interesting than a scrunched-up wad of 1940s newspaper.  Which was pretty cool, but not nearly as cool as this long-hidden NYC subway tile, revealed in a massive renovation on the uptown platform of the #1 IRT local at the 59th Street/Columbus Circle subway stop. I was so amazed by it that I snapped a picture as the train doors were closing:

And here it is, delicate as a dessert plate in all its demolition-derby context.

I'm not sure if the intrepid webmaster of Forgotten New York has covered this marvelous little discovery yet, but it sure had me curious. The story, I must admit, was nicely told in today's New York Times--it's the remnant of a sort of Subway Decor Expo, done in 1901, before the subway itself was completed. 

They've got photos, too, but mine are better!

Just in time for Halloween, a quick treat, something so horrible that they locked it up and threw away the key:

The original Hellpit...our Third-Floor Bathroom!!! Aiiiiiieeeeeeeeee!

When we first toured the house, I did a Ghostbusters on the door, whose key old Chang had conveniently "lost," and kicked it open. Oh...my...God.

After many exorcisms, it is now pink and rosy, and home to my aunt's collection of little Indian bronzes and assorted tchotchkes.

It's not perfect; the tiny stall shower leaks (blame Canada, where it was made), and the taping is coming apart in spots.  But so far, no ghoulish hand, Carrie-like, has shot out of the toilet to reclaim its fortress of evil. Of course, there's always tonight....bwahahahaha...

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.  May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.  Amen.

I was gazing down into the cool, drizzly garden this morning from our second-floor kitchen window because Charlie the Kitten had been machine-gunning. You know, the cat-behind-glass-talks-filth-to-prey noise. Every cat has a different twist on this, from a barely audible chattering to a highly vocalized riff of outrage. Charlie's is like Curly of the 3 Stooges doing "nyuk-nyuk-nyuk" in a whisper.

Sure enough, there were house sparrows everywhere out there--you know, those little brown stripey guys (males have black heads) who eat your fries in the McDonald's parking lot. These ubiquitous Eurotrash birds constitute 95% of my backyard bird feeder guests, and occasion within me a longrunning, low-grade spiritual battle: to come to terms with them, to love them even, because the gospels tell us to welcome and feed those who show up, not those on the A-list, even if cheap supermarket seed is up to $5 a bag.

And then this tiny little warbler...I said WARBLER...landed on the windowsill. Right in front of us. Gazed straight inside for a moment like a windowshopper, and flew off into my Bangladeshi neighbor's monster squash vine to forage in its enormous leaves. Charlie did a spit take, and I think I did too.

If you have never dabbled in bird-watching, trust me: This is like a paparazzi on his day off, walking into the supermarket to find Lindsey Lohan snorting coke with Brad Pitt in Aisle 7. Or a CIA agent tripping over Osama coming out of the men's room in the mall. It is so very much too good to be true. Bird-watchers swarm over obscure pockets of park and woods this time of year, peering upward at the migrating flocks until they get a cramp called "Warbler Neck," to spy these elusive featherballs as they flash through the foliage.  And here was a warbler on the windowsill, probably snickering at Charlie and his Kitten Gatling Gun.

And then comes the Great Birder Question: What kind of warbler? The bird guides have pages and pages of them, and lots of them look really alike; my Peterson Field Guide devotes a whole page to "Confusing Fall Warblers." Little arrows point to helpful clues like eye rings, wing bars, head streaks, and buff patches on parts of birds that most of us  never see unless we pick one up dead. (I'd like to ask some of these birds, "Pardon me, would you just turn around and let me see your rump?") Since warblers are fast flitters, I'm awed by the ace birders who can "make" things like eye rings; I'm lucky to come away with a keenly observed detail like, "Um, it was yellow."

Anyway, the markings of our brazen friend this morning were very plain--precisely the colors of a hard-boiled egg yolk, dull olive on top phasing into rich yellow underneath. Even eyeball-to-eyeball, I was too excited to notice an eye ring. At first, book in hand, I figured it was a female common yellowthroat (above), mostly because "common" sounds like something I would see. But Cornell's birding site describes the male yellowthroat as a "skulking masked warbler of wet thickets," and while it did rain and parts of my yard are thickety, we're no swamp--and no one could call this "skulking"! Instead, with a country twang of joy, I believe it to be a Nashville warbler, described by another birdwonk site as a "small, sprightly songbird of second-growth forests" who "can be seen feeding in mixed-species flocks in the fall...they search for food in the foliage, flicking their tails frequently...fairly low in trees or bushes." Bingo! (And no, they do not home their way down to the Grand Ol' Opry wearing spangled boots and fringed vests; they were just named by a guy who first saw them there.)

This isn't the first time that I've (maybe) identified a bird using behavioral profiling along with appearance.  Plumage changes with the season, life phase, region; but we all of us show our true colors in how we get our grub and where we spend our time. 

Photos: Top, Kevin T. Karlson, bottom, Greg Lavaty.

 This was an elegiac weekend, one in which to contemplate the swift passage of life's richest gifts. It was also a time to elbow people in the stomach on my way to a crate of produce. This, friends, was the last weekend for fresh corn at the  Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket. It was also the last real weekend for field-grown tomatoes (and what other kind is worth bothering with?)--there may be a few stragglers ripening half-heartedly under row covers, but today the Beefsteaks and Brandywines and I knew it was goodbye.

Not that the family won't have plenty of heavy tote bags to drag home on our autumn Saturday morning sorties.  We got a fine, somewhat triangular pumpkin (let's see if the kids in the street will spare it from beating or kidnapping this year).       

I've gotten a few mums (not this many);

I am especially proud that one of last year's plants, which I stuck in the ground after it shot its bolt, came back and bloomed this year, right on schedule, without a commercial nursery's worth of forcing.

I hope the grapes will last another week or so ...they are the juicy passion that eases my heartbreak over tomato- and corn-withdrawal. The names alone--"Seneca," "Canadace," "Jupiter"--are like poetry, conjuring the mythical upstate New York of Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale with its mystical "Lake of the Coheeries."

I love trusty earthy things for making soup. Okay, half the time I buy them meaning to make soup and then let them get all slimy and neglected in the crisper, but who can resist the notion of earthy soup-making?

And of course, everywhere there are squash, from tiny "Delicata" to monstrous grey Hubbards. I happen to like winter squash, if I'm feeling energetic enough to whack away at it with a cleaver, scrape out seeds, and hack it into chunks for baking or boiling. But this year, I decided that one of those vaguely menacing pod-shaped ones should be pressed into service as a Hallowe'en decoration more menacing than any Jack-o-lantern. Here, on our table, a tribute to the Invasion:

Now that's what I call a festive fall centerpiece!

"Do you not say, 'There are yet four months, and then comes the harvest'? Behold I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest." John 4:35