Crazy Stable

Today is the feast day of a saint who has a strong claim to be the patroness of the CrazyStable--the decidedly unbalanced St. Therese of Lisieux.

I think she looks a little like Reese Witherspoon in this shot. But the youth and touch of mischief are deceiving. By age 24, this sweet-faced French Carmelite nun would be dead of TB; in a few short decades, she would be canonized; and by century's end, she would be declared a "Doctor" of the Catholic Church--an honorific (not unlike "Doctor Who") reserved for the most towering mystical Time Lords of Catholic teaching.

All this from a small body of devotional writing that, frankly, can read today like a kind of demented Catholic chick-lit. Going back to her famous autobiography, I was struck afresh by the fact that she qualifies, to modern sensibilities, as a full-blown psychiatric train wreck. Motherless at age 4, adored by her doomed-to-dementia daddy, the petted baby in a hothouse family of fervently devout sisters who flocked one by one behind the wall of a cloistered convent...no wonder the poor kid was having fever visions of a smiling Mary statue at an age when today's little girls are playing Barbies. Like the middle-class daddy's girl she was, Therese "wanted it all"--but what she wanted was stuff like suffering, martyrdom, and mystical union with God. Oh, and the convent--she very much wanted to become a cloistered nun, even pouncing on the Pope during a tourist audience to beg for early admission. (The Pope was equivocal, but eventually she got her way.)

Not surprisingly, generations of devout Catholic girls have taken Therese to heart; her name is my Confirmation name, and my aunt's. (My mother chose "Celine," the name of her younger sister.) Rereading her "Story of a Soul" at midlife, as the mother of a daughter poised on the brink of adolescence, I step into a different river than the one that shaped my own spirituality in my youth. The medical writer in me can't resist tallying up the number of diagnoses that jump out from the DSM-IV. Borderline personality...bipolar...obsessive-compulsive...and that's just the stuff she told us about. What's even more harrowing is that this crazy masochistic adolescent let herself be swallowed up by a crazy sadistic milieu--a convent that wouldn't spring you to attend your own father's funeral, a Mother Superior who denied the girl morphine as she coughed up her lungs, for the good of her soul. Therese wrote passionately of how she welcomed trials and suffering; I just want to go back in there and beat up those old nuns who tormented her for pearls of wisdom in her last hours.

Yet Therese's strangest and most radical statements, shorn of the saccharine sentiment piled onto them over the years, retain a mystical power that is more Doctor Who than Drama Queen, more zen than zany. The girl who begged God to toss her around like a ball, to consume her like a fire, to pluck her up to Heaven in an elevator--what does she have to say to us today? Is it so impossible to believe that a headstrong, lonely and sexually terrified bourgeois teenager could evolve in a few short years into an ascended spiritual master when she got all the agony she asked for, and more?

Legions of Therese devotees find it easy to believe, partly because Therese seems (as she promised in life) downright profligate with miracles. In another girly touch, she promised to shower "blessings like rose petals" on the earth after her death; Therese-ophiles love comparing their "rose stories." (Her iconography always shows her with an armload of roses, although your basic plaster St. Therese never looks anything like her--why not, when we have photos of her? Huh?)

I've got my rose stories; they range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Just like this house and its patroness.

No, I do not believe that I am a great saint! I believe myself to be a very small saint, but I think that the Good Lord was pleased to put in me things which created goodness within me and in others. --St. Therese of Lisieux

Maybe it's the recent arrival of a landmine, er, landmark birthday, but I find myself longing for a makeover: a total face- and body-lift, full cosmetic overhaul, and some kind of snug and snazzy white couture to keep the whole refurbished architectural miracle upright and fabulous.

No, not her, stupid, this!

Now that's what I call plastic surgery. This neighbor's house here in "Victorian Flatbush" is a dead ringer for the CrazyStable, and the new owners are doing  exactly what we need. (I don't recall what theirs looked like before--probably better than ours.) I pulled over to a screeching halt when I noticed that they have taken the side of the architectural angels and gone for a total reshingling. And it looks like damn nice work, too; look at how they're trimming the Tyvek around this nifty old window. They've also redone the porch, the soffits (with nice slick joinery) and the rear deck...drool, drool.

So, a big CrazyStable shout-out to these old-house lovers for just saying No to entombing their gem in "easy-care" vinyl or boxy aluminum--the fates of countless old sagging wooden homes like ours. Hey, not that I blame folks who choose siding; one understands that decision the first time one gets a quote for replacing all the cedar shakes and scraping, priming, and repainting all the wood trim on a three-story, 3,000-square-foot pile with 60-odd windows. (Price of historically appropriate total facelift: $1 gazillion. Aesthetic integrity: priceless.) But it's a sad compromise, one that we have refused to make. Having an exterior renovation budget of zero, we have chosen the high ground: deferred maintenance, prayer, and sweeping up stuff as it peels and falls off. Meanwhile, I got the contractor's phone number from the dream job above, so I'm ready for that day when our ship comes in. The fellows will have their work cut out for them, as you can see from this close-up of our south facade. "Weathered"...not the runway look we old girls are hoping for.

With thanks to our neighbors for permission to post the photos above...and hopes they will treat us in the future to a guest posting about the nitty-gritty of this fantasty makeover, painful anesthesia and all.

As you may recall, all the floors and bannisters in the CrazyStable were painted with 3 coats of enamel in a ghastly ox-blood red (still are). But at least they're not...this:

which is the color inherited by the proud owners of a Bedford-Stuyvesant townhouse, who are newly minted renovation bloggers at the Brownstoner site. Makes our lucky red Chinese floors look like bleedin' Martha Stewart, mate.

Good luck, kids. Hell-oise Hint of the Day: Don't waste your money on that "green" stripper that's supposedly less toxic. Go straight for the lethal stuff with fumes that melt your brain...and buy steel-wool by the case.

That is, if you're really going to strip it. I have to admit, it's kind of growing on me.

My dad said that in the Army, your bed had to be made so tightly that the sarge could bounce a quarter off it. We sometimes fail to meet these military criteria in the CrazyStable. Okay, True Confessions: Some days, the master bedroom never gets made up.

Who could disturb this poignant tableau of Conjoined Cats merely to straighten the bedlinens?

At the slightest sound, young Master Charlie elongates himself, revealing his downy belly-seam and fully posable limbs.

 Uncle Cocobop, for whom sleep is a far more serious pursuit, is not amused. How inconsiderate to force a fellow to open both eyes at once!

                                                                                    Sorry, big guy!  

Uh, did we mention that the 17-pound longhair is conducting a Spa Day inches away on the Master's pillow? (This has absolutely nothing to do with the Master's asthma.)

With a face like that, Lexi is used to getting away with stuff.

OFFICIAL NOTICE FROM BLOG MANAGEMENT: This concludes the very last cat-blogging on this alleged home-renovation blog, at least until somebody says "awww" and asks for more. Which, incredibly, some of you have, so you have only yourselves to blame.

Now, the bonus in my tutorial, Clearing out the Augean CrazyStables of Beloved Dead Family Members Without Triggering a Major Depressive Episode. [Cut to Monty Python and the Holy Grail:  "Bring out your dead!"] We've reviewed the need for companionship, speed, ruthlessness, and a sense of the absurd. In addition, I've found a way to snatch a small measure of joy (fun, even) from the jaws of death: Let's call it The Redemptive Token.

The RT is a thing that belonged to your dearly departed, rescued from the junk heap and repurposed with a little extra love.  It doesn't have to be big or valuable (it is a token, after all); but we're not talking about the routine delivery of usable clothes or furniture to the Salvation Army, either. The giveaway, however  tiny,  should be intensely personal--a Zen-like transference of karma through stuff, preferably hands-on.  Mine have included these:

* Daddy's last dollars. When I got my dad's sad little bag of personal effects back from the hospital (Jesus, why do they put them in a flimsy plastic garbage bag?), I found that his wallet had about $20 in it. Two rumpled tens--the last currency he ever handled, and never got a chance to spend. Boo hoo. Unable somehow to simply put them towards the next grocery haul, and bummed out by the pathos of jamming them into the church poor box, I stuck them in a special purse nook and asked my Dad to tell me what to do with them. Months later, I got on a city bus and saw a scrawny and exhausted guy with the furred-white lips of advanced thrush--this was 1986, and people were dying of AIDS in the streets. My dad had had an oral candida infection, too, from chemo; it was how I recognized it.  It really sucked. Thrush guy got $20 without having to ask, and that poor messed-up mouth broke into a smile. Thanks, Dad!

* Silk scarf salvation. My aunt had an outbuilding on her country place for every category of stuff she hoarded--magazines, china and glassware, papers--and every one of them was an extravaganza of mice, mold, mildew, dust, and assorted decomposers I couldn't even identify. In the "old clothes" outbuilding, I found her ancient fur coat; it fell apart in my hands. Almost every garment was too far gone for any second life beyond the landfill. But there was a cache of colorful silk scarves; they stank of mildew, but hadn't shattered or been chewed on. Goddamit, something out of here is going to give somebody pleasure again...I washed them in Woolite until the mildew was exorcised, ironed them, and sent one to each of the old-lady friends in her address book--some of whom hadn't even heard she'd died. They loved them, and I had what the social workers call a "corrective experience" for the decomposing fur coat (augh).

* Tool tiempo. This one was really fun: finding a home for Uncle Don's old tools. We didn't need them; the Becker Boys had every tool in triplicate, and my dad's collection is enough to last the CrazyStable for a lifetime. (Who knew there were so many kinds of pliers?) Up at his brother's country place--where, unbeknowst to us, the fur was already rotting in a shed--my Dad would visit lovingly with his extra tools, which he stored in Don's barn. We found a dusty, rusty nest of tools in Don's city apartment. I threw out the many broken ones. But the usable ones were indestructible--some so old that they were still forged in America. Who needed or wanted those?

Well, where do you find guys who are both handy and needy? In Brooklyn, you find them on streetcorners along Fort Hamilton Parkway, waiting for contractors to pick them up for a day's labor at a construction site. Most are Mexican, some are Polish, all are hungry for work. Last Thursday morning, I circled around...which corner? And there it was: an awning proclaiming "Brenda's 99-cent Discount Store," with a dozen or so wary guys loitering out front. I parked and put down a cardboard box full of tools, and called out  what I hoped was "Free stuff here!" in Spanish (but was probably something like "Liberate your tablecloths!")

In seconds, a hive of guys gathered around, picking up items and examining them. They spotted the coolest bits--like a three-way clamp--right away, and tried out the various files and wrenches. It was Daddy and Don in the barn all over again--Tool Guy Heaven--and a tiny bit of reparation for the way we treat these indispensible de-facto Americans whose strong backs and willing hands our country can't function without.

And then (lest you think any of this was my idea), as I pulled out, I remembered something about my aunt and uncle: They simply loved Mexico. Back in the Sixties, my aunt traveled there and sponsored a young man desperate to come to the States; he became a successful businessman and pilot and they stayed lifelong friends, the handsome young Mexican dropping in every so often on the aging lady from Alabama to give her a ride in his private plane. I think she enjoyed this Redemptive Token as much as I did.