Crazy Stable

Clearing out my uncle's stuff has been appalling, funny, inspiring, and exhausting...but most often, it has just been heart-aching. Dumpstering the detritus of the dearly beloved, sifting through the remnants and deciding what to keep or toss--it's gotten more routine after several go-rounds with my now-extinct elders, but it's never easy.

Along the way, I've picked up some tips for Getting Rid of the Stuff of the Deceased Without Losing Your Sanity:

-- If possible, don't work alone. Otherwise, you will mope over old letters and photos, fondle knick-knacks remembered from childhood, and contemplate the Brevity and Irony of Life. Bring someone with you, preferably someone a little short on patience with a snarky sense of humor.  And a strong back. And no allergy to dust. If you must work alone, turn on the radio. (An only child, I have had both the luxury and the burden of having no "help"--and no agita--from siblings. I therefore cannot speak to the internecine squabbling over the petty effects of the deceased that I have observed in other, larger families, a crap-wrangling insanity I have dubbed "Deathzilla.")

-- Start with the hardest stuff first--in most cases, the most intensely ordinary and personal items, like a night table or the contents of a medicine chest. Do it fast. For things that require planning as to their disposition, fire them into a box for safekeeping and get them the hell out of there.

-- My personal style is to start in the deepest, most remote pockets (closets, chests) and work my way out; that way, there are no shadowy surprises (why, look, Auntie saved all her old empty lipstick tubes!)*

* (I am not making that up.)

-- Be prepared for the weirdest damn things to knock you for a loop emotionally. I was bemused at my reflexive hurt and anger that several presents I'd bought for the departed were still here--they hadn't liked it enough to take it with them!

-- Especially for Collyer Brothers cases (known in the clean-out trade as "garbage houses"), acknowledge that part of your burden is mourning the fact that your beloved deceased was, effectively, nuts, and a sad prisoner of his or her stuff. They are free now; don't you start. As you pick up each piece, ask yourself three questions: Is it useful? Is it beautiful? And does it make me happy? If it fails on all three--or just on #3--move it on out of your life!

Clearing out so much collected junk (complicated by many buried treasures) has made me intensely conscious of my own struggles with the Crap Demon. (Hell, we have managed to fill every room of this house, and there are a lot of rooms.) I have sworn I won't leave an Augean Stable to my own kid, but it's an ongoing battle not to hoard, dump, and despair. Here are two of the resources I return to again and again when the Stuff Demon threatens to overwhelm the CrazyStable, and me:

Clutterbug.net, run by "professional organizing coach" Christie Best, has a trove of inspiring articles on everything from killing the garage to the connection between clutter and depression. (Unfortunately, one of her best--on clutter and grief--is currently unavailable on-line, but I hope she'll get the link working in the future.)

Clearing Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston was transformative for me--and I don't even buy most of the feng shui stuff (although there's something to it). Feel free to ignore her dippy digressions into colonic cleansing and Asian mysticism, and take away the basic wisdom: If your life choked full of stuff, there is no room for anything new, fresh or good to enter!

And tomorrow, I will tell you my own personal secret for Karmic De-Cluttering...

The following letter was written on September 26, 1940 by my aunt, Beatrice Warde, an expatriate New Yorker living in London through the Blitz. It appears in her collection of wartime letters, Bombed But Unbeaten (1941). The letter pays tribute to the ordinary workers of the city struggling home through the disruptions of bombing barrages, and then, this:

…There are suburbs and outskirts-streets around New York; there are miles of Brooklyn and Jersey City in which the streets have always seemed hideous to Manhattanites. Tell them from me that some day the Little Men may be trudging down those streets with fighters roaring overhead, shrapnel falling, fire-engines clanging by, and the sky all melon-pink; and they’ll be coming home in spite of Hell’s Might, because it is their home, and seeing nothing in the world so beautiful as Number 57 still there with its windows all shiny with unbroken glass and the still unbroken Family waiting under that roof. And when they ask the Little Men, and the little typists, “Why go back to Jackson Heights to-night? Why not sleep in the office shelter?” the answer will abash the questioner: “But I must get back to my family.” If and when that day comes, you’ll find that the people of the Bronx would rather pick their way past craters and crowd into a neighbor’s house when their own goes, rather than leave the Bronx! You’ll know what the word Brooklyn means, and it will never sound funny any more.”

With prayers and gratitude to all those who have sacrificed to protect our families and homes, and with inextinguishable love for the city of New York--BLB

Illustration: Woodcut, Beatrice L. Warde, by Bernard Brussel-Smith, 1950

Quite a weekend around here...your StableMistress turned 50. Curiously, what bothered me was not the age itself, but the inarguable corollary that 20 years ago, I turned 30. The onset of those two prime-cut decades is indelibly easy to remember. In September 1987, in rapid succession:

...after a year of struggling to carve out a habitable oasis in this house, we moved my widowed mother into the downstairs apartment...

...where she seemed to thrive for one "honeymoon" month...

...and then I went freelance to pursue my dream of working as a writer/editor from home...

...and then my mother started to lose her mind, conveniently situated within vocal hailing distance of my home office two flights up.

What followed were two decades (ouch, keep saying it until you toughen up, girl, two decades) of freelancing and caregiving, snarled together in a wildly unpredictable roller-coaster ride, with motherhood added on halfway through. The cast of elders requiring my services as Medical Advocate and Hospital Fool-Killer expanded to include various well-loved aunts, uncles, parents-in-law, and one treasured friend. No longer just a medical writer, I would acquire intimate firsthand knowledge of wound care, mechanical ventilation, the titration of anti-psychotics, post-op care for cardiac surgery, and home morphine infusion therapy. I would learn exactly what Medicare does and doesn't cover (hint: "doesn't" doesn't begin to describe it) and would hire more than a dozen home health aides from as many different countries. Somewhere in the middle of it all, we had a baby, and kept trying to renovate chunks of the house.

The house, you've heard about; the baby is now 12 and magnificent; and the elders have all gone to their rest...but my resume, not surprisingly,  is a little short on worldly achievement. (I keep recalling the midlife jibe of an erstwhile colleague as we car-pooled to our jobs at a publishing firm in New Jersey: "There comes a point when you realize you're never gonna win an Oscar.") But everyone around me has conspired to kick some sense into my sorry birthday butt. The Child and I went swimming yesterday at Brighton Beach, where summer refused to be over despite the lack of lifeguards, and then we all stuffed ourselves with Porterhouse at that temple of beefy ecstasy, Peter Luger's (probably the only place in Williamsburg that is hipster-free). A wise friend of mine who also recently turned 50  reminded me to embrace God's mysterious will, and then danced with me on the sidewalk outside our church; and my garden gave me an astonishing gift of raspberries.

The thing about the raspberry canes is, they are out of control. This spring, after years of offering up a few berries a day, they marched right over the vegetable bed and pumped out two successive flushes of fruit. This weekend, they outdid themselves, knowing that the Child and I cannot resist them. The entire garden is neglected and wild now; cherry tomatoes and some unidentified squash sprouted from the compost and, as usual, I get suckered into sparing them to see what they'll produce.

 But the garden is full of gifts: a lilac-like buddleia given to me as a shoot by one friend, along with the third generation of Thai peppers sprouted from the long-ago dinner-garnish of another friend (the dancing one--he also cooks).  Plus, a feathery white wild clematis of some sort has scrambled up the rosebush--where on earth did it come from?

Every year, the garden does this ...extinguishes much of what I've planted with hope and ambition, and instead offers up its own tangled harvest. Time for acceptance, and possibly a Raspberry Dance.

...anything that grows for us
is wild or thrives by luck, our prized

but accidental garden full
of unruly roses, unlooked-for lilies.
Our blow-ins have become perennials

re-christened every spring: Windbloom,
Randomflower, Golden Come-What-May,
Weather's Will, Common Chance-Blossom.

James Scruton, 'The Accidental Garden' by way of 'A little cup of poetry' blog

I always knew it would be hard, this part. I mentally rehearsed for it over the years, but now it is upon me: cleaning out my Uncle Don's apartment, a stable far crazier than ours, in preparation for selling his co-op.

My uncle and aunt were among the very first "co-operators" to inhabit Morningside Gardens when it opened 50 years ago on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It represented the urbane side of their life plan, the one centered around exotic cultural events, clubs devoted to UFOs and other esoterica, photography, and sundry enthusiasms that filled and energized their childless life. The rustic side would flourish in Brookside, their little old white house in a wooded valley in New Jersey, where they spent weekends gardening, reading, feeding birds, and tooling around the backroads in my aunt's collection of vintage Volkswagens (beetles as well as buses, all painted blue).

That was the first of their Augean stables. When my aunt died almost 11 years ago, leaving the childlike Don alone at age 83, I signed on to facilitate his final years of feisty--okay, completely wacky--independence. The first order of business was clearing out and selling that wonderful country place, buried under years of clutter and falling to ruin in the woods. This turned into an exhausting, amazing journey of discovery, as I unearthed several Tut's tombs' worth of family treasures and secrets; my aunt turned out to have been, not just a compulsive pack-rat, but an obsessive diarist as well. As her strength for manic bouts of organization failed, she took to dumping all the detritus of their lives into undifferentiated piles, squirreled away in a dozen mouldering outbuildings. The clear-out job was a heartbreaking one, since this house was a mystical shrine of my childhood, scene of family summer picnics and Thanksgivings, and a place of deep respite and peace for me even in adulthood. 

Don didn't seem to miss Brookside after we sold it, and kept busy loping about the city on public transportation (assisted by his trusty crutch), taking pictures, attending free concerts, and rewiring lamps with terrifying creativity. He proved as adept at unloading clutter as Louie was at collecting it; he'd often call me to announce cheerily, "I'm eliminating!" I suspect he gave away lots of stuff, valuable antiques as well as junk, to assorted home health aides, repairmen, and strangers. The Morningside apartment thus had three incarnations: the delightfully Bohemian refuge I remember as a kid (with a Buddha statue and a beaded curtain!); the Collier-brother elder-nest crammed with my aunt's books, homeopathic remedies (hundreds of jars' worth), and tchotchkes; and, finally, the widowed Don's increasingly bare and filthy rooms, filled mainly with piles of assorted photos and paper memorabilia that he proudly called his "museum." At the end, there was hardly more than a bed and a few sticks of furniture to hold the teetering piles of stuff.

Oh, and there was some old pre-digital photography equipment and supplies, offloaded to a member of the co-op's camera club. And now even the "museum"  has been cleared out, much of it awaiting a final sorting in bags all over our house. The piles are 95% garbage and 5% priceless family pictures or terrific Don photography, all in manila envelopes with nonsensically wrong labels. An envelope  marked "Italy, 1939" in Don's wavering hand might contain take-out menus from his favorite Indian restaurant down Broadway; a box labeled "best India slides" might turn out to contain an ancient cache of Fig Newtons; and so on. Don's mother, another clutterbug, saved 4-year-old Don's first drawings. So did Don. Half the family was involved with light opera; no one ever threw out a program in 125 years.  I lifted a pile of letters from a grubby folder marked "Interesting People Known by Family"; among the thank-you notes and Christmas cards from long-forgotten acquaintances was a letter to my grandfather from Albert Einstein. (And a Publishers' Clearinghouse pitch from the mid-1980s--you get the idea.)

As Spouse and I wandered through the emptied-out rooms, now awaiting the anonymity of plaster and paint, I left one task for last: taking down the portraits of a young Don and Louie drawn by their family's friend, the legendary eccentric artiste Paul Swan. While no masterpieces, they are reasonable likenesses, and Don taped them up on the wall at the foot of his bed. During the final few days of his life, when we got him home from his purgatorial nursing home, they were the first thing he would see upon awakening, and the last thing he would see before turning out his lights. Removing them felt like lowering the flag before abandoning an embassy or a military base.

Their home for half a century, I thought, now dissolving back into a blank template of empty rooms. They moved here the month I was born, and now as I prepare to turn 50, I erase the last traces of their sojourn. Back in our own CrazyStable, it is impossible not to envision a time when these rooms, too, will stand empty again. But I find myself smiling; they had an awful lot of fun along the way, and by God's grace, so do we.

We still have that Buddha, by the way; he's sitting on our landing now, serene and inscrutable. There are some things you just can't get rid of.

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was...

[For the rest of this astounding poem by Stanley Kunitz, who recently died at age 100, go here. Thanks to Flatbush Gardener for the discovery.]

Photos: Don V. Becker

No child to mind...no client to produce for...a glorious day to myself in waning summer, sprung while the day is young from another horrible brush with jury duty in downtown Brooklyn. Did I sprint from the Supreme Court building back home to wield my heat gun on the remaining unstripped front-door paint? Nooooooo. I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Wow, what a thrill--and one I've never experienced in all my life as a New Yorker and 24 years as a Brooklynite. Driving over the bridge is a cramped, chore-like business, but walking over it--preferably from Brooklyn into  Manhattan--is pure drama, a sky-wrapped promenade, cables swinging up all around you, one set of Gothic arches rising up framed by another. I had left my camera at home to avoid its confiscation by the Mean-Faced Court Officers, but took a few pictures for tourists with their own wee cameras, kneeling way down to get a nice dramatic angle with the American flag in the background. Helicopters crisscrossed overhead, a few pleasure boats cut up and down the East River, and the grimy old yellow Staten Island Ferry chugged along in the distance under the gaze of Miss Liberty. It's a long walk, longer than you think it's going to be, but one to put on your life list, now, if you've never done it. (Note to outlanders: Take the F train to Jay St./Boro Hall stop, then get out and walk to the bridge so you can head back into Manhattan.) And when you come to the bronze bas-relief marker showing the skyline ahead of you, don't hestitate to run your fingers over the Twin Towers as you gaze at where they stood; so many people have done so ahead of you that the two rectangles are polished, like the toe of a saint's statue in a pilgrimage shrine. My friend Walt, with his "curious abrupt questionings" as he leaned into this wind on this crossing, could he ever have questioned as we have, who have polished that little spot of bronze with our remembering fingertips?

As I turned and looked back at the Brooklyn waterfront, poised for its painful transformation in coming years to a forest of skyscrapers, I felt a surge of delight in being a Bridge and Tunnel New Yorker: Somewhere back there, in the green heart of the borough, were my home and my raspberry bushes, but right over there, rising up gleaming, was the urban heart of the world. In need of some antidote to all this ecstasy, I decided to have a look for Mayor Bloomberg in City Hall, which is, appropriately enough, the very first thing that greets you as you ramble off the span in "the city." No luck; thanks to Homeland Security measures, you can only gaze on the steps from afar (although a few news crews are permanently planted around the periphery in case of a Sudden Outbreak of News).

But I enjoyed an iced coffee and some people-watching near the gorgeous City Hall Park fountain, then went uptown to the one museum that would be least intriguing to the absent Child, The Morgan Library. I hadn't seen it since the new fancy architecture was added to knit its robber-baron buildings together; the result is delightful, an airy web of glass and blond wood floating around the shadowy gilt-edged, velvet-lined jewel boxes of Morgan's original follies. I gazed right down on Beethoven's scribbled themes for the Emperor Concerto while listening to the same measure on headphones, tears stinging my eyes in a true Schroeder moment.  I felt sorry for the priceless books, though, especially the children's storybooks; they are prisoners of their exquisite conservatorship, never destined to be grabbed off a shelf, casually flipped open, and then devoured by a delighted rainy-day reader.

I headed home on the subway with the gainfully employed commuters, feet worn out but happy. When I got to my own front porch, the paint was still there on the doorframe.

--Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Photo taken by: Fanny Granger Becker, my grandmother