Crazy Stable

There is no end of inspiration possible when one is eating a muffin and drinking coffee while overlooking Prospect Park on a winter afternoon. Fueled by sugar and hazelnut-scented caffiene, I awoke from my post-holiday stupor and realized: This is it! This is 2006, the year of our 20th anniversary in the Crazy Stable! Next September will mark two decades since we staggered into this overwhelming monstrosity, and they must and shall be celebrated! My vague, long-held dream has been to finally hold an exorcism--excuse me, a house-blessing--and have a reception for all and sundry, kicked off by playing the Talking Heads' Burning Down the House . (And to have the front hallway, including the broken stained glass and horrible busted-up painted-over parquet floor, done in time to cap this celebration.) So there's a goal for this year...one to prod me in the small of the back like a bayonet when my feet start to drag.  (And bayonet-in-small-of-back is not such a bad thing when you're on the downside of being a wee bit bipolar. At least you're moving and not lying by the side of the road in a ditch moaning! Empowering death-march metaphors! Who says I can't think positive?)

 And as for the year after that...the year in which, like SNL's Sally O'Malley, I turn 50...I may do this. Get a bike and raise my physical fitness level above its current road-kill status, and ride a "century" to raise funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in honor of my father, Richard Q. Becker, who left us too soon because of that miserable condition, in 1985. (Here he is in December 1945, with the 240th MP Battalion in reconstruction Japan, stationed on the island of Honshu; he spent part of the year some 120 km from Hiroshima, suggesting a connection to his eventual fate that no amount of research will ever be able to confirm.)

So there we have it...party in '06, ride in '07, with book arts in between. Time to throw the galoshes out the window.