Crazy Stable

Wow, a real heartbreaker of a story in Today's New York Times: There is, it seems, a movement afoot to restore children's playtime. This is positive but pitiful, because apparently lots of children have forgotten how to play.

"Play" here is defined, rightly, as stuff kids do on their own--not with digital screens, and not with parents, counselors, coaches, or party motivators. It's what we used to call, in my "Wonder Years"-like childhood, "going outside," except when it was raining, when you called it...um, "playing." Or "making stuff up." And for all our blathering purple TV dinosaurs exhorting kids to "use their imaginations," it would seem that we've turned them into nation of Nevilles: cosseted, overstimulated couch potatoes incapable of a frolic that doesn't involve pixels, vigilant authority figures, or crash helmets.

The usual suspects are blamed: paranoia about unsupervised outdoor roaming, digital everything, and the insane focus on peewee sport and academic superachieving. One profiled mom, who has overcome her painful aversion to stuff littering the floor and embraced free play at home, tried to get recess revived (revived!) at her kids' elementary school:

"But school officials were too worried about potential injuries, unruliness and valuable time lost from academic pursuits to sign on to her idea and, she was surprised to find, many parents were similarly reluctant. “They said: ‘I’m not going to sign that. I’m sure there is a good reason why this is good for our kids — our school has good test scores.’ "

An impressive coalition of sane experts is advocating for a return to simple, old-fashioned play, even staging an "Ultimate Block Party" in Central Park to introduce the city's uber-offspring to such exotic pursuits as make-believe, jump rope and I Spy. Good start, but enabling a play-rich childhood for kids isn't rocket science. The secret to my daughter's happy feral childhood (inspired by the parenting of Bestfriend) was, in a sense, a whole lot of nothing. Bestfriend and I both found great value in: no money, no fear of boredom, and a steely willingness to say "no" to some things (and "yes" to others). 

Lack of money. So much cable, so many digital devices, and so few dollars! It's a winning combination. We have never had a video gaming system, because they are really expensive.  Yet I've taught classes of inner-city children and polled them: 100% household penetration for these addictive gizmos, even among working-class and poor kids. Ditto for premium cable, cell phones, and other electronic gadgetry. I don't know where folks find the money for this stuff, but we sure as hell didn't have it. So...we didn't buy the stuff. (Everybody's got one? Not you, kiddo!)

Whenever we could, though, we bought books, art supplies, little plastic wild animals and Beanie Babies instead. My Aunt Valeska, a pioneering Montessori teacher, raised my cousins on something thinner than a shoestring, (they are all the most resourceful people I've ever met), and she could get a bunch of kids going with paper bags and string. Her "less is more" philosophy restrained me from feeling obliged to be Daughter's playmate or recreation director. The best stuff happened without my interference, like these (above)...Daughter called them "Tufties," product of her month-long Googly Eyes Period. She wound up taking custom orders for them from schoolmates. (Here, they are guarded by Jawas.) A packet of googly eyes is about 79 cents, by the way.

No fear of boredom. On summer days when the backyard's charms waned, I would drag daughter to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. And I mean drag: It was "stupid" and "boring" and had nothing but "dumb plants" and there was "nothing to do." Until I set her loose in the BBG's Children's Garden, where some genius put a huge table full of pinecones, and my shy child played spontaneously with another kid for the very first time. Later, we'd hang out under this mighty willow next to the stream, where we developed elaborate leaf-boating strategies. When kids whine that they're "bored," try answering, "Good! That's when you figure out something interesting to do!" And then, having secured the matches and the cutlery, walk away.

No to some things, yes to others. It was "no" to GameBoy, and, sadly, to just "going outside." (This is 21st-century Brooklyn, not Sixties suburbia.) But whenever possible, we said "yes" to takeovers of the kitchen table for miniature zoos; to paint, clay, and glue; to dress-up raids on my closet, within reason; and to garden excavations for worm and pillbug husbandry. Daughter and her BFF were particularly obsessed with Beanies, whose world could take over ours at any moment (as for this rock concert).

Acccording to psychologist Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, “Play is just a natural thing that animals do and humans do, but somehow we’ve driven it out of kids.” We can't drive it back in, even with "ultimate block parties." What we can do is...nothing. "Play is the work of childhood," Aunt Valeska used to say. Is it really so hard to let kids get on with their work?

Images: Edward Gorey, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, available from Edward Gorey House.

Well, we ain't going nowhere for awhile, I guess...because this is our street, Marlborough Road in "Victorian Flatbush," the heart of Brooklyn...48 hours after the snow began in the Great Post-Christmas Blizzard of 2010. Virgin drifts not only clogged our sidestreet (presumably one of the "secondary" or even "tertiary" ones that Mr. Bloomberg has advised to wait patiently for the plows)...they clogged the major cross-street. But more on that in a minute.

Here's another shot looking down to Church Avenue. A plow came by as the first flakes fell on Sunday, but since then...nothing. No ambulance or fire truck could reach us if needed.

Church Avenue itself was a slushy mess barely passable by a conga line of idling trucks. Pedestrians, even ones with canes, gamely clambered over the unplowed mountains to cross the street.

The faux coconuts adorning our local Cambodian temple were a poignant nod to distant tropics.

At the other end of our block, incredibly, we found more unplowed misery. Our stretch of Caton Avenue is definitely "primary"--a heavily trafficked truck corridor between Fort Hamilton Parkway to the west and Linden Boulevard to the east. But today it lay untouched under four-foot drifts. Here, at least, Bloomberg's excuse--abandoned cars blocking the plows--was in evidence, and then some: On our very corner, we found a mini-disaster area!

Yes, that's an incinerated taxicab. We smelled something burning last night, and figured (naturally, this being the Crazy Stable) that our basement was on fire. We never thought "outside" because we never heard sirens--the car must have burned up unimpeded by any emergency personnel. Thank God no one seemed to have been inside. As we looked on, the owner of the white car stood nearby in horror at the collateral damage to her Nissan.

Behind it, a semi, a van and an Access-a-Ride bus were all mired. Both the truck driver and bus driver had been sitting in their vehicles for more than 24 hours, and they were still there at 3 p.m. today. Tuesday. In the middle of Brooklyn...at the end of the world. Here's the video.

You know, I was a kid during the "Lindsay blizzard" in the 60's; we lived up in the hills of Little Neck, where the snowbound thing went on for days. It seemed magical to me as a kid. Now I understand why my parents couldn't get in on the fun. As for Bloomberg, he's right that a lot of numbskulls have ditched their cars in the streets; but it's a Catch-22, since the tow trucks can't reach these guys unless the streets are plowed. Somebody's screwing up big-time, because in almost 25 years here (including 2 snowstorms rated worse than this one), we've never been this abandoned.

UPDATE: The plow came through at 3 a.m. Wednesday, and I think we heard tow trucks hauling off the casualties; now suiting up to face digging out the driveway. Oh, and--as of 1 p.m., the abandoned semi was STILL THERE, blocking all traffic on Caton Avenue without a cop or detour sign in sight; plows came near it under the eye of a Dept. of Sanitation superviser-type fellow in a DOS sedan, then backed away.

Twilight at five, 40-m.p.h. gusts, and, this morning, hail. Thanks to a Facebook friend, I remembered the right song for today.

I awoke today and found
the frost perched on the town
It hovered in a frozen sky
then it gobbled summer down
When the sun turns traitor cold
and all the trees are shivering in a naked row

I get the urge for going
But I never seem to go
I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in

This will be a hard year to let go of--the year when I actually got the urge and went.

Sorry, no year-long odyssey of eating, praying and loving, but one week in Italy this spring, alone, was enough. As Miss Alma Winemuller said, Give me the hour and I'll make a lifetime of it. And I did, in Rome...

...and Turin, where at sunset I pondered my day's encounter with the Shroud, as the swallows cruised over the chimneypots...

 ...and Milan, where I spent a single day and clambered over the roof of the Duomo.

And if that weren't enough, this summer Spouse, Daughter and I spent a dreamlike fortnight in England and Scotland. This is a mountain called Catbells in the Lake District, where we stayed in a farmhouse that was ancient when Beatrix Potter vacationed nearby.

Now belts get tightened and sights get set on a financial goal far more outlandish than transatlantic travel: college. And before that, there are leaves to rake and a winter to face. Thank you, Providence, for 2010, and thank you, Joni, for a song to ease its passing.

I'll ply the fire with kindling now
I'll pull the blankets up to my chin
I'll lock the vagrant winter out and
I'll bolt my wanderings in
I'd like to call back summertime
Have her stay for just another month or so

But she's got the urge for going
So I guess she'll have to go
She gets the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
All her empire's falling down
And winter's closing in.
And I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
And summertime is falling down.
© 1966; Siquomb Publishing Company

We fired up the heating system today. Adam the Master Plumber gave the boiler its annual check-up, and the news could have been better. "How old is that boiler?" he asked.

Well, I sputtered, it's the new boiler. It's, um...about 20 years old.

 Actually, it's 22 years old...and showing its age, with corrosion, rust, and heat loss around the flue. This is a new boiler, as featured today on the Brownstoner.com sub-blog chronicling the lavish renovation of a neighbor's home on nearby Albemarle Road. It looks remarkably like our new, I mean old, Burnham boiler, except ours looks like crap and has fewer safety features and less energy efficiency.

Oh, and of course, ours sits in front of the Crazy Stable Museum of Heating Technology: an ancient "pancake boiler" original to the house, which began as a coal-burning monstrosity, then switched to a diet of oil, and finally was converted to gas. Removing it would have required, not the modest loan we acquired, but a Superfund cleanup grant. I refuse to photograph it. Ever.

But someone else photographed theirs, as plumber porn on a pro site called "Plumbing Zone." You think I'm kidding? Comments on this 116-year-old, which looks just like ours (except ours looks like crap, etc.) include:

"That thing rocks."

"Very cool!"

and, I swear:

"Beautiful ! That old **** gives me a boner."

Gazing into our boiler room, however, aroused in me a different sensation: sheer dread. Somehow I always imagined that boiler would last forever, but nothing lasts forever. We just celebrated (okay, ignored) our 24th anniversary in the Crazy Stable. And as the Child starts edging toward college, and we toward some sort of retirement, it feels as if this house and we have begun to head down the other side of the mountain. We are getting old to strap on our armor and slay, once more, the Balrog in its lair, where it devours tuition and vacation money like popcorn.

Throwing stuff out helps me when I slide into despair, so I rooted around in the "Tool Room" closet and got rid of some junk. There, I spied a handsome old box that had belonged to our late and much-missed Uncle Don. I had thought it was empty.

But it wasn't. Opening it, I was overwhelmed by nostalgia for the oily, mothbally smell of his vast workshed out in the country. Inside lay his Dremel tool, its bits in a film box (Don was a photographer as well as a fix-it genius). And this note, in Don's jaunty post-stroke syntax:

"Here is a gift that will offer you a way to fix things by grinding objects into perfection."

 Thanks, Uncle Don!

No, not you, dear boy, no matter what a few protesters shout today in Scotland...

 ...you, Woody. Unlike our pontiff, who continues to express repentence for his shortcomings in preventing predation upon the young, you show no signs of remorse for a rather malodorous past in the Endangered Young'uns department. Yet your old fan club, the New York Times, serves you up again today, this time as the Weary Senior Statesman of bemused atheism. Don't get me wrong, Wood-man, we all love your funny movies, and their nuanced humanity has helped us brush off the whole daughter-poaching incident so long ago. These days, you say, you're just another wry aging New Yorker, who takes his kids to school and watches football between gigs.

Unfortunately, for a fellow whose cultivated image is that of a worldly intellectual, you sound awfully ignorant when you say things like this about religion: "To me, there's no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They're all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful."

Now, I'm the last one on earth to jump into the currently popular game of "Argue with the Atheist." Even in college, it bored me; my own faith is not the product of philosophical or theological disputation, but the response to a lifelong welter of messy encounters, broken hearts, absurdly generous gifts and laughable coincidences. I couldn't explain it persuasively to Christopher Hitchens, or Woody, or anyone, if I tried. But to equate any of the great faith traditions with a fortune cookie is the sort of shallow glibness I'd expect of, well, a college student--and not one at a very good college, at that. If you are really all that deep and Bergmanesque, Woody, even as a nonbeliever you should know better.

Just for the record, here's a quip from the old man that the New York Times does revile, spoken today on his "controversial" state visit to Scotland:

"As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a reductive vision of the person and his destiny."

Damn, that's one hell of a fortune cookie...and spoken by a man in red shoes.

Photos: Woody Allen, New York Times; Benedict XVI, The Times of London