Crazy Stable

Here's the view from our neighbor's third-floor rear window (thanks, Chris). The sheer scale of this job is incredible. Today they were working around the odd, shed-like dormered aerie that sits atop our kitchen. I have absolutely no idea how the guys get those huge sheets of plywood up there.

All day, they rained blows down upon the house; it was like living inside a kettle drum. The crew are mad hard workers. They don't bother to use ropes or harnesses, and mostly spurn filter masks even when raising clouds of ancient dust, despite my entreaties. Several are of Mexican Indian descent, sporting long black braids, floppy hats or bandannas and wild tattoos (and, in one case, a Ramones T-shirt). I sat trying to eat a sandwich while what looked like Aztec ninjas rappelled up and down past the kitchen windows. The new plywood appears to be measured with precision; the original old wood cladding on the little tower looks as if it had been fitted into place by a child making a hasty school project out of tongue depressors.

 There's just a bit of debris in the driveway right now.

Here comes my nineteenth nervous breakdown.

The roofers arrived at 8 a.m. on Columbus Day to begin tossing blue tarps over my plants. This is it: the job we should have done right decades ago, when we slapped a new layer over our old roof. 

This is the tear-off.

By nine, two trucks had arrived, one with enough plywood to build a small city, another with shingles and rolls of "Elastoflex" membrane base sheets.

  We have also got "Leak Barrier" ice and water armor and a massive crate of "Grip-Rite" colloidal framing nails (which are apparently manufactured in the United Arab Emirates).

Spouse and I realized that we never consulted about any "green" materials or LEED-certified techniques in this job. (Joke.) However, I did pause to wonder what forest our plywood hailed from, and to what landfill  our torn-off roof would be hauled in the cavernous dumpster out front. This is the fog of war, on a bare-bones budget; such concerns must be left to our betters.

Soon, the house shook under vigorous scrapings and hammer-blows. The guys are out there right now, pushing off the four old roof layers with special shovel-like implements, then hammering back all the popped nails in the skeleton underneath. You can see the back of our third-floor ceiling, like a chocolate layer cake of lathe with plaster icing oozing out. Inside, you can glimpse daylight through some cracks in the ceiling. Next, they will lay fresh plywood down. 

Spouse is taking it in optimistic good humor; I feel sort of ill. Whenever the house undergoes radical surgery, I tend to wander restlessly, overeat, and rock rhythmically while standing in one place. I've been doing a lot of all three this morning. So far, none of the guys has fallen clean through the ceiling like the crew did 23 years ago. I'll keep you posted.

Astute readers will have noticed that Buster shows up here, in all his Zen beauty and inner stillness, to steady me when I am coping with fear. And so:

It's a blissfully peaceful October day here at the CrazyStable, but we have, with the stroke of a pen, set a whirlwind into motion. This is the calm before the storm.

We have vetted a roofer (Angie's List, Better Business Bureau, local recommendations all checked out)...and we have given him a huge check with which to buy enough shingles to cover the vastness of our ancient leaky roof. We decided on slate-blue colored shingles...because when you're spending this much money on a job no one but a passing helicopter pilot will see, you kid yourself that such choices matter terribly.

What matters terribly is that the roofer can figure out how to channel the torrents that have beaten holes into a section of roof we call The Valley of Death. Because, despite the fact that our roof is a rotting century-old heap, it's still remarkably functional everywhere else, at least to the naked eye. We are essentially spending the price of a luxury European vacation for three (including gourmet meals) to plug one leak. Granted, it's a leak that has destroyed a $2,000 plastering job in our rental unit and made it rain in our laundry room...but it just feels so...wrong.

Functionally, it's the right thing to do, but it still feels wrong. Cosmetically, we couldn't be getting less bang for the buck, unless you count a beauty shot for Google Earth. After all this madness, the exterior will still be clad in its tattered cedar shingles, the porch will still be peeling, and the budget won't stretch to cover everything left to do, inside and outside, after 20 years of deferred renovation. But if the roof is leaking, you can't move forward with anything else. (There must be an O. Henry story in there somewhere.)

The whirwind--dumpsters, men with ropes, flying nails and shingles--begins the week after next; before then, there's a massive amount of prep to be done, inside and outside, to fend off collateral damage from dust, tromping feet, and vibrations. They are going to demolish our roof right down to the studs. I should be zooming about, swathing things in drop cloths, moving potted plants to safe locations, laying in supplies of clean water and first-aid supplies and hazmat suits for the kitties. Instead, I want to curl in a ball and whimper.

Just think, though. Soon I'll be able to do laundry even when it rains! That's worth the price of a Grand Tour...isn't it?

Buster Keaton images: The Damfinos.

I don't know why I was so shocked to learn that Irving Kristol had died; he was 89, after all, and when I took his seminar at NYU in 1978, he was already the urbane "godfather of neoconservatism" on that Esquire cover, a moniker that would recur in his obituaries.

I don't remember what the seminar was called; it was basically, "Irving Explains It All For You." It was heady stuff for a wonky girl from Queens who had gotten her first subscription to Bill Buckley's National Review at 16. And, as that magazine cover attests, it was a heady time to be a young conservative; the Reagan ascendancy wasn't even a glow on the horizon yet, so we got to feel fresh and transgressive amid the stagnating sludge of the Counterculture.

And God, were my NYU years sludgy...an academic nadir for that institution, and a bitter contrast to the electrifying, cafeteria-table-pounding intellectual foment that formed Kristol into a Trotskyist back in the 1930s at CUNY. His subsequent ideological journey to the Right made this Brooklyn boy a fascinating contrast to the patrician Buckley, and the seminar was (aside from the nitty-gritty vocational training I found in NYU's undergraduate Journalism department) a rare highlight of my confused and lonely college career.

I remember little of what Irving explained so lucidly (although I seem to recall grasping some central concept of Hegel's for a few precious moments). What mattered was Irving--good-naturedly world-weary, pacing up and down and deconstructing the modern world between appreciative drags on an ever-present cigarette. One day, I scrambled off the creaky old Main Building elevator, late for class, to find him smoking in the hallway while the other dozen students slumped, fidgeting, around our conference table. "Ah," he said with no apparent irritation, "you're here. We can begin." That moment meant more to me than my diploma.

After graduation, (and soon after his Esquire cover hit the newsstands), Kristol floored me by offering me a coveted position as an indentured editorial servant at his legendary journal, The Public Interest. (For a glimpse of what I missed, go here.) I wavered, but signed on instead with a crappy travel magazine; I was young, and the prospect of junkets beat out the promise of being groomed for a think tank. That, and I was scared to death. I declined the offer with a note containing this poem, because Kristol had such a deadpan and I fancied trying to crack him up:

Irving, dear Irving

I find you unnerving,

I fear I'll incite

Your contempt.

Your intellect causes

My wonder unswerving,

For my own puny mind

Is unkempt!

He wrote a gracious reply to my "absolutely lovely" note, and acknowledged that my choice of globe-hopping was understandable. (As it turned out, the best junket I got was a weekend in Honolulu.) I'd go on to do some writing for the Right, but not for The Public Interest; I knew when I was out of my depth.

And depth is what I mourn this week. Having lost Buckley and now Kristol, I feel like a conservative version of Norma Desmond, wistful not for "faces, then" but for minds. I don't recognize what passes for "the Right" anymore; vulgarians like Limbaugh and demagogues like O'Reilly have expanded like a gas into the void they left behind. Kristol, Buckley and the like were jousters, not jesters; they relished take-no-prisoners debate, but could graciously engage an adversary afterward. (One summer, I did typing for National Review and was stunned to read Buckley's warm, convivial correspondence, including invitations to ski in Gstaad, with some of his bitterest ideological foes.)

And, despite the fossilized sound of "paleo"-conservative or the trendy sound of "neo," these guys were capable of ambivalence and nuance, of actually holding more than one idea in play at once. Kristol famously mustered only "two cheers" for conservatism; he espoused the civic virtues that flowed from religion but hinted at a personal agnosticism. Having forged (and fought) some of the foundational ideas of the twentieth century--ideas that could and did matter deeply--the Godfather Generation has been eclipsed by a bunch of frat boys. The ideas still matter, but it's harder than ever to hear them under the ranting and infantile name-calling.

Irving, Happy New Year; you are missed.

Eight years ago today, the molten sun of September shone on my little girl as she skipped off to her second day of first grade in Brooklyn.  An hour later, everything changed—forever, it seemed.

This morning, in wind and rain, my daughter took a city bus on an hour's trip to her new high school. Flushed with anticipation, she scarcely remembered that it was 9/11, but then, she hardly remembers the day itself or its ghastly aftermath. She recalls feeding an Oreo to a pigeon atop the towers a month before they fell. She faintly recalls bringing sandwiches to a firehouse in Williamsburg for the rescuers, their faces caked with grime and sweat as they lay exhausted on the sidewalk.  She remembers that I looked serious and sad when I picked her up from school.

But when we look out our "park-viewing window" tonight at the Towers of Light, we will see them rise over a city that feels as full of promise and peril as it ever was—no more, no less. No loss in my life, not even that of my parents, has struck me with the surreal resilience of the grieving process as has this, our collective recovery. And yet, the other day, mulling the not-so-distant prospect of retirement planning, I realized that That Day had indeed left one permanent mark on my character:

I find it hard to imagine living anywhere else but New York City.

I was pleased to see Daughter take a copy of this prayer out of her backpack today, distributed by the religion teacher at her new Catholic high school. As a child, I loved its fierce romance; now, as a mother, I just pray it straight.

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.

Image: Madonna with the serpent, Caravaggio, via ChristusRex.org.