Brooklyn, as Mark Helprin has observed, is infinite; so, apparently, is Coney Island, if you explore beyond the hotly contested nexus of the rides and boardwalk.  A few days ago, I discovered another strange outland when I drove Daughter to a track meet in Kaiser Park, described by the Parks Department as "the perfect combination of beach fun and beauty combined with the functionality of a landlocked park." On this afternoon, with storm clouds again lowering, it was more like a strange dreamscape, one that began with a trip down Neptune Avenue, a stretch of car-repair joints so desolate that it brought Willets Point to mind.

The park has a gorgeous track thanks to an ongoing multi-million dollar restoration, but on this day, it was nearly deserted except for a handful of basketball players. From this shrugged shoulder of Coney Island, one actually looks out north to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Above, some guys had pitched a little tent on the shore, where they were relaxing. One had arrived by tricycle and another brought his dog, all sharing a peaceful, post-apocalyptic vibe.

The inlet between Coney and the mainland is studded with a few rotting docks and barges, and the beach is an inaccessible swath of boulders studded with strange cast-offs. A guy in dreadlocks fished off the concrete pier; blues and stripers are caught there, he said, although not, that day, by him. Further along the shoreline, abandoned shopping carts and garbage cans stood like sculptures.

Nature emerged at the fringes, too. I don't know if this grass is an ornamental or an invasive weed, but its pattern is fantastic. On the rocks, the milkweed bent over in the wind, ready to burst open and welcome the monarch butterflies.

Daughter had gamely signed up for track, and we did the "thunderstorm-coming" sprint back to the car to return to our own planet of Flatbush through the orbit of Neptune.

And then there's another metric: Is it a good Totoro house?

For those unfamiliar with the classic film My Neighbor Totoro by Japanese animation genius Hayao Miyazaki, it's the story of two little girls who move into a rambling, mysterious country house, populated by scrabbling little sootballs and shy, delightful creatures called totoros. These chubby, protective sprites can only be seen by children, and the director presents the ramshackle home matter-of-factly as a dream come true for curious kids. The girls' house reminds me, not just of the CrazyStable, but of the house I grew up in, where I explored the weedy wild places and my imagination ran wild; daughter loves the Totoro house, and ours, with the same unreasoning passion.

The movie's magical setting was recreated for a recent World's Fair in Japan, and if I'd had the money I'd have gone just for that. Maybe someday we will visit the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, a shrine to the animator's best-loved creations. Until then, I'll take Miyazaki's mission statement for it (with the word "house" substituted for "museum") for our own:

This is the Kind of House I Want to Make!

A house that is interesting and relaxes the soul

A house where much can be discovered

A house based on a clear and consistent philosophy

A house where those seeking enjoyment can enjoy, those seeking to ponder can ponder, and those seeking to feel can feel

A house that makes you feel more enriched when you leave than when you entered!

To make such a house, the building must be...

Put together as if it were a film

Not arrogant, magnificent, flamboyant, or suffocating

Quality space where people can feel at home, especially when it's not crowded

A building that has a warm feel and touch

A building where the breeze and sunlight can freely flow through

The house must be run in such a way so that...

Small children are treated as if they were grown-ups

The handicapped are accommodated as much as possible

The staff can be confident and proud of their work

Visitors are not controlled with predetermined courses and fixed directions

The house's relation to the park is...

Not just about caring for the plants and surrounding greenery but also planning for how things can improve ten years into the future

This is what I expect the house to be, and therefore I will find a way to do it

This is the kind of house I don't want to make!

A pretentious house

An arrogant house

A house that treats its contents as if they were more important than people

Adapted from Hiyao Miyazaki, (c) Museo d'Arte Ghibli

No, not with Ty and the gang, alas. This looked like a shoestring outfit with just two obscure renovation shows in production, and I suspect they wanted us for an upcoming entry on the DIY Network, touchingly titled "I Hate Your House." Here, verbatim (God knows I don't write copy like this) is the description of the show on their website:

"We all know of that house. The one where you walk into a your friend's home and you are scared to sit on the couch or use the bathroom because you do not know which amenities are functional. They are nice people who have just let their house go a little too far and your too nice to tell them ---until now. The DIY Network tackles the problem homes with a little bit of attitude in the new show, I Hate Your House. Based around an intervention, our brother-sister duo, Jonathan and Nicole, will give homeowners the wake-up call that is been past due with the support of friends and family. Not only will they point out the sights that horrify friends, but they will show the homeowner how to make it look fantastic, teach them skills so they can attack the other problems in their home, and have a great time doing it. Using new and innovated products, the home will transform before the homeowner's eyes into a beautiful space that friends and family can appreciate."

"Wake-up call"? What, were they going to flush out our "horrified" friends to ambush us about those third-floor kitty-litter pans, or the part of the porch ceiling that's hanging down? And who are Jonathan and Nicole—stylish, sneering siblings from Hell who will turn the CrazyStable into a sleek McMansion? I called Boy Wonder, where a nice young lady didn't specify which show we were unwittingly auditioning for, but did allow that we would be on camera and would get "a couple of rooms renovated for free." Certain that this was our worst chance for fame since a film crew begged us to vacate on Thanksgiving Day for a Metallica music video, I said a cordial but decisive "no." (The blogging possibilities were tempting, however.)

Funny as it was, the whole affair did play perfectly into the renovator's paranoia of anyone with more old house than they can fix at any one time. We're far from sipping lemonade on the gingerbread porch while people admire our woodwork on the house tour, folks. So what do the friends and neighbors say about us when, year after year, we still can't afford to paint the place? Are we really bad enough to need an intervention from the ghastly Jonathan and Nicole?

Curiously, my paranoia morphed quickly into a fierce protectiveness. A flashback montage played in my head of all the Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas mornings, summer afternoons of 20 years; of the dear friend who made this her last home, and said, with labored breath, "Oh, it's a wonderful house." Of the many kids who have remarked in awe upon its coolness. The Caribbean neighbors who assured us, "It takes time." I thought of the life journeys of my mother and daughter and how they briefly overlapped here at one's end and the other's beginning. Thought, too, about the century of Brooklyn history that has flowed around this house, which is now piped for both gaslight and broadband. 

And that's why I'm giving a big "googie" (as Harpo called that face, above) to "I Hate Your House" and all it stands for. We'll be making strawberry shortcake inside this old house this weekend, Jonathan and Nicole, and you won't be joining us. However, my fellow renovator and hospitality guru Mr. Fawlty sends his regards...with a "little bit of attitude."

You can actually see these guys in person at the American Museum of Natural History's new show, Extreme Mammals, the only live exhibit among a crowd of wacky warm-blooded critters (biggest, smallest, zaniest, most unlikely appendages, etc.) Humans are extreme mammals, too, according to the curators--not because we perform absurd stunts for the Guinness Book of World Records, or get strange body piercings, or become Scientologists, but because we have large brains, sparse hair, and walk upright on two legs without hopping, as kangaroos do. (Well, okay, I've known small-brained, hirsute humans who hopped, but that was back at NYU in the Seventies.)

Want more glider? We got you covered. This little dude is much more appealing than our resident extreme CrazyStable mammal, Bagel the Squirrel, although like Bagel, he makes a metallic "crabbing" sound when irritated. Spouse reports that the museum's gliders, behind the scenes, are gregarious, clever, mischievous, and keen for the opposite sex.

My one encounter with gliders, in a scruffy Nassau County pet store that specialized in "exotics," was less sanguine. I was toying with the idea of buying some for Daughter and smuggling them back to Brooklyn (where extreme mammals are illegal unless they've got a band in Williamsburg). A slackerish cage-cleaner reached in for one, explaining, "I call 'em da Creachuhs from Hell, but dis one don't usually bite--OW!" This was followed by the death-ray chorus of four angry gliders crabbing in unison. Frankly, I couldn't blame them. (After that, we auditioned a hedgehog, which snapped into a psychotic ball when the same hireling lifted it out of its cage with a putty knife and an oven mitt. At this point, BestFriend, collapsing in mirth, pointed out that white mice were pretty darn cute and cost only a few bucks apiece--although, as I explained, We Already Had Those.)

For more--trust me, way more--than you ever wanted to know about sugar gliders, check out SugarGlider.com and their "Gliderpedia." Best are the site's home videos and message boards. Most posts are of the "my adorable sugee-babies simply love their new snackie-poos!" variety (along with tributes to sugee-babies that crossed the "rainbow bridge"), but one is basically a tough guy stuck with his ex-girlfriend's two gliders saying reluctantly to the tiny terrors, "I love you, man." The bachelor reports, "They chill with me when I'm up too late (like now) and usually beg for noodles or yogurt." Aww! Date movie script alert!

He didn't go all soft, though; he named them Chuck Norris and Bruce Willis.

All photos except Hugh mashup: American Museum of Natural History

I would have done a far better job endearing myself to the servants. (When I first fell in love with the story in high school, I swear, I had no idea that we would buy an actual ruin, with no servants, or that my mother would fulfill the role of Mrs. Danvers.)

Well, anyway, we got a taste of the real thing on a day trip to Long Island's Gold Coast last Saturday, where we poked around the Sands Point Preserve. This is Hempstead House, a Gothic pile built (rather ludicrously) in 1912 for Howard Gould, son of "robber baron" Jay Gould. After a breezy picnic, we rambled the grounds making comparisons to both Manderley and the CrazyStable.

Hempstead House has admittedly better views; a private cove on the Sound beats even our sliver of Prospect Park.

Near the cove, they've got a fine ruin (prompting me to plead to Daughter in a Cornish accent, "Please, Miss, don't send me to the asylum!" Hey, you either know the movie or you don't.) But we've got the garage, artificially aged to a decrepit cottage by the scenery crew of NBC's Law & Order!

The house has cooler lighting fixtures than ours. Bigger, too. But the Gould scion's marriage collapsed a few short years after building this pile for his "lucky" wife, whereas Spouse and I are still together, sporadically renovating.

Garage-wise, even with our NBC connection, Gould has us beat: He stabled his horses in "Castlegould," built in 1902. What, did the guy ride out in shining armor, with pennants flying?

Finally, we found something that the magnates and we had in common: rotting wood! In particular, door paneling lifting off in birch-like sheets. This is exactly what our (interior-grade) back door is doing.

It's nice to know that a crappy composite door from a cheap contractor can have something in common with Old World craftsmanship bought by millionaires, if enough neglect is applied to either one. Makes you want to go out and grab some wood putty and spar varnish doesn't it?

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited…”

Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca (c) 1938

I was brave, reader. Fighting against the packrattism that runs in my blood like the curse of the vampire, I disgorged the following items into big blue Ikea tote bags:

--the Alcott & Andrews "power suit" from the 80s that made me look like Melanie Griffith in "Working Girl." Daughter tried on the jacket, was truly baffled by the veal-chop-sized shoulder pads.

--The set of mini speakers that my Dad planned to rig up in our newlywed apartment so I could listen to a record playing in the living room while I cooked in the kitchen. Let's just say they never got rigged, and never would.

--More Paternal Relics: clever Daddy's finely cobbled-together full-spectrum plant lights, which he customized for the plant shelves he made in, oh, 1981 or so. Clever Daughter (me) has felt guilty for 21 years that I disassembled that planter, moved the stuff here, and never rebuilt it in my plant room. Permission to ditch the rig was granted when I realized that the cords were so old, the plugs weren't even polarized. The fluourescent "Gro-Lites" went with them; let someone else worry about how to recycle them!

--The handsome and unreadable National Geographic books on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that I salvaged from my Aunt Rosemary's apartment in Florida. Let someone else feel guilty about never having read them!

--Every sweater, every goddam one, that makes me look fat and is old enough to be pilled. Fat + Pilled + GONE.

Where did they go? To a fabulous event held today, the Flatbush FreeMeet! Sponsored by activist blogger Sustainable Flatbush (great work, Anne!) and the Freecycle New York City folks, it's so simple: You bring stuff, or take stuff, and everything's free. No persnickety thrift-store donation rules here: The only things they don't want are items "heavily covered in pet hair" (allergies), or "drugs, weapons, or adult items." (None were in evidence.)

It was incredible fun to watch folks pounce on the items we'd brought. That white satin dress (above), which never was quite right for any occasion, intrigued several shoppers. A sweet little girl prized Daughter's toy cat carrier, and scooped up several children's books. Ladies in saris powered through sweaters. (The event took place at Newkirk and Coney Island Avenues, the halal-meat capital of Brooklyn, and was a model of Flatbush's delirious diversity.)

And the guys flocked to a table that was vaguely electronic-related. (Wow, typewriters!) Daddy's speakers aroused a lot of interest.

And I found something cool: a tiny measuring gauge, no bigger than a refrigerator magnet, for use in sewing. The lady next to me was delighted to see me snap it up. "It belonged to my mother," she said, "who was a seamstress...but I don't sew." The system works!

(First, we had to smell the wisteria, with its faint note of woodsmoke, and then I had to smell each color of lilac at least twice, but otherwise we were very efficient.)

Every year, the Member Preview is more of a scrum, it seems. This year, the lingering threat of drizzle did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of hordes of plant-crazed warriors. Daughter protested against being press-ganged into acting as my field artillery support, but Spouse gamely stepped in. And this year, I had a plan: shopping for my newly imagined border of acid-loving shrubs, to resolve at last the puzzle of what to do along the back fence. I didn't see a rhododendron I liked (I want one like the ones in Manderley in Rebecca, or like the ones I saw in Ireland, head-high fantasies with blooms the size of cheerleaders' pom-poms). But I got a little-leafed holly, a "bog rosemary," a pale pink azalea, and a purplish heath. Now all that stands between me and the border of my dreams is a shovel, a bag of MirAcid fertilizer, and a bottle of ibuprofen.

Speaking of rosemary, I got a real one, a tiny one, to replace the poor victim sacrificed to my sloth who froze to death over the winter when I left it outside in its pot. This variety claims to be hardy to zero degrees, which is probably nonsense, but...hope over experience.

And speaking of scrums, hope to see many of my favorite fellow Brooklyn bloggers, and to meet some new buddies, at the 2009 Brooklyn Blogfest tomorrow night. For details on this convivial gathering in its exciting new venue, the Galapagos Arts Space (which is way too cool for the likes of me, so I can't wait to infest it), go here.

Want this instead. Would cover it with piles of mystery crap in, oh, one-and-a-half weeks.

Help. Do not want Daughter someday to have to sign up with this.

Note to self: Buy more contractor's bags. Watch out when I get a fresh new box of contractor's bags. Landfill, here it comes!

Images: Top: Bettman/Corbis; bottom, ApartmentTherapy.com

In honor of Poem in Your Pocket Day, and the very first blooming of my pale, pale lilac, here is "Lilacs" by Amy Lowell. Actually, it's the first two of four stanzas; Amy takes lilacs as seriously as I do.

Lilacs,

False blue,

White,

Purple,

Color of lilac,

Your great puffs of flowers

Are everywhere in this my New England.

Among your heart-shaped leaves

Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing

Their little weak soft songs;

In the crooks of your branches

The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs

Peer restlessly through the light and shadow

Of all Springs.

Lilacs in dooryards

Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;

Lilacs watching a deserted house

Settling sideways into the grass of an old road;

Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom

Above a cellar dug into a hill.

You are everywhere.

You were everywhere.

You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon,

And ran along the road beside the boy going to school.

You stood by the pasture-bars to give the cows good milking,

You persuaded the housewife that her dishpan was of silver.

And her husband an image of pure gold.

You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms

Through the wide doors of Custom Houses—

You, and sandal-wood, and tea,

Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks

When a ship was in from China.

You called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men,

May is a month for flitting.”

Until they writhed on their high stools

And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers.

Paradoxical New England clerks,

Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the “Song of Solomon” at night,

So many verses before bed-time,

Because it was the Bible.

The dead fed you

Amid the slant stones of graveyards.

Pale ghosts who planted you

Came in the nighttime

And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems.

You are of the green sea,

And of the stone hills which reach a long distance.

You are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles,

You are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home.

You cover the blind sides of greenhouses

And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass

To your friends, the grapes, inside.

(To read the rest, and you won't be sorry you did, go here.)

Amy Lowell, “Lilacs” from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Copyright © 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright © renewed 1983 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Brinton P. Roberts, and G. D'Andelot, Esquire

On the south side of the house, I've been doing just that--observing the slow dance of decay--on this beautiful blue jay since last fall. His feathers are still vivid, even as his little skull has started to emerge. I suppose I should inter him with respect somewhere (but not on top of one of the cats' graves).

Lest you think that all is rot and corruption around the CrazyStable, here are some proud-Mama shots of the front garden. Spirea (I think)...

vinca...and my brave pot of pansies, which Bagel dug up five times before I finally foiled him by laying pieces of slate across the soil. Hey, guy, you wanna see what happens if you mess with my flower pots? Check out your buddy up the alley.

Now I am terrified at the Earth,

it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.

Walt Whitman