Crazy Stable

Poem in Your Pocket Day is on Friday, April 27. Another homebody with a view of Prospect Park (above) brought to mind the following possibility from Miss Emily Dickinson, a fellow soul in terms of what we might call nest-ambivalence.

THE ROBIN is the one

That interrupts the morn

With hurried, few, express reports

When March is scarcely on.

The robin is the one

That overflows the noon

With her cherubic quantity,

An April but begun.

The robin is the one

That speechless from her nest

Submits that home and certainty

And sanctity are best.

                                                --Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems

CrazyStable Bonus Link: If tender tales of flawed houses and souls (and bodies) under renovation strike a chord for you, here is a wonderful story in the Washington Post Magazine's Spring home and design issue, about a young couple who took out a mortgage on the farmhouse of their dreams and got way more than they bargained for. Author Kelly McMasters gets a CrazyStable shout-out for combining themes of mice, mortality, and mortage in a scary, funny, wise tale.

If there is anything in the world better than living steps from Prospect Park, I can't imagine what it would be.  Yesterday was just right, not the hallucinatory false-summer of Monday's 86-degree madness--but warm enough to release the fragrance of the falling magnolia blossoms, something like triple-milled lemon-scented French soap. Here is a portal to the Hill Kingdom north of the Lake, a rise visible from our topmost windows.

Yesterday was some sort of Redwing Blackbird Festival; I have never heard or seen so many of them, their exuberant metallic squee-graaaaack bouncing in chorus from tree to reed thicket and back again. They seem to know how gorgeous they are. Here's one I captured; I'm no Rob J yet, but I'm proud that the red wing is visible!

Apparently, there are two pairs of swans in the lake this year. One pair was chilling on the shore, grooming and loafing around. They are only ballerina-ethereal from afar; up close, they're palookas. This snoozing guy let me stand a foot from its breast and barely shot me a glimpse as I backed off. (If my neck were that thick, I would feel safe sleeping in the park, too.)  Wouldn't it be great to be able to use your own back as a pillow?

After this past warm weekend, the park was awash in still-uncollected litter. One pile of leavings delighted me, however: this midden of rather pricey-looking sweaters, abandoned by their wearers as they arose in the Rapture of Spring. Time for bare skin against the breeze!

Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. He stooped down but could see nothing but the wrappings. So he went away full of amazement at what had occurred.   -- Luke 24:12

This morning I was called to, and sprung from, jury duty at the Supreme Court in Brooklyn. It was brief but awful, even in the new “kinder, gentler” era of jury duty; we were packed into a fluourescent-lit room and forced to watch a well-crafted video about the jury system narrated by Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer. (Diane’s hair looked fabulous, however.) I realized, sitting there without breakfast and spiralling into a hypoglycemic torpor, how deeply cynical I am about the jury process. And not just because of O.J.; years ago, Spouse gave his all in a sequestered jury that was similarly torpedoed by “jury nullification” (one guy who swore he could believe testimony from cops, then blatantly announced in the jury room that he wouldn’t believe the cop’s testimony, letting a probable killer walk free.)

As I frisked in joyous reprieve in the Greenmarket outside the court building, I was struck by the powerful irony that yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling had just jammed one shaky brick back into my sagging belief in the justice system. The highest court in the land says no to skull-collapsing! Those who claim that the ban on what the New York Times calls, with sneering delicacy, a “controversial procedure” (that would be, um, skull collapsing and brain extraction), is being used cynically by the pro-lifers as a “wedge” towards a total ban may be right. But those who claim that the “procedure” is being used cynically to reframe the debate in terms of “fetal rights, not women’s rights” are definitely right. I confess: We just love making New York Times reporters pick out the words on their keyboards: collapse the skull and extract the brain. After all those years of sniffing about the “products of conception,” it’s music to a fetus’s ears. Skull, skull, skull! Brain, brain, brain! Yeah, we got those! Call us “blobs” now, will ya? That’s some crunchy blob, folks!

I should know, being an ex-fetus myself—one who survived my obstetrician’s considerate suggestion that I be flushed out of my mother’s womb before she even got the results of her pregnancy test (and before my skull was even remotely calcified). Thanks, doc. This Upper East Side ob/gyn (whom my mother proudly related was “an obstetrician to the Rockefellers”) knew she was a devout Roman Catholic; at almost 44, she was also a high-risk “elderly primagravida” (first pregnancy, in the tenderly gynocentric language of obstetrics). He offered her “hormones to bring her period on.” (Pace Justice Ginsberg, it would seem that “this way of thinking, that women are flighty creatures who must be protected by men,” is not unique to anti-abortion males.) “But I knew damn well what he was offering,” said my mother, “and I knew damn well I was pregnant.”

And that, dear readers, is how your StableMistress survived the early winter of 1957 in utero and went on to become the jury-duty-shirking creature who blogs before you now. Don’t mistake my mother for some saintly Irish Catholic heroine; she was appalled by the prospect of pregnancy, and particularly by the risk of a child with Down’s Syndrome. (If I’d slipped a chromosome, it could’ve gotten ugly.) But she said no to Dr. Rockefeller-Family-Guy, and had, as Doonesbury put it, “a woman! A baby woman!”

My own daughter, by the way, says that this picture proves I had a big head even as a child. Amazing what an intact skull can turn into, given a few more trimesters.

For a link to a well-researched and convincingly argued article from Salon in favor of legalizing intact dilation and extraction, go here. Or, to savor some journalistic sang-froid, you can just enjoy this highlight of the reporter’s description of the Controversial Procedure: “The fetus was perfectly limp, its tiny feet and hands flaccid as they immediately darkened from oxygen depletion. In the three intact D&X procedures I witnessed, not once did I see even a glimmer of response from the fetuses -- the anesthesia having passed through the placenta into their bloodstreams.”

Estragon: I can't go on like this.
Vladimir: That's what you think.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Did you know that today, a Friday the 13th, is the 101st birthday of Samuel Beckett? All in all, a most fitting day upon which to contemplate that the roof still leaks.

After the $1,300 patch job by the seemingly thorough, intelligent roofers yesterday.

After the $900 patch job by the hasty, dopey roofers a year ago.

Before the nor'easter the day after tomorrow.

Thanks to Beckett, however, I now have a cognitive model for the implacable drip through the ceiling of the laundry room. Happy century-plus-one, Samwise! (With thanks to Kora in Hell for an excellent tribute and links.)

Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy…

The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? From time to time. There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.

                                                                                                                                                                           --Malone Dies (1951)

Easter day was lovely, with the Child and Godchild hunting Easter eggs in a light snow. Easter Monday, I was awakened by the doorbell--oh, Lord, the roofer! I had forgotten about the roofer. After numerous candidates declined the job (one declared morosely that he would "need a ladder for that"), this company had agreed to patch the Roof Valley of Death over the eternally leaky laundry room. About a year ago, we paid more than $900 for another roofer to have his guy slap tar around up there; it leaked anyway. (He had been candid in his refusal to guarantee the job.) This time, two guys spent hours laying down shingles, flashing, and flexible underlayer stuff; every time I spied on them from the third-floor dormer window, they were furrowing their brows in concentration and lining things up carefully. Attaboys!  This roofer wanted even more than the last one, and wouldn't guarantee the job, either, but is "98% sure" that it will work.

We'll see Thursday, if it rains. If there's no drippage, the next step will be to repair the two holes in the sheetrock ceiling and plaster the other damaged bits. But I confess that I will never fully trust the Valley of Death again. Can we put a moisture-sensing device or DripCam up there before we seal it up? It could double as a SquirrelCam, since the Valley of Death is also Bagel's chief entry point into the cavity walls. Or we could patch with acrylic instead of sheetrock to make a wildlife-viewing window, like an aquarium.

Whenever geologic time crawls forward and we finally repair one of our long-standing eyesores, it's the same--I take awhile to get used to a bit of decency and normalcy in that spot, having gotten perversely adapted to the brokenness. Not to worry, however. Just as I was starting to relish the prospect of a laundry room without a drip basin and squirral-debris-filled holes...the toilet backed up, and neither plunger nor snake will it heed.  It's always something, Cheddar.