Crazy Stable

No child to mind...no client to produce for...a glorious day to myself in waning summer, sprung while the day is young from another horrible brush with jury duty in downtown Brooklyn. Did I sprint from the Supreme Court building back home to wield my heat gun on the remaining unstripped front-door paint? Nooooooo. I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Wow, what a thrill--and one I've never experienced in all my life as a New Yorker and 24 years as a Brooklynite. Driving over the bridge is a cramped, chore-like business, but walking over it--preferably from Brooklyn into  Manhattan--is pure drama, a sky-wrapped promenade, cables swinging up all around you, one set of Gothic arches rising up framed by another. I had left my camera at home to avoid its confiscation by the Mean-Faced Court Officers, but took a few pictures for tourists with their own wee cameras, kneeling way down to get a nice dramatic angle with the American flag in the background. Helicopters crisscrossed overhead, a few pleasure boats cut up and down the East River, and the grimy old yellow Staten Island Ferry chugged along in the distance under the gaze of Miss Liberty. It's a long walk, longer than you think it's going to be, but one to put on your life list, now, if you've never done it. (Note to outlanders: Take the F train to Jay St./Boro Hall stop, then get out and walk to the bridge so you can head back into Manhattan.) And when you come to the bronze bas-relief marker showing the skyline ahead of you, don't hestitate to run your fingers over the Twin Towers as you gaze at where they stood; so many people have done so ahead of you that the two rectangles are polished, like the toe of a saint's statue in a pilgrimage shrine. My friend Walt, with his "curious abrupt questionings" as he leaned into this wind on this crossing, could he ever have questioned as we have, who have polished that little spot of bronze with our remembering fingertips?

As I turned and looked back at the Brooklyn waterfront, poised for its painful transformation in coming years to a forest of skyscrapers, I felt a surge of delight in being a Bridge and Tunnel New Yorker: Somewhere back there, in the green heart of the borough, were my home and my raspberry bushes, but right over there, rising up gleaming, was the urban heart of the world. In need of some antidote to all this ecstasy, I decided to have a look for Mayor Bloomberg in City Hall, which is, appropriately enough, the very first thing that greets you as you ramble off the span in "the city." No luck; thanks to Homeland Security measures, you can only gaze on the steps from afar (although a few news crews are permanently planted around the periphery in case of a Sudden Outbreak of News).

But I enjoyed an iced coffee and some people-watching near the gorgeous City Hall Park fountain, then went uptown to the one museum that would be least intriguing to the absent Child, The Morgan Library. I hadn't seen it since the new fancy architecture was added to knit its robber-baron buildings together; the result is delightful, an airy web of glass and blond wood floating around the shadowy gilt-edged, velvet-lined jewel boxes of Morgan's original follies. I gazed right down on Beethoven's scribbled themes for the Emperor Concerto while listening to the same measure on headphones, tears stinging my eyes in a true Schroeder moment.  I felt sorry for the priceless books, though, especially the children's storybooks; they are prisoners of their exquisite conservatorship, never destined to be grabbed off a shelf, casually flipped open, and then devoured by a delighted rainy-day reader.

I headed home on the subway with the gainfully employed commuters, feet worn out but happy. When I got to my own front porch, the paint was still there on the doorframe.

--Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Photo taken by: Fanny Granger Becker, my grandmother

Summer's winding down--the sort of comment that prompted the Child to tell me yesterday that I was being Strindberg to her Helium.  In my own defense, I am wallowing in mere seasonal wistfulness, not black despair. Strindberg would never have managed to keep alive some of my more outlandish Big Dreams for the vast unrenovated badlands of the CrazyStable for the past 21 years. Here's the third in my trio of perennial favorites in "Extreme Makeover: Strange Home Edition": the ground-floor space we call "the Tool Room," which is in mint boarding-house shape. Keep in mind as you tour: When we bought this 3,000-square-foot house, this was basically the condition of every room (the rewiring holes in the ceilings were added shortly afterward by our first electricians, Moe, Larry, and Curly).

Step through this door from the center hall (the fainthearted are welcome to bless themselves from the holy water font) and step down two steps painted their original Chang-floor red.  (Why is this room sunken? We have absolutely no idea.)

The room is a spacious rectangle flooded with north light from two big windows. (It was, like all the other rooms except the kitchens, somebody's sorrowful bedroom in its last incarnation, with a sink and towel bar since removed.) We keep, guess what, tools in here...along with leftover Sheetrock and lumber from projects, bicycles, and assorted stoop-sale finds awaiting refinishing in my copious free time. Note the inspired layout of Door #1, Door #2, and Door #3.

Door #3, on the right, leads via the "Tandoori Pit" (please, don't ask) to the brick-extension mud room and the back garden.  Behind Door #2 is a closet; ditto for Door #1, but this one used to be a kitchenette, judging from its crude cabinets, tiny window, and capped pipes. It must also have suffered a helluva lot of moisture over the years; dig those plaster chips. (I also like how they painted the ceiling fixture to match the walls.) Collapsing ceilings are the Tool Room's special charm; here's an even bigger mess thanks to our erstwhle contractor, Mr. Stupid, whose guy drove a nail through a pipe beneath the newly laid plywood subfloor upstairs when they were framing in the second-floor bathroom. Apparently you are supposed to mark the location of the pipes so you don't nail holes through them, you freaking moron, but instead we got a dam bursting down onto every tool we owned, all of which were laid out  underneath. We were Mr. Stupid's last job in the New York metro area; I like to think my warm responsiveness to his craftsmanship had something to do with his relocation to the West Coast shortly afterward. Now look down:  Here's an intriguing "detail," a very old (probably original) "linoleum rug" (moccasin shown for scale), about 4x8 feet.

Now, [sung to the tune of "How do you solve a problem like Maria?"] how do you use a sinkhole like the Tool Room? It hunkers behind its hallway door with no purposeful flow to our living space upstairs; we don't even need to pass through it to go out the back door (there's a back staircase to the Mud Room for that. Don't worry, at this point everyone gets lost as to the floorplan.) Opposite it lies the rental apartment, a floor-through "double studio" that occupies the only two grandly proportioned parlor rooms in the house; the remaining room on this floor, in  front, is used as a sewing room and auxiliary guest room. [N.B.: Yes, and every goddam one of them has to be heated all winter.--Strindberg] The cats are forbidden entry to the Tool Rooom, because they hide in the wall-holes behind the surplus Sheetrock, and besides, who wants to look at this supersized Fibber McGee's closet?

But I have a plan for the room's redemption. Someday, when I have mastered my little platen handpress and moved up to a bigger model--say, a Vandercook--this will be my press room. Cleanly resurfaced, with the addition of versatile track lighting and a big work sink, it will hold big flat cabinets of lead type, and cans of ink, and all the marvelous things that go along with it, like "reglets" and "furniture" and composing sticks and big crisp sheets of Arches paper, and I will come downstairs after breakfast to put on my printer's apron and set type and turn out beautiful broadsheets with poems of Chesterton, say, plus some wedding invitations to pay the bills. Hey, it could happen.  Here's a master printer named Peter Kruty right here in Brooklyn who does just this on an 1878 Hoe Washington handpress.

Presses are heavy, very heavy. In my tool-room dream, I have a mental note to tell the contractor--Mr. Very-Smart, who we will be able to afford because our ship will of course have come in--to reinforce the floor. And maybe put an old-fashioned frosted-glass window in the door, with the name of my press--Tenth Leper--stenciled on it. Would that not be cool?

Image: Handpress.

Today's episode from CrazyStable Wins the Lottery: the metamorphosis of the "Blue Room" to the master bedroom. I'm going to be brave now, and show you the Blue Room, the biggest of the five curious chambers that constitute the third floor of our house:

Yes, this is the room that has always functioned as our "attic" or junk room, its current centerpiece the Child's crib (she is now 12--stowing furniture for over a decade is one of the insidious perks of roaming around in a 16-room house). And this is almost precisely the condition in which we found it upon moving in almost 21 years ago. We're particularly fond of the psychedelic murals left behind by some trippy boarding-house tenant in the Peter Max era. They clearly had bigger plans, as evidenced by this recessed panel on the closet door; perhaps a road trip with the Dead interrupted their sojourn here. Note also the handsome enamel "flophouse sconce" at left. When we toured the house in its last incarnation as a Chinese immigrant haven, a young man had a Buddhist altar in the room decorated with little kumquat trees.

Now, the plan is...to make this the master bedroom, which now occupies one of the two big front rooms on the second floor. The second floor is "the apartment," our chief living space, with kitchen, living room, both master and child's bedrooms, and bath. (The first floor is half occupied by our rental unit and half by...two other rooms whose identities are complex and ambiguous.) But our second-floor living room is surprisingly small for a house so grandly proportioned on the outside, and my fever dream is to knock out the wall between the living and bedrooms (replacing it with columns) to make one big living room (which would then have the nonworking but pretty fireplace that is now in the bedroom), and to move our bedroom up here. Did you get that? Because I was talking very, very fast. In two decades in this very big and complicated house, I have learned to describe all my plans very very fast before potential contractors lose interest.

The Blue Room seems to be in pretty sound condition, needing only heavy cosmetics and an air conditioner to make it tolerable. It may not be an inspiring abode in its current state, but I've always loved attic bedrooms--ever since reading and re-reading A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett as a girl. The noble, plucky but persecuted heroine, Sara, is exiled to a dismal and freezing garret amid the chimney pots of London; but one night, she arrives tired from her scullery duties to discover that a sympathetic neighbor, the mysterious Indian Gentleman, and his servant, Ram Dass, have transformed her little room to cozy digs with a crackling fire, colorful rug and quilt, and welcoming armchair. Here is Tasha Tudor's vision of the delightful scene.

I want to do a Ram Dass on the Blue Room. It might look something like this (which happens to be the attic bedroom in a rental cottage in, I swear, Tasmania--thanks be to Google).

It must be mid-August; I am mopey, distractible, and nagged frequently by the delusional sense that I am supposed to be somewhere else...a verdant valley, a cove in Maine, an emerald lawn next to a sparkling pool behind a towering swath of privet hedge. This delusion becomes particularly oppressive when I am marketing or doing laundry or some other mundane task here in Brooklyn...no, no, the alternate reality awaits, I am wasting precious time, summer is slipping away and I am in the wrong place.

On Sunday, at least for a while, we were in a Right Place--Wave Hill, a ravishing little botanical garden in (of all places) the Bronx, perched on the Hudson overlooking the green cliffs of the Palisades. Wave Hill has rolling lawns, two spiffy historic houses, and flower-crammed gardens, but our best discovery this week was their woodland path. It led down into a piney grove where some earnest artist had constructed a particleboard cabin containing a camera obscura--part of an exhibition of generally silly art "inspired" by Thoreau, all of which was roundly upstaged by the little signs containing Henry David's actual prose, which holds up really well. (Better, I'd imagine, than the art in his honor, like the "installation" made of cut-up milk bottles. But I digress.)

Anyway, as we emerged from the woods, I indulged the fantasy that Wave Hill was all mine, and that got me to thinking about house dreams--not "sleep dreams," which I've discussed recently, but daydreams, blue-sky plans, outrageous fantasies for the day one's ship comes in. And in the spirit of midsummer dislocation and drift, I'm going to share a few.  (Hey, at least I'm not asking some foundation to grant-fund my milk-bottle depiction of environmental decay. Now that's chutzpah.)

Today's Dream: The CrazyStable Pine Grove. I am obsessed with conifers; I love everything about them, their vast repertory of textures and smells, their magical gift of cones, the ancient peacefulness they impart. And what I want to do most around here is knock down the garage and plant a pine grove. It would have stone and slate pavers and some Adirondack chairs and a table for my book and iced tea. At Christmas, we would weave tiny blue lights among the branches; in snow storms, I would stand in the middle of it and hear that wonderful whispering music that pines make in the snow. Here is the garage, standing empty except for a few bags of garden supplies.   And here is a coniferous montage from the gorgeous stands of them at Wave Hill.   A great improvement, no?

Let's steal away in the noontime sun

It's time for a summertime dream.

Gordon Lightfoot, "Summertime Dream"

Well, last night, as I was slipping into bed with the leaf-shifting streetlight pouring in the window through the branches of our Mighty Ent, it hit me: I am really, really scared of tornadoes. The day's relief and puzzlement at our narrow escape from a path of destruction suddenly dissolved into a deeper, more primal terror: Wow, we could be really screwed at any time, in any place, with no warning at all.  The helicopter shot of someone's dear little staircase, picture still on the wall, hanging out naked from a half-demolished row house in Bay Ridge, kept flashing onto my tired brain. Why not the CrazyStable? And, of course, What Does It All Mean?

I got a kick out of the fellow who sniped, after yesterday's tornado entry, that there was nothing "blessed" about our having escaped the tree-carnage (and car-carnage) by one block's distance, since God was the one who sent the tornado to start with. My mother, a devout cradle Catholic, was very much given to such observations. She wrestled miserably, not so much with the "problem of evil," as with the problem of senseless misfortune and tragedy, and was particularly annoyed by people who felt that their own little problems had been thrown into perspective by greater sorrows and losses. (Mom was very invested in the gravity of her own little problems.) She was even more annoyed when people (like oh, say, elderly devout Catholic ladies) got sufferings they didn't "deserve." What the hell was God thinking?

My mother semi-solved this problem by cultivating an intense devotion to the Blessed Mother, who was a powerful intercessor but could not be held responsible for really awful events; endless Hail Marys helped her perform a sort of end run around God the Father and his equally ineffectual Son, who dished out earthly justice with such inexplicable carelessness. My Aunt Louie, who wandered from her Southern Protestant roots into every manner of mystic searching in later years, took another tack; in addition to a robust belief in astrology,  she playfully adopted a relationship with "Zeus," whose capricious nature left no theological difficulties in understanding the occasional hurled thunderbolt into her life. If her Volkswagen bus broke down in some spectacular manner, as it often would, she would say resignedly that it was "old Zeus sockin' it to me again." She and Zeus had an understanding: Stop Making Sense.

The Gospels, frankly, aren't all that helpful on this old chestnut. There is, of course, Luke 13: 3-5, in which Jesus makes uncanny mention of a particular phobia around here, falling towers:

Talk about mixed messages!  This is one of those passages where I console myself that a lot must have been lost in translation.  The best I can figure is that everybody's death comes like a falling tower eventually; we're never "ready" to go, and He's saying that we should be.  Trees and towers that fall and crush us like bugs are a wake-up call, (I hate wake-up calls that come as I am getting into bed),  and the mystery of our lives is finding out who is calling us and what we're waking up to. 

Mind you, I am only receptive to strange and complex utterances such as these when they come from resurrected guys who come back from the dead bearing torture scars and telling me they love me unconditionally and will always be with me.  And even then,  I sometimes need a moment alone with Mary and Zeus.

To-do list:

1. Repent.

2. Review house insurance coverage.