Crazy Stable

...but on Sunday it made a nice little luge run for the Child. The blizzard of '96 was way worse, though...much bigger drifts.

 Yesterday the bird feeder had, in addition to the usual mob of sparrows, a mocker, a blue jay, and a cardinal.  I'll be on the lookout for the slate-colored juncos;  twice a year they pass through and eat up everything in sight, like a busload of tourists invading a rest stop on the interstate. 

Carlos, the painter's assistant, is downstairs spackling Mom's old apartment...the snowy light and spackle have given the space an unreal appearance, milky and distant. Looking in at the two big, empty rooms from the outside was uncannily like my recurring dreams in which I discover a vast, dusty wing of the house that we never knew existed. These dream spaces have included an Edwardian-era servants' kitchen,  a room filled with carved sarcophagi and fountains,  a gallery flooded with sunlight, and a mysterious wing full of bedrooms containing priceless old furniture stuffed with antique letters and artifacts.  The house, like Brooklyn, ultimately unknowable.

Well, the Painter finally came by to diagnose the Apartment, which has been sitting empty since the departure of our tenants last month...funny how when a place is occupied, you don't notice all the cracks and flakes. We were under the impression that the two big high-ceilinged rooms needed "just a few big spots" spackled. This is because we spared ourselves the anguish of actually examining the ceiling and walls in daylight. As John, the competent fellow who spray-painted our mud room a glorious white, walked around, cruelly pulling up shades and opening blinds, the ceilings seemed to recoil like Blanche duBois under the bare lightbulb.  "There's not a square foot that doesn't have cracks in it," John said evenly. He is right.

Kind soul, he offered several classses of estimate: economy, business, and first-class, as it were. Economy is patching the really obvious stuff; it could go all the way up to primed-for-Sistine-Chapel-ceiling-mural, i.e., a total covering with mesh and a whole new skim coat. Surprise! We chose economy class.  Kill the tortilla-sized flakes, fill in what looks like the Nile Delta sketched under the old leaky spot, and paint over the rest. This will still cost thousands...along with a new range, countertop, and carpeting to come afterwards. John says he can also fix the horror behind the bathtub faucets, where the tiles are hanging like a beaded curtain over empty wall space, because the tub enclosure was built by imbeciles who used regular sheetrock instead of Wonderboard. Wonderboard is a technical term meaning "wall stuff that won't melt around bathtubs." Unlike, say, sheetrock.

It has to be done...the place basically hasn't been touched since we staked it out, the Jamestown colony of our terrifying wild new world, back in 1986-87. That is so long ago that we were technically still in our twenties then, and now we are in our seventies or something. (Well, not chronologically, but psychically...) The pink walls and dusty mauve trim I picked out for my just-widowed mother look sad as hell. And now that our tenants are gone, and I roam around the space, I realize that it's really time for a fresh coat.

Because, in a way, our just-gone tenants were on a continuum of my mother's ill-starred  occupancy; when she finally left for a nursing home in 1999, the first person we offered it to--basically still furnished with my mom's modest stuff--was the wonderfully competent Trinidadian lady who had been the best (by far, by very far) of the Mater's many home health aides. Then her daughter joined her from Trinidad after a long and frustrating separation, giving me the emotional satisfaction of having at least one successful mother-and-child-reunion down there.   But now that their cheerful working-gal clutter is gone, the marks of the Mater's pictures are still on the walls...the faded pink carpet that tripped her and sent her (and us) on a one-way trip into broken-hip-hell remains on the sloping floor...and a few bits of the Mater's furniture (dating back to my childhood) are down there waiting to be repurposed in spare rooms upstairs. The curtains she sewed (the ones that made it into the shot in the Law & Order episode) still hang on the windows.

And the memories won't fade, rising up like those corny hollow voice-overs in TV movies. A few pleasant ones, a decade's worth of sad and awful ones.  Wheelchairs, walkers, house calls (from podiatrists and physical therapists and psychiatrists), ambulances, recriminations. Does it sag like a heavy load? Or does it explode? That would be choice (a).

There will be no skim-coating the past completely, but with luck, we can spackle over the biggest fissures and make something bright and fresh and new. And absolutely no more pink, or mauve. 

...up with the "Project Platform"! I will explain...the mystical connection between Groundhog Day and my having bought a new ladder at Lowe's this morning. Well, not a ladder, exactly, but it is manufactured by "America's leading maker of climbing equipment."

Groundhog Day, on the far more intriguing old Christian calendars, is Candlemas Day, also known as the Feast of Mary's Purification and as the Presentation (of Christ in the Temple). It comes 40 days after Christmas, which is when Mary would have undergone ritual purification after giving birth...and is the last feast to date itself from Christmas. So if you still have that withered tree up in a corner, get it down! (Having it sitting in the backyard waiting to get its branches cut up for mulching the rosebushes so does not count.) For the fortitude to climb my new "Project Platform" and take down our aging Christmas wreath, I will invoke the words of the poet Robert Herrick (1591-1674):

"Down with the rosemary, and so

Down with the bays and misletoe ;

Down with the holly, ivy, all,

Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas Hall"

Anyway, on Candlemas folks would bring candles to church to be blessed (including, presumably, the candles needed for that great old Catholic weird-thing, the "priest sick call kit," a sort of field desk containing a cross and candles and other sundries, which would be solemnly produced if Father had to come to the house to deliver Last Rites. We never had one, and I can't fathom why not, given my mother's Eeyore-like tendency to believe that health catastophe was just around the corner.) However, the candles apparently must be made of beeswax to be bless-able; no Yankee or aromatherapy numbers, please. The groundhog has nothing, apparently, to do with candles or Christmas; turns out he's from an old German superstition about a hibernating animal coming out to see his shadow. (Some suspect that Candlemas was established to supplant such pagan rubbish; given the media hoopla in Punxsutawney every year, I'd say that plan backfired.)

So I bought the ladder...not just to remove decorations from the Christmas Hall, but because our old ladder tried to kill the Spouse. It was always an evil ladder--bought with the best of intentions by my dear aunt and uncle, "as seen on TV"--the ladder that bends into many shapes with a snap of its hinges, including the mystifying "W" shape. It weighed a bloody ton (despite being made of aluminum), and had to be dragged screeching here and there just to change light bulbs on our cavernous first floor. Then the other day, as Spouse was carrying out his sacred duty of lightbulb-changing, there came a thunderous metallic crash--the Evil Ladder had slipped its snappy-joint-gizmos and flattened. Spouse was rattled but uninjured, but given the history of people falling down in the Crazy Stable and sustaining real catastrophes, I (semi-hysterical) dragged the wretched ladder out to the curb. (A few hours later, in the dark, we went out and saw someone piling it into a van; I hollered, "Be careful, it's dangerous!" The scavenger said something I didn't catch that didn't sound like English, and quick thinker that I am, I hollered, "Cuidado! Es peligroso!" Then we saw, as he emerged into the streetlight, that it was our next-door neighbor, who speaks English. And Bengali, his native tongue. And Spanish, as it happens. The Spouse, perhaps touched by my desire for revenge on the ladder or my concern for the prevention of Mexican-American spinal injuries, refrained from pointing out that I am an ass.)

But I got other cool stuff at Lowe's too! I love just going to Lowe's on a beautiful morning...the Gowanus is lovely on Groundhog Day...the towering mountain of scrap metal across the canal glints in the early sun, and the big sky fans out over the Brooklyn waterfront in a way that makes me feel tough and alive. There are always nice fellows to chat with, about renovation and hardware of course, and the huge aisles provoke in the modestly bipolar a giddy sense of possibility.

In examining my receipt, I realized that I had not merely blown a quick $141, but had produced a mini-portrait of the obsessions that churn through my soul regarding the Crazy Stable:

"3 Step Project Platform"...Yes, this will do; it will supplant anything resembling an extension ladder; because if it is high enough to require an extension ladder, we should call the Man to come and do it anyway. Preferably the Man with Insurance.

"Pro 100% Corn Broom." Spring-like weather has triggered the fantasy that, if I keep a broom downstairs, I will sweep the front walk and sidewalk with it. Corn brooms make me feel like I'm in "Little House on the Prairie"; synthetic push-brooms make me feel like I'm in "Silkwood."

"Soap Saver." It's a nubby plastic thing, it was 88 cents, and it means I can put out my Crabtree & Evelyn rosewater soap, a fragrant present from the Child, and declare territorial rights over it.

"27" Brawny Runner, 5 feet" Not Brawny but cheesy, it's a dull grey strip of rug meant to hold in the desert sands of scooping litter marching forward from our two kitty litter pans. They occupy the otherwise empty third-floor landing, and sometimes when I cannot sleep I design fabulous inventions to hide and deodorize and dust-proof this awful cat-kingdom. I'm grateful we have space to keep the pans someplace other than the bathroom...but sad it has to be in the same zip code with us.

"42 gallon contractors bags." These are Lawn 'n' Leaf bags big enough to hold a hefty mobster with sharp elbows. Or a ton of rose clippings, without slitting the bag. What Lowe's did not have are empty "sandbags," or whatever you call the indestructible little white woven bags you put cement rubble in. I have cement-tearing-up plans, and will need these in order to titrate out the demolition garbage through the good offices of the Department of Sanitation...one little ol' bag at a time. 

"20" Snow Blazer shovel." I got the "deluxe" one...$18 instead of $13 for standard...to guarantee we don't have a blizzard this spring.

"Ceramic Heater." Just a little one, to use in the bathroom between heat cycles. When our radiators are on, they're blasting...but the heat flies out of the house the moment they cool off.

"4" Campanula." I had to! I had to! Life can't be all snow shovels and project platforms and industrial carpeting. The little flowers look like tiny blue roses. I give it 3 weeks to live, but I just needed some touch of spring--besides the kamikaze crocus sprouts deluded by the recent thaw into an untimely appearance. Good weather on Candlemas predicts a hard winter later, as Phil (or his handlers) would remind us. Crocuses, go back down!