Crazy Stable

Or, as the Child thought Mick was singing, "Can't get no....sanitation..."

Around here, both have sometimes been accurate assessments of Life. That's why I love the following quote, from the freewheeling Dawn Eden of Dawn Patrol; it was written about the quest for "self-fulfillment" through coupling, but it could just as well apply to my restless inability to find "fulfillment" in any job I've ever had, in parenthood, in...anything--even, I suspect, in whipping this damn house into perfect shape if we won that proverbial lottery:

At any rate, how, pray tell, does one fulfill oneself? There's not a blessed thing I can do to fulfill myself; I'm lucky if I can manage to dress myself. I can, however, make a sincere attempt to help those around me enjoy more fulfilling lives, by trying with all my heart to say and do the most loving thing at every moment.

If I succeed even a small part of the time, I'm that much closer to being fulfilled. But I wouldn't call it fulfilling myself, because that would ignore the economy of grace — which magnifies every good thing I give into something far beyond what my own resources could provide.

The economy of grace--I knew there had to be some economy at work in the CrazyStable. As for Dawn, author of a new book called The Thrill of the Chaste, don't let her conservative-rocker-chick schtick fool you; she's got some major spiritual and intellectual chops, and I expect great things from her. 

Apologies to Flannery O'Connor, but it's hot as hell up here in my third-floor study, because it's 10 degrees F outside. Brooklyn has gone from a Savannah winter to a Fargo interlude, and once again we remember just how much the CrazyStable hates the cold.

If you live in a big, uninsulated, freestanding wood-frame house, it is really hard not to root for global warming, especially if, like us, you are not located near a coastal area. (Here in the "wooded plain" of Flatbush, we would presumably gaze out at a tent city of Coney Island refugees in Prospect Park if Mr. Gore's worst nightmares come true--a grim scenario, but not quite as bad as imminent inundation.) When we first moved in 20 years ago, we sort of camped here, with the weather pouring in through the electricians' ceiling and wall gashes and the several ancient windows that rattled in their frames, held together by duct tape. Thus began my dogged experimentation with every insulation material in the hardware store, starting with the crude but effective "cleaner's bag shrink-wrapped over the windowframe" system. I think they're called "Frost-Kings." Before we replaced our 60-odd enormous windows, the taut plastic would luff in the wind like the sails of a schooner and then snap back against the panes with a sad sucking noise.

The new windows helped; so did the process, once every few years, of scraping up enough money to plaster or gut another room and get rid of yet more holes and open channels in the walls. When we'd gut, we'd put insulation bats in between the studs, but not every room needed gutting; and there are still too many holes left here and there to pump in cavity-wall fluff. At great expense, I had guys insulate the attic (a sealed-off crawlspace under our roof peak, above our third floor); the stuff they blew in shot out all over the house like pink popcorn, even in the basement. And the house was not one whit warmer afterward. No more effective were my adventures with strips of adhesive-backed foam, cute kitty draft-catchers from catalogs, or that spray foam that expands into cracks (although my enthusiastic wielding of it earned me the name "Spittle Bug" for awhile).

Well, at least on the third floor, it is positively tropical. What do you know? High-school physics was right: Heat rises! We have de-facto "zoned heating." The first floor is at 60, the second is at 70, and the third must be pushing 80 unless I open windows. The cats come up here and sack out like Ipanema sunbathers, while the ground-floor apartment (poor Tenant!) must have its three radiators supplemented with convection space heaters and a hopeful but ineffective ceiling fan just to be tolerable. (Even down there, heat rises; if one could bob around at ceiling level, like Ed Wynn in Mary Poppins, one would be relatively toasty.)

The heating system itself is a clanking steam beast, a monstrous boiler that feeds an assortment of cranky radiators ranging in age from Original (they have cool torch designs imprinted on their cast-iron) to Institutional Fifties-Era, to Bland Baseboard Modern. When we fire it up each fall, I envision the system coming to life like an old Max Fleischer cartoon, with truckin' white gloves and tap shoes, frantically blowing its stack as we run from room to room hunting for fresh leaks. (Each year, some old ones silt over and "heal" while new ones emerge. In a valve joint, they can be fixed; in a seam, you take the radiator out and shoot it.)

Among the paradoxes of this system is that the house overheats only when it's frigid outside, and remains as chilly as a rigorous Scottish boarding school when temps linger in the balmy 50's. At springlike temperatures, the system seldom cranks on, and once a heat cycle is over, it's over. Freeze and burn. But when it's this low, the Fleischer dancing radiators are grooving incessantly, hissing and gurgling, and Ed Wynn could float up the center-hall stairs on a cloud of hot air night and day.

You know what I like? June. I really like June...when "drafty" means "breezy."

Housebloggers have been tagging one another to admit "5 things" we probably didn't know about them, and I have been tagged by fellow Brooklynite Brooklyn Row House.  Hm, I could start with, "I am a media whore," but as a blogger, this would be a tad redundant.  Here, then, are 5 media-whorish things you probably didn't know about the Crazy Stablemistress (unless you have the dubious honor of my personal acquaintance):

1. In my freshman year of college at Fordham University, as the drama critic for the Fordham Review, I gave Denzel Washington his first review, in his student performance of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.  I gave him a rave and said he had "star quality." He went on to become a famous actor; I went on to become an obscure journalist. (Fun fact: He and I were in the same acting class together, but he was so hot that I never worked up the nerve to speak to him, much less suggest we do a  scene study together. Like, oh, say, Desdemona and Othello.  This happened--or didn't happen--in 1975; still can't get over it.)

2. I am visible as a crowd extra in the movie Marathon Man, in the scene where a shouting woman in New York's diamond district is hit by a car; I even have a reaction shot.  (During this shoot, I cornered Laurence Olivier in the Gotham Book Mart and babbled worshipfully; he was very kind.)

3. I was a conservative intellectual wanna-be in the 1980s, with several features for The American Spectator including a cover profile of anti-abortion activist Bernard Nathanson. (Like Spy, TAS was really good for awhile back then; their website says that archives are "coming," so no link.)

4.  I co-authored a book  on heart health with a cardiologist for Rodale Press, Week by Week to a Strong Heart. You can still get copies on E-bay, although much of the book's content is outdated. There's a picture of my co-author on the cover--the authoritative, silver-haired Dr. Marvin Moser--but none of me; my eyes were too red from weeping when I saw my final royalties statement, so they couldn't take my picture.

5. The crowning glory: I was quoted on page 1 of the Sunday New York Times on April 28, 2002--above the fold, in the lead--in a story about the Catholic Church and the sex abuse scandal. I sounded like a blithering idiot, (the ironic use of slang looks awful in print, wouldn't a print journalist have known that?)--although fortunately my quote broke to an inside jump before they got to the part where I called the U.S. bishops "duplicitous weasels." (No link possible, since this gem is now buried in the pay-to-play "Times Select Archive.")

Now you see why it is easy for me to reveal on the Internet that we have yucky tub caulk, a hole in the roof, and interior squirrels. 

Late-breaking Media Whorish Update: I have a letter in the New York Times this morning, taking issue with David Brooks' column on marriage yesterday (no link yet). The Times clearly just cain't quit me, so why don't they break down and hire me as a columnist--Brain of Brooks, Soul of Quindlen, something like that?

How's this for "back to the land"--last weekend,  the Family was conscripted to drag the  Christmas tree to Greenwood Cemetery to be chipped into mulch, and to dig out and bag our take-home bonus of compost.  The poor tree had plenty of life left in it, since we bought it ultra-fresh at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket; I was reminded of the guy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who, when the fellow comes around crying, "Bring Out Your Dead!" protests, "But I'm not dead yet!" Disposing of the tree has always been fraught for me; my mother recounted that the only lie she ever told me in my childhood was that curbside Christmas trees were carted  off and happily replanted, after my sobbing toddler self tried to drag one home and "rescue" it from the garbage men. 

At least this is a noble end for the tree, and on ground both historic and hallowed, yet! I was delighted to learn that one can tool around to Greenwood any time of year for more compost. Since I am hatching plans to bring a swath of cracked cement under cultivation this year, I can use all the compost I can get (in addition to what I, or rather the industrious CrazyStable worms, can make from our food scraps and garden waste).  The irony of composting in a famous cemetery was not lost on us, of course; but it was only in examining the picture above that I noted the name of the monstrous chipper is "Vermeer," a curious choice for a loud machine that digests trees.

While we're doing irony, my resolve on this very recent 50-degree day was to pile the mulch protectively around all the rosebushes before our long-delayed first cold snap.  Hahahahaha...20 degrees out there, and the mulch is frozen in its bags.  The bird feeders are also empty. My performance as a good countrywoman of Flatbush is inversely proportional to the outside temperature...

It will be a shame if Martin Luther King, Jr. is caught in amber as a mere civil-rights icon when, in fact, he was first and foremost a spiritual master (thanks to Brownstoner for the link). These timely and timeless words (from a Stanford University transcript of a 1966 sermon) find a grateful listener at the CrazyStable, where brokenness of all sorts is a fact of life:

MLK in Birmingham, AL jail, 1967...Broken-heartedness is a fact of life. Don’t try to escape when you come to that experience. Don't try to repress it. Don't end up in cynicism. Don't get mean when you come to that experience. (Make it plain) The church must say to men and woman that Good Friday (Yes, sir) is a fact of life. The church must say to people that failure is a fact of' life. Some people are only conditioned to success. They are only conditioned to fulfillment. Then when the trials and the burdens of life unfold, they can't stand up with it. But the church must tell men (Yes, sir) that Good Friday’s as much a fact of life as Easter; failure is as much a fact of life as success; disappointment is as much a fact of life as fulfillment. And the church must tell men to take your burden, (Yes, sir) take your grief and look at it, don't run from it. Say that this is my grief (Yes, sir) and I must bear it. (Yes) Look at it hard enough and say, "How can I transform this liability into an asset?" (Yes)

This is the power that God gives you. He doesn't say that you're going to escape tension; he doesn't say that you're going to escape disappointment; he doesn't say that you’re going to escape trials and tribulations. But what religion does say is this: that if you have faith in God, (Yes) that God has the power (Yes, sir) to give you a kind of inner equilibrium through your pain. So let not your heart be troubled. 

(Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, on 5 June 1966)

Take a few moments and read the whole thing, a miniature symphony of power, tenderness, and impeccable theology, here. Civil rights is in there, but the broader sweep of King's preaching frees him from his museum case as a "historical figure" with a Monday-falling holiday and plants him squarely back among us.