Crazy Stable

The Crazy-Stablish house down the block is for sale! Do you have the soul...the stomach...the half-million dollars-plus (a steal, I'm told)...to embark on a like journey and restore this gorgeous ruin?

The owners, a doctor and his wife, were old-timers here when we arrived 20 years ago. I am put in mind of this morsel of P.G. Wodehouse:

"A writer, describing Blandings Castle in a magazine article, had once said: 'Tiny mosses have grown in the cavities of the stones, until, viewed near at hand, the place seems shaggy with vegetation.' It would not have been a bad description of the proprietor." 

 If interested in sensitive restoration, go here to Mary Kay, the doyenne of Victorian Flatbush real estate...or read up on Brownstoner, here...and know that I will ply you with a welcome wagon of brownies, lemonade, and empathy. If interested in knocking it down to replace it with a fat brick multistory monstrosity or a stucco'ed McMansion built out to the property line, go here...and know that the surrounding blocks virtually bristle with  preservation-minded activist types who will watch your every move and bust your every violation faster than you can say "Dumpster."

The above-linked discussion on the Brownstoner site, by the way, explains why we are still at it 20 years later. Apparently we should have had an extra $250K to $500K  lying around to finish the job, instead of an extra $25K to $50K. Aha...so that's where we went wrong!
 

Just a harmless little midsummer prank, called "Frustrate the Sleazy Googler"!  

But seriously, folks...isn't the door coming along nicely? Under all the layers of dreary white is a layer of black varnish of some sort, and under that...wood, battered but unbowed. Lunatic Spouse is about 3/4 of the way around by now, heat wave or not. By comparison, my labors in the kitchen to turn this morning's Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket haul of peaches into a skillet cake pale by comparison.

Spouse will have to get his own blog if he wants to run a picture of me under the headline "Peaches, Peeled and Ready for Some Sugar." 

"When I tell friends I grew up in Brooklyn, they seem to imagine a grim cityscape of concrete and brownstone, populated by rowdy gangs of streetwise, tough-talking kids playing stickball in vacant lots twinkling with broken bottles. In fact, ours was a neighborhood more like the main street of a small town, with a block of stately trees, manicured lawns, and rather grand old houses. Like most children, we were unobservant and took nearly everything for granted, but even so we understood that our homes were magical places full of small architectural surprises: stained-glass bay windows, narrow back stairs, porches and porte cocheres, dusty attics, and basements that smelled thrillingly of mold and damp and earth."  --Francine Prose, "The Transient Beauty of Fireflies," Victoria, July 1994

Amazing, what you can find flipping through an old magazine. The rest of Prose's article--about the carefree roaming of kids from street to street and yard to yard on summer nights--is achingly reminiscent of my own childhood in Little Neck, Queens, but  sadly, no longer a prudent lifestyle for young residents of the sometimes-eventful 70th Precinct.  Even our most blissful blocks are too close to a rougher reality (they call it an "Impact Zone" for policing purposes) to permit that lost summer dreamworld of wandering at dusk until Mom called you in. But the fireflies are out, golden-green blinks among the shadowy ferns and roses, and deep summer can still work its magic...even if that magic no longer includes the elixir of youthful freedom.

 Photo: Steve Baldwin, www.brooklynparrots.com

Now look who's hanging around the CrazyStable...monk parrots! 

For more than a week, I've been sort of half-conscious of some very loud squawking in front of the house, not so much in the Ent-maple itself as in the surrounding trees. Although I've long been a fan of the famous Green-Wood Cemetery  parrot clan, it never occurred to me that we could have parrots here; in ornithological denial, I thought, "Hm, how about that--starlings or mockers can get agitated and make a noise exactly like parrots!"

Then on Sunday, when the squawking was incredibly loud and close, we astutely gazed upward to see gigantic pistachio-colored birds tumbling around in the trees across the street like a bunch of drunken frat boys. At least three or four of them were on hand. Could these guys be the real culprits behind the daily freefall of maple branchlets all over the front of the house? (I've been blaming Bagel the Squirrel.)

Silly me, I'd thought the only Brooklyn parrots were the Green-Wood bunch; turns out there are numerous clans, most notably near Brooklyn College. I found this out through a fantastic site, BrooklynParrots.com,  which perfectly illustrates the genius of the Internet: It's the personal passion of Steve Baldwin, a noted business author and parrot lover, who has put together a handsome and altogether fascinating combination of great photography, lore, and advocacy for these wacky and improbable airborne Brooklynites.  (Seems they escaped from a pet-store-bound shipment at JFK decades ago, and have been surviving like true-blue--or true-green--New Yorkers ever since.)  Steve, the Parrot Guy, has assured me that my parrots (who seem to hang out intermittently, not constantly) represent a novel geographic sighting, and may be a case of birds "visiting' each other from two separate family compounds.

Possums, parrots...it's a good summer for wildlife in Flatbush.  All of which just ramps up my frustration with my rudimentary little digital camera, which doesn't do zoom or any other cool stuff. What I need is a nice digital SLR with a big old parrot-clarifying zoom lens.  I am so greedy and shallow; why must everything around here remind me of how much more money we need? Look ye at the parrots of the field; they neither save nor invest nor have day jobs in the corporate world, yet not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed in bright green feathers.

(Hey, I'm trying.) 

I just received some extraordinary photos from Amazing Cousin, the burgeoning architect, who is in New Orleans on some adventure involving urban housing solutions.  It's the best visual story I've seen of just how bad things remain down there, at least in the poor areas. 

 Photo: Derek Lindner

After last week's fierce storms, (and in particular a gripping picture of a huge tree squashed down across the roof of a car in Queens), I'm feeling rather fragile and vulnerable here in our huge pile of flaking wood, cowering under the branches of the mighty five-story Ent-maple.  Morbidly, I found myself mentally rehearsing what it would be like to see the CrazyStable  slumped in a pile of blue-shingled timbers.  Oddly, it was rather freeing...as long as all of us were safely outside, I could imagine going on with life minus stuff.  Even the poorest victims of Katrina--those who survived--are still opening their eyes to a new day, and  I truly believe the cliche that where there's life, there's hope. And, while I make a fine "poor mouth" much of the time, in truth, we'd start out with a lot more hope than those souls (hope for friends' guest rooms, for one thing). I even know what we'd rebuild with the insurance money: a little house, an energy-efficient anti-McMansion, with a picket fence and bigger surrounding garden.  Then I'd try to get someone to write us up for the Times real estate section as a trend-starter.

Having thus decided how we will survive utter devastation, I must drag the Stablemates out before the next "cell" of thunderstorms (when did they start calling them "cells" on TV?) to buy peaches and corn at the Greenmarket and hit a few yuppie stoop sales in Park Slope. 

"Angel bright, Life in Death, go away, don't suck my breath." -- "To Kill a Mockingbird"