Crazy Stable

...or whimper, or clamour. Not after reading this in today's New York Times--Dan Barry's column about a young woman named Ann Nelson, whose family just discovered her "life list" of goals, great and small, profound and whimsical, on the laptop sent home to them in North Dakota after Ann's death at Cantor Fitzgerald on 9/11.  It is not often I march people by the shoulders to read something in the Times (unless to snort with hilarity over a particularly wacky bit of lifestyle coverage), but hit the link above, please. If they make you join "Times Select" to access the thing, and you're out of NYTimes newsstand range, click through the trial subscription just to get this article. [Photo at left: New York Times]

And then do something on Ann's list--today. Maybe not "Nepal" or "make a quilt," but you'll find plenty of others. Better yet, make your own list...and enjoy this gift of a day. (And if you can't get your mind off the small stuff after reading Ann's list, don't expect any sympathy from G.K. Chesterton:)

A Prayer in Darkness

This much, O heaven—if I should brood or rave,

Pity me not; but let the world be fed,

Yea, in my madness if I strike me dead,

Heed you the grass that grows upon my grave.

If I dare snarl between this sun and sod,

Whimper and clamour, give me grace to own,

In sun and rain and fruit in season shown,

The shining silence of the scorn of God.

Thank God the stars are set beyond my power,

If I must travail in a night of wrath,

Thank God my tears will never vex a moth,

Nor any curse of mine cut down a flower.

Men say the sun was darkened: yet I had

Thought it beat brightly, even on—Calvary:

And He that hung upon the Torturing Tree

Heard all the crickets singing, and was glad. 

The promised tour of the CrazyStable's strangely-named superfluous rooms has been cancelled on account of rain...which is entering through the roof of the laundry room at an alarming rate, reminding me again of the pressing need to find a roofer willing to patch, not tear off the whole bloody roof for $40,000. I will take a gang of rhesus monkeys with buckets of tar and lots of enthusiasm at this point, even if they don't have worker's comp.

The dismal rain and cold (and the sound of the boiler struggling to come on in the second half of May), along with the pwank-pwanking of roof tea into the foil turkey pans, plus hormonal impairment, were sending me into a tailspin this morning...til I saw this picture in the news:

Yes, as the old Irishman said, Sure 'tis never so bad that it couldn't be worse. For example, in New England along the banks of a raging river right now.

But this reflexive bit of optimism--the house is not half-full of water, by God, it is half-empty!--is quickly countered by an inner voice saying, "Well, aren't we Pollyanna today?" This is the Voice of the Mater (not to be confused with the Voice of Binky). My beloved late mother lived her (unnecessarily difficult) life in the absolute conviction that not only was the glass half-empty, but the waiter had taken one look at her in particular and then surreptitiously spat in it. Pollyanna was my mother's archfiend. To be cheerful, relaxed, or hopeful, in my mother's worldview, was to wallow in self-delusion. Embracing the role of the clear-eyed realist with acerbic gusto, she spent her life in a defensive crouch against the next blow from the hairy right arm of fate.

Amazingly, she had a long and happy marriage to a man--my father--who was possibly one of the world's greatest optimists. More a philosopher than a Pollyanna, my dad saw happiness as a never-ending series of choices--some profound, some minuscule. He never saw the point of choosing misery. He never gave up, in 37 years of marriage (and 15 years of courtship!), trying to convince my mother of this wisdom. And he never succeeded--not the tiniest little bit.

Both my parents were highly verbal, persuasive individuals, and so I am left with a sort of everlasting debating society raging inside my head. Life: Mined Field, or Box of Chocolates? The facts that my father was one of the most genuinely happy people I've ever known, and that my mother spent the last decade of her life in a slough of largely self-inflicted mental torment, would seem to tilt the case. But I spent a lot more time with the Mater, and a lot more recently, since she outlived her sunshine-souled husband by 14 wretched years. Hers is the first voice I hear, every time I put my hand on a broken doorknob or step over our cracked driveway:  It figures. It's always us. I might have known.  How typical.

And then, in distant answer, there is my dad's reply... you could save that knob, they don't make them like that anymore, and just replace the lock casing. You'll get the cement fixed; look how well the Belgian-block footing is holding up. Good thing that leak is where you can see it, and not sneaking in under the attic where it'll rot the joists without your knowing it.

In other words, I spend more time fighting off the temptation to join the Dark Side than Luke Skywalker. And yes, that means I have compared my mother to Darth Vader (well, sort of) on the day after Mother's Day. This is a one-dimensional sketch of her--in younger days, she was fiercely funny and loving, the brittleness and bitterness only hinted at like sombre notes in an overture. And even in later years, she was more Eeyore than Evil Empire. But by the time she spent her final years here, every square foot of battered floor and wall was an outsize challenge to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.  It's quite a tribute to my dad that, Obi-like, he still beams in after all these years, and never gives up.

Cheer up, Brian. You know what they say.
Some things in life are bad,
They can really make you mad.
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you're chewing on life's gristle,
Don't grumble, give a whistle!
And this'll help things turn out for the best...

Monty Python's Life of Brian

Well, it seems we have found a tenant for the  Apartment, a perfectly charming young person who seems delighted by its assets--sun, space, a view of the rose garden and a fresh coat of everything--and undaunted by its quirks (the facelift-awaiting facade, the shared entryway with...us).  She even likes Law and Order, and seemed pleased to know that the apartment had been used to film the Mad Bomber Episode...and she belongs to a generation tech-savvy enough to master the intricacies of the alarm system control panel. May our shared enterprise be blessed, and may the cats leave the poor gal alone, since she is allergic to them. (In reality, they will stalk her enthusiastically until the novelty has worn off, but she has been warned.)

It's been sort of nice having the house all to ourselves for a few months (except for the gash torn in our cash flow by the lack of rent combined with the cost of renovations), but I'm more than ready to have that ground-floor suite become someone's home again.  Big, empty rooms trigger melancholia, at least these ones do. The very vastness of this house seems like an absurd character in our ongoing drama (at about 3,000 square feet, it's dwarfed by today's McMansions, but at least twice what we need).  The Apartment alone is at least 625 square feet, and the rest of the house--our part--contains at least two rooms more than we know what to do with (unless you count the entropic junk middens that have accumulated in them over the years).  Keep in mind that when we first moved in, the CrazyStable was a boarding house--a mind-numbing succession of scruffy chambers weakly bonded to a filthy center-hall staircase , with the closest thing to a designated "nucleus" the grease-blackened communal kitchen on the second floor. There was no living room, no "master" or "junior" bedroom, no apparent floor plan, no "flow"...just room after dirty-white room, each with a sink, towel bar, and a cheap hasp for a padlock.

Next entry, I'll take you on a tour.  Meanwhile, look how cool the stained-glass window lights look when you strip the white house paint off 'em (my spring hobby). Did I mention that Mr. Chang painted them on both sides?

Garden madness has begun...very hard to focus on anything else, and certainly not on renovation. Last Tuesday unleashed the fevered hordes upon the member's-only preview of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's annual plant sale...code for which, in the CrazyStable, is "Out of Control!" (Me, that is.) This year I scored a parking spot and a red wagon, which the Child hauled dutifully around the Cherry Esplanade as I drooled and sniffed and slavered.
I had made my usual resolution, drawn from all those garden-porn magazines, to buy drifts of things, not just loners to plug in here and there...and was hindered, as usual, by the painful realization that drifts of things quickly rack up at the cash register. So three is a drift, okay? Got three yellow spreading thingies that a lady recommended...three more creeping phlox, since the phlox out front is flourishing even under the ironclad maple domination of Rootbeard the Ent...and, of course, a few tomatoes, even though the raspberry canes have marched into the tomato bed and I don't know how to resolve the incursion. Was tempted by the enchantingly named heirloom tomato "Mortgage Lifter," but I tried it last year, and not only did it not lift the mortgage, it didn't even set fruit until nearly frost. (So what if I didn't plant it til late July--we don't pay the mortgage off til we're 71 anyway.) We also hauled home 5 four-packs of impatiens for the Child's class to pot up at a botany workshop yesterday, and a monstrous fuschia whose drooping globs of flowers were cheerfully slaughtered by the Fifth Grade in the name of stamen-and-pistil-dissection. (I was a docent at the BBG for years, and old habits die hard.)

The Plant Sale often spurs me to my first panicked gardening of the year, but warm weather had drawn me out of my badger-den early (well, okay, last week), and I actually planted some stuff bought last year that survived the winter in pots. (The guilt, the guilt.) I stuck a new Coral Bells into the "woodland garden" taking shape in the long-desolate "Back 40," a deeply shaded yard-corner that, left to its own devices, grows plastic bags, ragweed, and packing peanuts. The idea is to use the leftover pavers from the driveway project to make a tiny patio just big enough for a cafe table for 2...except that laying these pavers will require leveling them with a layer of builder's sand, which we haven't managed yet. (The cement trough in the background is supposed to be my Early Spring Greens container garden, but I haven't dragged it into the sun yet, and when I do, I suspect Bagel will consume Squirrel Mesclun as fast I can sprout it.)

And now, for the first Rose Update...I did not buy any more roses at the BBG Plant Sale. (Alright, I bought 2 of them at the Gift Shop 2 weeks ago, which doesn't count.) Both are climbers: Climbing Don Juan (which sounds like a silent film comedy title), who is red, and the unfortunately named but highly regarded yellow rambler, Golden Showers. My fantasy is that Don Juan will climb across the derelict garage with its new, Law-and-Order-set cottage exterior, helped by a scaffold of lattice, but planting it close enough will require breaking cement. (Yep, can't plant a rose without a sledgehammer.) But Goldie (as I will call it) is envisioned as a swath of sunny blossoms in the driveway/over the porch rail, and I planted it last week in a spot where a baby lilac had been languishing, a lilac bought as a twig at the Philadelphia Flower Show 3 years ago. The poor lilac had to go somewhere (preferably out of competition with the Ent's steel-wool root mat)...but where? Needless to say, Walt Whitman had the answer, so I popped it into the closest thing we have to a "dooryard." (Note the one tulip that Bagel has not eaten--maybe cherry-vanilla is not his favorite flavor.)

How many years before I lean my head against the doorframe and grab a handful of lilacs and start sniffing and go...Out of Control?

In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,

Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love,

With every leaf a miracle......and from this bush in the door-yard,

With delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

A sprig, with its flower, I break.

Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d