Crazy Stable

Paveover, College Point, Queens. Suzanne DeChillo, New York TimesOnce again, the Sunday New York Times brings home a stark reminder of the gulf between us and Thoroughly Modern Homeowners. According to this metro story ("For Some, Grass is Greener Where There Isn't Any"), many New York homeowners are paving over their front and back yards, not always to their neighbors' joy. Ah, yes, pave-overs--we know them well!

We have several right on our block of once-leafy, once-verdant 50 x 100 lots (that's a nice bit of acreage by urban standards). Several have involved lopping down huge old trees. Most have been done by homeowner/contractors whose panel vans cheerfully advertise their readiness to perform "all types cement work." Some consist of cracked, hastily slathered concrete; others are stark masterpieces of interlocking pavers. Every last one serves the prime directive of the pave-over: making more room for cars. Or SUVs. Or panel trucks. Some of these contractors were born and raised in Southeast Asian lands lush with vegetation--does it not break their hearts?

Not as badly as parking tickets or garage rentals, apparently. I have been asked repeatedly why we do not pave over our back yard--usually by someone eager for yet more vehicular storage and willing to rent some from me. "Hm, let's see--14 different rosebushes, one of which is named Cardinal Richelieu and has reddish-purple velvety blossoms? My tiny lawn, where praying mantises scramble up the shafts of grass each summer? The herb garden, which includes three different types of thyme? The compost heap, where every scrap of fruit, vegetable, and leaf waste gets turned into fragrant black soil? ..." Oh, never mind. None of it equals a parking space.

But in reading the Times account of pave-overs and their unashamed advocates, I have discovered an even more compelling argument for cement than mere utility. In the minds of some enlightened homeowners, the whole lawn-and-border thing is worse than a waste of space--it's a toxic threat. One Jack Casaro, aptly employed as a "technology systems executive," has recently turned his modest Whitestone house into a "brick fortress," reports the Times, and now he proposes to spend another $25,000 to pave the property in brick. Grass, he says, is "too much maintenance." (I assure you that a fortress on a 40 x 100 lot does not leave much room for burdensome greenswards.) But it was the comments of his mother, Angela, that really opened my eyes. That lawn? That compost heap? A sinister hotbed of contagion! Or, as Angela proclaimed, "Lawns have ticks and disease and worms and stuff. This way, it's safe and sterile. It's a cleaner area for the children to play. I love nature and I love grass, but I don't want my family exposed to disease."

Angela, you earth mother you--I'll just bet you love grass! About as much as my poor inner-city children, back when I gave tours of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, who (after a lifetime kept pent up in the projects) would recoil in horror from the rolling lawns, shrieking in genuine alarm, "That's nasty!" And to think I have been exposing the poor CrazyStable Child, all these years, to those dreaded worm-borne diseases! To think of the countless occasions on which she has (shudder) actually touched a worm!

All this has simply fueled my resolve to tear out much of our remaining old cement pad--in the now-truncated piece of driveway destined to become a medieval cloistered garden, or "garth"--preferably with my bare hands. I've already got several big chunks pried up. (Then there's the substrate of sand and gravel to excavate--although if I put down enough compost I can simply start a "lasagna garden" of fertile layers.) It must be my old Catholic fervor for "reparations"--making up for the sins of others. Every backache and broken fingernail will help expunge the karmic (and environmental) insult of Angela's Asphalt.

The city itself lives on its own myth. Instead of waking up and silently existing, the city people prefer a stubborn and fabricated dream; they do not care to be a part of the night, or to be merely of the world. They have constructed a world outside the world, against the world, a world of mechanical fictions which condemn nature and seek only to use it up, thus preventing it from renewing itself and man.

     --Thomas Merton, from Raids on the Unspeakable (1964)

Thanksgiving managed to be wonderful, in spite of the poor Child having managed to contract both warts and chicken pox in the same week, and the Godchild to have hatched a sore throat the morning of the feast. Godchild and family are our "family of intention," and so our 10-year tradition went forward, gathering in the kitchen of the CrazyStable for truly superlative versions of all the stuff that's supposed to be on a Thanksgiving table. (This year, Best Friend glazed the mince pie crust with bacon fat and then sprinkled it with sugar--that and the jiggers of brandy in the filling, plus RonnyBrook whipped cream, produced something beyond joy.)

The table was a Missing Man Formation, however, due to the absence of Uncle Don, who at age 92 (almost 93) is too old and frail to be exposed to chicken pox and its risk (for him) of the dreaded shingles. This was sad, because Don is the crucial connection to the core of my Thanksgiving obsession. Starting when I was 7, our family always spent Thanksgiving "out at Brookside"--his and my Aunt Louie's country house in Hunterdon County, NJ.  Brookside was, to me, like Bilbo's house in the Shire--a fantastic, Hobbit-scaled treasure chest tucked into rocky wooded hill that shadowed a stream-fed valley. It was magical in every regard, filled with Aunt Louie's books, souvenirs, and marvels relating to her fantastic array of interests: homeopathy (bottles of tiny pills and potions everywhere),  UFOs, astrology, dowsing.  The tiny rooms were crammed with curios, incense burners, owl figurines; there was always a cat or two, and even in winter a rusty wind chime tinkled on the sagging porch.  The hill was studded with tiny sheds built to hold even more archives and oddities. Each year, my dad (Don's brother) and I would walk up the hill as dusk fell, kicking up leaves (just a few yellow ones clinging to the dark wet branches), smelling the moss and bark and water, and then we'd duck back into the crowded little kitchen, the one I've etched in my heart as the Ur-kitchen with its spice jars and hanging iron pans, to a steamy cloud of turkey-scent and pie perfume.  Sometimes we'd eat with our plates on our knees in front of the fireplace, and then pop popcorn in an old iron grille-thing with a long handle; if I was patient, I could coax Louie into telling me bits of my horoscope, even though she knew my mother would disapprove.

Brookside sank into ruins gradually over the years, its demise accelerated after Louie's death in 1996, and the vast and sad task of dismantling Bilbo's Hobbit-home fell  to me...a strange parallel Stable story that lasted for years, and indelibly shaped my understanding of our own house and home and our relationship with it.  I may tell this tale in pieces from time to time; it involved some fascinating things, like contact with the friendly dead through a gilt-edged Book of Common Prayer, and vintage Volkswagen beetle almost entirely eaten by mice.

But, getting back to Thankgiving, we transferred the feast to the Crazy Stable many years ago, when Don and Louie became too frail to host. Louie would always bring my beloved creamed onions in a  casserole, and Don (our family photographer) would take a picture of everyone about to dig in. Here is my favorite shot, from 1993, which could be titled, "We Don't Call it Crazy Stable for Nothing." Or perhaps: "The Survivors." Starting from front left and going counterclockwise we see: my mother (with pill bottle at the ready), her recently broken and badly healed wrist visible; she had also, that year, broken her hip and her other wrist, and was at that point three months away from an even more devastating break of the psychiatric sort.  Even here, she is clearly not a happy camper. Next to her is Cynthia, her gorgeous and competent home health aide, who held things together on countless occasions through sheer force of will and a strong back. Then comes the Spouse; then Merian, hiding a radiant smile behind her wine glass along with an oxygen cannula (for her story, see "The Second Story Man" somewhere below in an earlier post). Then my adorable father-in-law, his perfect Irish face punctuated by a recent bout with skin cancer surgery; then your humble StableMistress; and finally, Louie, who had recovered the previous spring from a near-fatal abscess and cellulitis of the head and neck. She was mortified about the hair loss (she had a ravishing head of strawberry blonde hair as a young beauty from Alabama), but was game nonetheless. All the old folks except Don, who is behind the camera, are gone now. Cynthia is still in the home health aide business, bless her, and by now those white walls need a paint job, badly.

What do I give thanks for? The ghosts of the table past...the children of yesterday's table, young and vigorous enough to bounce back from chicken pox and sore throats...and the curiously blessed fact that we have entertained these two family parties--the withering branch and the sprouting shoot-- in something of a reverse order from the usual life script. There is nothing like the laughter of children to ease the heartache of memories of infirmity and loss. That, and mince pie with bacon crust...and Best Friend's creamed onions, which she makes for me without fail.

A present  from the Kurdish president!  Repeat after me, Holy Father:  "We will store this masterpiece for safekeeping in a temperature-controlled warehouse in Queens!"

Thanks to those wacky self-professed Catholic nerds at Notre Dame for presenting this gem via their group blog, Shrine of the Holy Whapping.

Thank you, client who needed revisions by "first thing this morning," or I would not have looked out my study window to see this glorious sunrise over Flatbush at about 6:30 a.m. Now this:

Pied Beauty

G LORY be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Speaking of which, I really like a blog called Dappled Things, by a 31-year-old priest in the Diocese of Arlington--he is impossibly articulate and wise and orthodox for someone who came of age in the Dark Age of Catechesis, and he also looks, like, really cute. (Get thee behind me, Thorn Birds!) (Well, it didn't help that he and I both came out Numenoreans on the "What race of Middle Earth would you belong to?" quiz! Flashback to teengirlgeekdom!) Here's a sample:

There is a sensuousness (often even a sensuality) built into the Catholic religion, an attention to the fact that the human spirit is ordinarily reached only through the impressions that come through our body's senses. Where Catholicism goes, the arts tend to follow…

Mm-hmm, preach it!

Behold Rootbeard the Ent, our towering guardian and silver maple, in the first flush of color change! The curtain of green he provides across the facade of the CrazyStable will change to a scrim of yellow, and in the brief afternoon hours, the sun from the west will pour through it into the front rooms, bathing everything in gold.

Melancholy is never far away this time of year--and not just because we must contemplate raking Rootbeard's shed mantle into big black bags. (About a dozen bags, and that's after about 60% of the foliage blows down the street to our lucky neighbors.) The Catholic Church devotes November (with canny pagan calendar-logic) to remembrance of the dead, and just about everyone I've loved and lost has conveniently managed to expire between September and New Year's, with November and December chock-a-block with somber anniversaries .  Add to this my history of robust "seasonal affective disorder" (c'mon, surely they made up that term just to produce the acronym "SAD"), and the fall-to-Christmas stretch is rather daunting.

When I am drawn to mope, overeat, and hibernate (my time-honored adaptations), two things often prove restorative. One is, curiously, an insight from a botany class at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden about the mechanism by which leaves change color. The chlorophyll fades away, and the glorious russets and golds and reds turn out to have been there all along. They don't "change"; the colors are simply revealed, as the leaf shuts down its natural life cycle as a food factory for the tree.  I fancy the idea that as my Verdant Youth wanes, it will unmask all sorts of colors , perhaps more intriguing and flamboyant ones, that were waiting for life's autumn to display themselves (but not, please God, that red-and-purple-hat business).

The other tonic for morbid autumnal musings is this gust of bright wintry wind from GBS, which works for me more consistently than Prozac:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

--George Bernard Shaw, from Man and Superman, dedicatory letter