Crazy Stable

What grows in Flatbush as we edge toward mid-November?

No ailanthus trees, thank God. (The "tree that grows in Brooklyn" is an invasive pest.) And not tomatoes.  Not on this vine, anyway...and this was the year I was going to be really good to them.  Staking, feeding, the whole bit. Instead I stuck them in the ground and forgot about them--and then the viburnum turned into a shade tree and they lost their sunlight, and the raspberries arched over them and intimidated them. (Time to reposition the "vegetable bed" or get serious about pruning the bullies.) This poor vine actually produced one nice edible fruit last month; the rest, as you see, are corpses. Of which variety, I forget (although it's some heirloom that seemed to matter greatly back in June).  Oh, the shame.

The cherry tomatoes, which basically grow themselves, did a lot better. The teeny little grape-cluster ones ("Matt's Sweet 100's"?) did especially well. And as usual, I lacked the heart to yank out the wild volunteers that sprouted from last year's plants, even though they seldom produce anything stellar. I mean, could you look this little shaver in the eye...or the bud union...and tell her not to give it a try in that crack in the cement?  (These ripened in the week since I shot the picture, and tasted pretty good.)

 The herbs are still raging joyfully. Rosemary (in pot) and lemon balm (wild) are hanging out together, and the catmint is flourishing--not growing to staggering height, because the cats really do roll in it. (Not our cats, they're inside; but the local alley cats pass through the yard and indulge in a little druggie body-rub now and then.)

Several sprawling garden bullies kept pumping out a variety of gorgeous little rubies. Below is one of at least a hundred such clusters on the cranberry bush viburnum, which the Monrovia label claimed was a "native American shrub." This year, it towers over the garage, and everything else. ..and has taken to producing tough-minded offspring via underground runners. Again, hard to get mad at it, when its arborial aspirations have neatly camoflauged the long-broken window in the side of the garage and the compost heap. (And in spring, each cluster begins as a frothy white lacecap!)

And then there are the raspberries. I swore these were the very last bunch (and duly offered them up to the Child, who worships them as I do)...but today there was precisely one left, just hanging perfectly off its little stub; I confess that, alone and puttering in the falling leaves, I blew the ant off it (ants love 'em) and popped it in my mouth. This year, the ever-advancing ragtag army of canes has produced an unprecedented bumper crop; after years of, maybe, a tablespoonful on a good day, we sometimes collected enough for two dessert-servings. Since it was one of my childhood ecstacies to tramp through the woods, braving scratches and poison ivy to pick raspberries at my aunt's country place, it all seems like an impossible luxury.

What else is blooming?  Two rosebushes...a flush of late lavender...the sweet alyssum, which releases much more of its odd, melancholy perfume after a few cold nights...the impatiens, still...a few hardy amethyst-lipped "Grandpa Ott" morning glories...some blowsy asters...and, after a long dormancy, the yarrow, all pink and girlish amid russet peony foliage.  So much flourishing after so much neglect...thanks, guys.

On this All Souls Day, we salute the passing of an erstwhile neighbor of the CrazyStable: William Styron, novelist and chronicler of the battle of mind and soul against depression and despair. Styron's fame rests on a handful of towering works like The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie's Choice, and his late-life memoir Darkness Visible. But here in Flatbush we mourn him for a curious and particular reason: His narrative gifts cast a ghostly illumination into the recent but vanished past, just 200 feet from our front door. We call it the Sophie's Choice connection, and I was working on an entry about it to share with you here this week. Now it will be my offering on the Day of the Dead (on which Styron left this world, surely a novelistic touch he would have appreciated).

By all accounts, Styron's masterpiece was a roman a clef inspired by his early postwar years as a struggling writer, who becomes the restless narrator Stingo:

Our secret delight in the book is Styron's evocation of our neighborhood when it was "the kingdom of the Jews," as Stingo wryly observes, with Church Avenue a place of delis, rye-bread-and-challah bakeries, and the click of mah-jongg tiles. Nowadays, the air is more likely to be fragrant with roti, dal and rice-and-peas than pickles and brisket. In our sector, almost every trace of a once-thriving Jewish culture has vanished under the sifting sands of demographic change and immigration, with the exception of a few handsome temples. There are burgeoning young families of very Orthodox Jews deeper into Brooklyn's heartland, but the remnants of Sophie's generation are getting too old even to sit out on the benches along Ocean Parkway. If there are any number-tattoo'd wrists left in Brooklyn, they are increasingly likely to be resting atop the bedcovers in a nursing home, I fear, and their owners' stories (except for the endless font of imagined ones, like Styron/Sophie's) will disappear with them.

The connection gets even closer; Stingo goes on to describe our view:

“Sitting down, I lifted my gaze and looked out the window and was suddenly made aware of another element which must have worked on my subconscious and caused me to be drawn to this place. It was such a placid and agreeable view I had of the park, this corner known as the Parade Grounds. Old sycamore trees and maples shaded the sidewalks at the edge of the park, and the dappled sunlight aglow on the gently sloping meadow of the Parade Grounds gave the setting a serene, almost pastoral quality. It presented a striking contrast to remoter parts of the neighborhood. Only short blocks away traffic flowed turbulently on Flatbush Avenue, a place intensely urban, cacophonous, cluttered, swarming with jangled souls and nerves; but here the arboreal green and the pollen-hazy light, the infrequent trucks and cars, the casual pace of the few strollers at the park’s border all created the effect of an outlying area in a modest Southern city—Richmond perhaps, or Chattanooga or Columbia. I felt a sharp pang of homesickness, and abruptly wondered what in God’s name was I doing here in the unimaginable reaches of Brooklyn, an ineffective and horny Calvinist among all these Jews?”

The prospect today is still verdant (thanks now to artificial turf), but gone are the days of "infrequent" cars and trucks; Caton Avenue is a congested pseudo-highway with semi's bouncing past at all hours. Still, it's possible--when the Parade Grounds are vacant of soccer players--to get precisely the vibe Styron conjures up.

When Sophie's Choice was made into a movie (long before our move here), it was partially filmed at a house on Rugby Road in the Prospect Park South historic district, where locals still recall Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline shooting this scene on the roof. Hollywood painted the house pink for its role, then painted it back to its original color. Here's why:

“Yetta Zimmerman’s house may have been the most open-heartedly monochromatic structure in Brooklyn, if not in all of New York. A large rambling wood and stucco house of the nondescript variety erected, I should imagine, sometime before or just after the First World War, it would have faded into the homely homogeneity of other large nondescript dwellings that bordered on Prospect Park had it not been for its striking—its overwhelming—pinkness. From its second-floor dormers and cupolas to the frames of its basement-level windows the house was unrelievedly pink…The floors, walls, ceilings and even most of he furniture of each hallway and room varied slightly in hue—due to an uneven paint job—from the tender rose of fresh lox to a more aggressive bubble-gum coral, but everywhere there was pink, pink admitting rivalry from no other color..."

"Large nondescript dwellings," indeed. But what inspired Styron to make Yetta's place pink? None of the informal block historians recalled his actual digs being lox-colored inside or out. But there is one house nearby, a rambling ex-boarding house, whose residents have discovered a ghastly shade of Pepto-Bismol pink under the pea-soup green and grungy white layers in at least half its rooms. Yes, the CrazyStable. We were never pink on the outside (in fact, no one seemed to have painted our blue shingles since the place was built). But given the evidence of our interior paint-chip history, it is not impossible to imagine a young author walking home from his miserable job at McGraw-Hill and passing, each night, a nearby rooming house, some of whose rooms gave off a libidinous, roseate glow. Already dedicated to his craft, the callow young man might well have thought, "I'll use that someday."

That, anyway, is my fancy. I always dreamt of contacting Styron to ask him about his time here, on our corner, but couldn't quite bring myself to bother him with it; his struggles with his physical and emotional health were well-known, and I feared he might think I had reduced his haunting tale to a walking-tour curiosity. Now, of course, I'll never know, but ultimately, it doesn't seem to matter. Sophie, Nathan, and Stingo, conceived here in a young man's fervent imagination, will probably live as long as books are read and movies rented. That's neighborly enough.

Today is All Saints' Day, but I find it hard to focus on "all" of anything. The closest thing the CrazyStable has to a patron saint, I reckon, would have to be St. Philip Neri, founder of the Oratory (a Catholic church in Rome that became a sort of movement or order around the world). In this picture, he looks like Ron Moody with heartburn, but he sounds like a guy who would have understood our present milieu:

 (The appearance of 'heartburn' in his iconography, by the way, is because the Holy Spirit entered him through the mouth as a ball of flame, a sort of hunka burnin' love that lasted all his life.)

St. Philip is the patron saint of joy, something that had been in short supply in our lives in the years before we joined an Oratory church. Learning about him was restorative; he loved music, picnics, and pranks, and especially enjoyed puncturing pomposity in the would-be-holy of this world. He was a master confessor and reader of hearts, but not above making his followers leave the comfort of a church to go swab the sick at a grimy local hospital. And he often said to those around him a simple phrase that can lift the heart when you can't decide between re-grouting the moldy tub, turning over the compost heap, or going back to sleep:

"When shall we begin to do good?"