Crazy Stable

Without further ado, for Cat-Blogging Friday:  Here he is, the senior member of the CrazyStable Feline Triumvirate: Raffles! a.k.a. Handsome, Tuxedo Guy, and Raffie-Boy.

His 'working title' was Gonzo, because of the wacky stunt whereby he entered the Stable and our lives: via the porch roof, where we noticed him loafing for an entire day. To Spouse's horror (after foolishly pointing out the cat that was "back on the roof" by evening--and had in fact been stuck there since morning), I opened the window and invited him in--wherein the poor fellow, still in his tux after a long night of ill-advised revelry, hopped over on three legs! He must've climbed still higher on the Ent and then fallen. Around and around he circled our legs, purring in a fine vibrato-rich baritone, and basically doing the Roger Rabbit ohthankyouthankyouthankyouTHANKYOU! thing. He was about two years old, and his neck fur bore the imprint of an outgrown collar; otherwise, we hadn't a clue where he came from. A good bet is that the Cat-Dropping Spaceship passed overhead and noticed the big yellow letters, "SUCKERS," stencilled in cat-visible-only ink on top of our house.

Spouse declared that we would not, NOT, be adding him to the 4 cats we had at the time (about1993). But a friend was in the market for a friend of the four- (or three-working-)legged variety:  our beloved Merian Kirchner, a writer who lived in Park Slope and had recently lost her husband.

Merian, a fragile-looking sprite (shown here holding our Child), was the daughter of Maud Hart Lovelace, who authored the famous Betsy-Tacy books; the books were based on Maud's bedtime stories for Merian when she was a girl.  Merian came to meet "Gonzo" in his quarantine area, kneeling down with her circle skirt spread out around her;  he limped over and settled on the skirt peacefully. I warned her that we weren't sure yet whether the leg would heal (it did); she said simply and happily, "Oh, he'll do just fine."

Upon hearing of his porch-roof entrance, Merian--a huge fan of mysteries--named him after Raffles, a gentleman burglar and "second-story man." They had a good few years together in her spacious brownstone apartment on Berkeley Street,  Raffles bounding up and down the long hallway to accompany her from room to room. The poor guy has bad nerves, a sort of Tourette's-like  problem with impulse control, and would occasionally "lose it" and bite her (and then mope dejectedly when she would scold him); Merian never held it against him, though, insisting, "He is a kind cat."  Since Merian was both a superb judge of character and a person with a lapidary ability to both see and bring out the best in every creature, this is a credible assessment.

A child of the Bohemian Greenwich Village of the Fifties, Merian was a smoker, and quit too late to dodge the  bullet of emphysema. As her health faltered, Raffles spent longer and more frequent sabbaticals at "camp" back in CrazyStable, where the other cat guys knew and tolerated him (except for the late Gordon, an alpha male who harassed him). Things came apart; first she had to give up her apartment, and came to live with us for awhile, a delightful houseguest even camped on our couch with an oxygen tank. Then came the crash and  an endless, inexplicable year clinging to life in a nursing home on a ventilator, unable to speak--the one thing she'd always dreaded. Merian bore that last year with the same odd, steely denial that she used to cope with her entire decline, scribbling her half of our conversations on stacks of legal pads.  At each visit, I would tell her how much we wanted her "home," because the Crazy Stable was the closest thing to a home she had left; she made it quite clear that the aseptic room at St. Elizabeth's would never be home. And I would always tell her some little story about Raffles, and she would profess interest and delight in her boy's doings, and we would have a little ghost-life in which to dwell happily for awhile.

Raffles, and a whole lot of memories of convivial wine-happy dinners and garrulous car-pool rides to our long-ago jobs in New Jersey, are my connections to Merian now. Like an idiot, I tell this cat about his "mama Merian" to have the pleasure of saying her name. He hardly ever bites anymore, and now, as senior cat, he is only occasionally baited into a wrestling match with his younger pals. He's suddenly begun to look old--maybe as old as 15 --although he still chirps and hustles, tail curved upright and ears swiveling, in his same dapper style.  He sleeps for hours up here on the third floor, in a quiet corner on his sheepskin.  He is a kind cat.

Yesterday I planned to relax in post-houseguest mode, putter, and progress in my third-floor rehabilitation, but that was before the nor'easter. (What's with that apostrophe, anyway? Why do we suddenly turn into old seafaring salts chomping pipes around a crackerbarrel when referring to this meteorologic phenomenon? Gar, gar, cap'n...she's a fine nor'easter!) During the recent monsoon, the trickle of roof tea in the second-floor laundry room had advanced to a brisk drumbeat into the foil catchbasins. It had just about dried out, and now this fresh onslaught...So I spent yesterday morning scaring up a roofer to slap some flashing cement on the offending Valley of the Damned before the deluge. Nice fellow named Nick showed up. Carries insurance! (Which is to say, he's expensive.)  Seems to know what he's doing, and to take some pity on me (How long ya been in this house?)...barks very specific orders at his guys...informs me that a whole new roof would run about $40,000 (this is about what I'd heard from others, believe it or not), and that today's outing, whose results he could not guarantee, would be $950. Black stuff was slapped about as I davened and stuffed myself with little Hershey bars and paced. Soon,
extension ladders were screeched and borne away, and dark wedges of cloud scudded in.

And today it rained, hard...and it leaked quite a bit less in the laundry room.  Just a few tablespoonsful from a whole nor'easter. Which is not quite the bang I'd desired for that particular pile of bucks.  The whole affair, combined with the sudden need to turn on the heat (now a commodity so expensive that it feels like some designer drug to be resisted by force of character), has just had me curled in a ball like a hibernating vole.  The Crazy Stable loves summer: Almost every room has two capacious windows inviting the breezes, which issue from Prospect Park still fragrant with pine and pond, and the Ent provides a towering green scrim. The Crazy Stable detests winter: Warmth vamooses out of every crack, the wind rips in from the park's expanse, and the Ent groans under a weight of icicles, while the various parts of the steam heating system wheeze and hiss and fizzle. Today was the season opener of Flue Spillage Season--in a high wind, the pilot blows out on the hot water heater, usually while I am steamily showering to defrost my poor overstuffed hibernating-vole body. (Why does fat insulate other mammals and not me?) And, after $950, there is still roof tea brewing. 

Could've been worse department: The wind has died down, and the Ent is unscathed...   

I have indeed spackled--not just a skim coat, but filling in big lacunae underneath with "Structo-Lite," this fluffy cement-hard stuff for really big missing chunks...but before I tackle the deeper spackling issues next week, time for some plugs. I haven't tried theamazing purple spackle referred to below by my lovely second-cousin-in-law and style guru, Rena Tom, but you can see the results this weekend in her gorgeous new little jewel box of a shop in the south Slope: Rare Device at 453 Seventh Ave. near 16th Street. A jewel box, literally--Rena is a wonderful jewelry designer and also features work of some talented colleagues...but there are also strange cool Brooklyn shirts, soap made in Brooklyn in unusual fragrances that actually smell wonderful instead of odd, and fabulous bags for all you bag enthusiasts. That end of the Slope--which used to have tumbleweed rolling down the middle of Seventh Avenue back in the day, when Spouse and I briefly lived there as carefree newlyweds--is becoming a nexus for design-y goodies that are hip and still affordable. While you're there, check out the best wine store in Brooklyn, run by my pals Patty and Bob, Slope Cellars...Patty has a genius for describing wine with perfect acumen, even for a wine ignoramus like me, and never sounding like Robin Williams doing his oenophile routine ("Hm, a presumptious little Bordeaux...impudent, yet flaccid!") It's a talent shared to some degree by everyone in the store who's ever waited on me--total lack of pretension and a 100% track record on recommendations. (And in back, lots of crates of wine marked "Cheap and Tasty," always true on both counts.) So get off the F train at the 7th Ave. or 15th St. stop, have brunch, and have a ball.

This weekend we will be hosting the Goat Eggs clan here in the Stable. After my assurance that October is the very best weather for visiting NYC, they will see us in rain...but that is why God created planetariums and put lasers in the firmament of the skies!

How's this for a tonic for that pre-house-guest inferiority complex about the falling plaster over the door to the guest room?: (This was sung by our glorious church choir to a setting by Gerald Near)

Christ, He requires still, wheresoe'er He comes,

To feed or lodge, to have the best of rooms:

Give Him the choice; grant Him the nobler part

Of all the house: the best of all's the heart.

--Robert Herrick, Christ's Part (1647)

My third-floor study has been my obsession over the past few weeks...reconfiguring it, painting it, and before painting, spackling. I have huge issues about spackling, mostly related to my dad, the Michelangelo of spackling.  Then there is my decision to embark on a radical new color scheme,chalky white with a sort of Adirondack spruce trim around the windows and baseboard...why green? why do I always gravitate to the treacherous shoals of greenness? [In a startling insight, the Spouse pointed out that I detest being trapped in an office and am usually yearning to be out in the natural world, and that this might represent an effort to create some sort of psychic gateway. This has bought him about 250 'clueless points' to cash in the next few times he, like, totally doesn't get something.]

And what this is really all about is TOTAL SCREAMING FEAR OF CAREER EVOLUTION...because while I will be keeping my 'day job' of medical writing/editing, the next phase is book arts...if I can ever get over PARALYZING FEAR OF CHANGE, ahem.  My deceased mother has been visiting, speaking of parental issues, pointing out the imprudent fiscal angle; she is not too crazy about the spruce trim, either. She beams in on me like the English guy and the little girl on John Nash in A Beautiful Mind; like Nash, I have learned to studiously ignore her and then she quiets down, but at critical junctures this becomes more difficult. The spackling has also intersected with the upcoming 20th anniversary of my father's death and all this Joan Didion mourning stuff. Which is why I bought No Man is an Island for $7 at Barnes & Noble yesterday and then got rollers and more spruce paint today. I may weave all these things together masterfully in my next post, or I may post more pictures of Bagel the squirrel, or I may just curl up in a fetal position with spruce paint under my fingernails, crooning and rocking. Since we are going to have houseguests this weekend, and the guestroom adjoins this angst-ridden study, the last choice would be most inconsiderate. 

What is it? That mysterious light? What was that strange, lofty quiet we awoke to? Who knew the sky could be blue, and what a blue!

    Funny that I realized this morning, after our monsoon, that I missed, not just the sun, but the shadows--those black-velvet October shadows. It's our 22nd wedding anniversary (the day itself was perfect, picture-perfect,) and we're going to the Greenmarket to shop for a lovely anniversary dinner at home, my having finally convinced Spouse that the natural-gas-price thing pretty much rules out dinner at Rosewater, our favorite Park Slope restaurant (which would have to include babysitting, since there is nothing, nothing, not a single appetizer or side dish, that the Child would eat at Rosewater).  Our present for each other is going to be a microwave--our first!--not so much for cooking as for the heating of these amazing neck pads I tried. (See a gas-conservation theme emerging here?) I have always been deeply suspicious of microwaves, but after one session with my best friend's nuked neck pad, my course was set.

And isn't the 22nd anniversary gift theme "radiation"? (The new one, anyway; I think the old one was "tin.")

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my Lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!  Of You, most High, he bears the likeness.

St. Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Sun