Crazy Stable

Sometimes I wonder if we'd get more work done on the CrazyStable if we lived someplace else besides Brooklyn...someplace with fewer distractions. There is just too damn much fun to be had around here, so totally without even bothering to hop the subway to Manhattan.  Last weekend, it was diaphanously clad artistes perching amid tombstones to accordion music (see below)...this weekend, our friend, co-blogger, intrepid urban explorer and now author, Kevin Walsh, will be giving one of his "Forgottener Tours" of Red Hook--a nabe I love--after signing copies of his just-published book, Forgotten New York, based on his endlessly absorbing website of the same name.  The tour will start after the 3 p.m. booksigning at Freebird Books, 123 Columbia Street in Brooklyn (near the corner of Kane Street). 

1.  Those of us lucky enough to be FOK's (Friends of Kevin) celebrated at a book party recently at Chumley's, an appropriately tucked-away relic of Prohibition in the winding streets of Greenwich Village, where I met the fabulous bloggeuse of Dawn Patrol among other pals old and new.  (Your Stable Mistress is in one of those party pictures on Kevin's site, looking unfortunately like Letterman on laughing gas.) There was a rare degree of consensus that it couldn't happen to a nicer guy; Kevin has been following his curious passion for haunted and fading traces of the urban landscape for a long time. The book sprung from his site is a meticulously researched and designed Baedeker to a city caught fading in and out of a time-warp transporter beam, in plain sight all around us (if you know where to look, and boy, Kevin does).

Expect the Red Hook tour to be crowded; there are other Forgottener signings-with-tours coming up  on Wed., Oct. 18 (Greenwich Village), Sat., Oct. 21 (Staten Island), Sun., Oct. 22 (the Bronx), and Sat., Oct. 28 (Bayside, Queens).  At the heart of Kevin's enterprise is the notion that the urban landscape is endlessly fascinating. I remember on his tour of Bushwick, as the ragtag lot of us toddled along in search of crumbling brewer's mansions and other ghosts, some "homeboys" sipping from brown bags outside a deli gave forth with some, er, less than flattering characterizations of our shared adventure.  Kevin betrayed only a mild peevishness, and commented, "Hey. They're just sitting there, and we're going around, looking at stuff."  (Or slightly stronger words to that effect.)

Here's to going around!

When I'm out in the street
I walk the way I wanna walk
When I'm out in the street
I talk the way I wanna talk
Baby, out in the street I don't feel sad or blue
Baby, out in the street I'll be waiting for you 

--Bruce Springsteen, ‘Out in the Street’

Only the dead know Brooklyn, they say (although I've never been sure what that means).  But many of the living got a closer look  on Saturday at the astonishing Green-Wood Cemetery's "Angels and Accordians" event, part of "openhousenewyork".  It might be more accurate, if less catchy, to say "Only in Brooklyn would hundreds of us turn out for a site-specific dance performance that involved girls in a graveyard swinging in trees while guys in top hats played accordians." For me, it was a chance to give a workout to my nifty E-bay Canon PowerShot S50, recommended by RobJ of City Birder.

The dance event was sweet, with the basic wackiness of accordians keeping the whole thing from taking itself too seriously. The vibe was sort of "hipsters-meet-liturgical-dance-team and they all 'do' Edward Gorey."  The choreography was minimal, lots of floating about, but there were two moments of genuine brilliance (both sprung entirely from the use of the site itself). One took place in the Catacombs, where white-clad dancers stood motionless behind lit candles in the little "rooms" and spoke aloud the names of  the dead, ringing a silver chime (it worked, really--I couldn't bring myself to photograph them, it would have seemed awfully intrusive). This is the exterior entrance to the Catacombs; as you walked down this interior vault, you'd look to one side, and there would be a solemn apparition inside the burial chambers to right and left. Wild. The other great moment was at the end, when the dancers converged on the terraced hillside outside Green-Wood's chapel and "disappeared" by simply lowering themselves behind the ridges of earth and out of our sightlines below. Extra kudos to the dancers who elected to go barefoot instead of wearing Keds with their diaphanous garments. For the record, Charles-Ives-like dissonances sound terrible on accordians.

The glories of Green-Wood are such that even the most earnest dancers and accordionists risk being upstaged. To our delight, several mausoleums (mausolea?) were open to the public, including this  wonderful forecourt-and-temple arrangement;  an astute guy next to me pointed out that "Christ had a six-pack, and was really, like, an Adonis."  Good Lord, look closer (below)--he's right! (Sometimes there are benefits to living in a borough crawling with artists--like when the guy next to you with the bike-messenger bag turns into Sister Wendy.)

Green-Wood (their spelling, not mine) is famous as the burial place of--the famous: Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Morse, Lola Montez, and many other luminaries.  But of course it's the countless tiny headstones of babies and young children that blow a drift of dead leaves across the sunny heart: "Our Little Jessie," "Baby George," "Rosie," and on and on, sometimes three or more babies in a single family plot, within a few years of one another. How did their hearts take it, those Victorian parents? Did it help to walk these lovely hills, where stone angels have beseeched the sky since before the Civil War began? During the tour, we learned that Green-Wood only has room for about five more years' of burials, and then what? Wisely, they're preparing to "rebrand" themselves as a nature preserve, historical park, and sculpture garden. But amid all the arts and conservation "partnering" and nonprofit "planning processes," one hopes that the immortal souls won't be forgotten, or turned into nothing but quaint themes for hipster art projects.
Little Rosie's mom and dad would have wanted us to stop amid all our cultural preoccupations and spare them a prayer.

Did you know?

* Rainwater is bad for interior sheetrock.

* Squirrel mastication is bad for fascia boards.

* Cat urine is bad for parquet floors.

* Liquifying small decorative pumpkins are bad for antique sideboards and adjacent  bric-a-brac. Especially carved folk-art waterfowl under which pumpkin-liquifaction has pooled.

* "Quick" oatmeal is not good 40 minutes after being microwaved.

* Set your microwave for "3 minutes" to make the fence salesman arrive to take measurements.

*  A backhoe, dump truck, and jackhammer crew replacing the sidwalk across the street from your home make everything more exciting. 

* Baking soda rubbed into parquet floors does not extract the smell of cat urine.

* Murphy's Oil Spray for woodwork does not remove the stain of liquified pumpkin.

* 12:30 p.m. is generally considered too early for cocktail hour.

Hell-oise does not wish to elaborate on any of these points, but she  wishes you a peaceful weekend.

Yesterday, October 1, had loomed long and large in my fevered little mind--perhaps too large. It marked the 20th anniversary, to the day, of our first day as occupants of the CrazyStable.  Given to fits of grandiose plan-making, I had spent years envisioning a grand rededication to cap off a surge of long-delayed renovation, something to put Hyacinth Bucket and her candlelit suppers to shame.

The impulse to over-memorialize our transition to home ownership is understandable, I suppose, given that it also marked the onset of a series of permanent changes in our identity, from comfortable little apartment-dwelling newlyweds to  (in overlapping succession) overwhelmed homesteaders, traumatized elder caregivers, and richly blessed parents.  We are still all three, to some degree, and the monstrous appetites of the CrazyStable (not so much money 'pit' as money furnace) still keep us on the financial brink--another curious identity shift after making the one life choice that is supposed to confer immaculate financial security.

But with one happy exception--the restoration of the stained-glass  window lights--my ambitious list of second-decade house goals, and my plans for a champagne-fueled completion celebration, were all consumed by the money furnace.  The roof still leaks, and yesterday Bagel the squirrel actually looked us right in the eye through the dripping hole.  The floors and banisters are still covered in ox-blood red paint. The one exterior paint job we managed to afford in 20 years is flaking off. And two enormous rooms (albeit just ones used for storage) are still in their original state of utter ruination.  No bubbly toasts to a glorious transformation--not this year. Er, decade.

Ironically, Spouse and Child were off at some "future expo" at the Javits Center on this momentous day, observing too-clever robots and high-tech building solutions, while I dragged myself around the Stable in a  funk.  And surprisingly, the source of my heartache had nothing to do with our ever-receding goals for the house. It was, rather, another anniversary--a ten-year one, the death of my beloved Aunt Louie. 

Here she is as a young lass fresh from Alabama, smitten with a young photographer and Navy man who happened to be my father's older brother, Don.  She would become the Georgia O'Keefe to his Steiglitz in the decades to come.

This (below) is how I remember her later in life, a folksy wizard at once shy and adventurous, tooling around in her old blue Volkswagen bus, studying homeopathy and astrology, and tending to her magical country place out in New Jersey, which in many ways was my wild formative template for the CrazyStable. 

Although Louie was never child-friendly in any conventional sense, I adored her, and learned from her that neither poverty in youth, nor infirmity in old age, can keep a great soul from enchanted dreams.  (She also loved the CrazyStable, seeing in it promise rather than horror.) Her death ushered in, not just shock and mourning, but the weighty responsibility for my uncle's affairs--for she had been the business head of the childless couple, and had left their affairs in a baffling tangle that was beyond Don's grasp. He was resourceful and resilient, but a series of strokes had left him with a childlike dependency on her--and now, for an astonishing 10 years, on me.

When we first lost Louie, I struggled to fit their shipwrecked lives into my own, which included, at that point:  the CrazyStable, my disabled and chronically distraught mother, a year-old baby, a freelance job we desperately needed, and a close friend on life support whose affairs I also managed. By comparison, things are easy now; their decaying country house is sold, my mother and friend are both with their Maker, and Don thrives in his own wacky way at 93.  What seemed like a burden looks, in retrospect, more like a privilege.  But at the end of the day, 10 years is a long time to be without someone you love.

And so, at the end of the day, I shambled out onto the streets of Prospect Park South to buy some vegetables, vaguely intending to roast a duckling that we bought Saturday on the North Fork of Long Island.  I ran into several dear friends in the neighborhood and chatted, noticed the leaves turning buttery yellow, and then walked straight into a movie set, where Helen Hunt and Matthew Broderick were filming "Then She Found Me" on a neighbor's front porch. The PA's let us watch them rehearse a scene, so I got to hear Helen's lovely distinctive voice in person. (She's also directing this one.)   

I wished my friends a good Yom Kippur and moved on.  By the time I bought some dispirited overpriced celery at the Flatbush Food Co-op, I had run out of energy for the duck project, which had been slated as a sort of small-scale Candlelight Supper. Instead, we ate pasta in front of the TV, and Spouse and Child told me about the robotic Therapy Seal they saw at the Javits Center.  Food (ducky or not), friends, family, and movie stars...maybe there is a "little way" to Heaven.

That, at least, was the contention of my ascended spiritual master, whose feast day is...October 1. Happy birthday in Heaven, Thérèse...give my love to Louie. 

Wow, what mysteries surround people. I must pick myself up, and renew all my studies and get going. --Louie C. Becker, age  70, diary, Dec. 31, 1987

Jesus does not demand great actions from us but simply surrender and gratitude.  St. Thérèse of Lisieux, age 23, Story of a Soul