Crazy Stable

Just in time for Halloween, a quick treat, something so horrible that they locked it up and threw away the key:

The original Hellpit...our Third-Floor Bathroom!!! Aiiiiiieeeeeeeeee!

When we first toured the house, I did a Ghostbusters on the door, whose key old Chang had conveniently "lost," and kicked it open. Oh...my...God.

After many exorcisms, it is now pink and rosy, and home to my aunt's collection of little Indian bronzes and assorted tchotchkes.

It's not perfect; the tiny stall shower leaks (blame Canada, where it was made), and the taping is coming apart in spots.  But so far, no ghoulish hand, Carrie-like, has shot out of the toilet to reclaim its fortress of evil. Of course, there's always tonight....bwahahahaha...

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.  May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.  Amen.

I was gazing down into the cool, drizzly garden this morning from our second-floor kitchen window because Charlie the Kitten had been machine-gunning. You know, the cat-behind-glass-talks-filth-to-prey noise. Every cat has a different twist on this, from a barely audible chattering to a highly vocalized riff of outrage. Charlie's is like Curly of the 3 Stooges doing "nyuk-nyuk-nyuk" in a whisper.

Sure enough, there were house sparrows everywhere out there--you know, those little brown stripey guys (males have black heads) who eat your fries in the McDonald's parking lot. These ubiquitous Eurotrash birds constitute 95% of my backyard bird feeder guests, and occasion within me a longrunning, low-grade spiritual battle: to come to terms with them, to love them even, because the gospels tell us to welcome and feed those who show up, not those on the A-list, even if cheap supermarket seed is up to $5 a bag.

And then this tiny little warbler...I said WARBLER...landed on the windowsill. Right in front of us. Gazed straight inside for a moment like a windowshopper, and flew off into my Bangladeshi neighbor's monster squash vine to forage in its enormous leaves. Charlie did a spit take, and I think I did too.

If you have never dabbled in bird-watching, trust me: This is like a paparazzi on his day off, walking into the supermarket to find Lindsey Lohan snorting coke with Brad Pitt in Aisle 7. Or a CIA agent tripping over Osama coming out of the men's room in the mall. It is so very much too good to be true. Bird-watchers swarm over obscure pockets of park and woods this time of year, peering upward at the migrating flocks until they get a cramp called "Warbler Neck," to spy these elusive featherballs as they flash through the foliage.  And here was a warbler on the windowsill, probably snickering at Charlie and his Kitten Gatling Gun.

And then comes the Great Birder Question: What kind of warbler? The bird guides have pages and pages of them, and lots of them look really alike; my Peterson Field Guide devotes a whole page to "Confusing Fall Warblers." Little arrows point to helpful clues like eye rings, wing bars, head streaks, and buff patches on parts of birds that most of us  never see unless we pick one up dead. (I'd like to ask some of these birds, "Pardon me, would you just turn around and let me see your rump?") Since warblers are fast flitters, I'm awed by the ace birders who can "make" things like eye rings; I'm lucky to come away with a keenly observed detail like, "Um, it was yellow."

Anyway, the markings of our brazen friend this morning were very plain--precisely the colors of a hard-boiled egg yolk, dull olive on top phasing into rich yellow underneath. Even eyeball-to-eyeball, I was too excited to notice an eye ring. At first, book in hand, I figured it was a female common yellowthroat (above), mostly because "common" sounds like something I would see. But Cornell's birding site describes the male yellowthroat as a "skulking masked warbler of wet thickets," and while it did rain and parts of my yard are thickety, we're no swamp--and no one could call this "skulking"! Instead, with a country twang of joy, I believe it to be a Nashville warbler, described by another birdwonk site as a "small, sprightly songbird of second-growth forests" who "can be seen feeding in mixed-species flocks in the fall...they search for food in the foliage, flicking their tails frequently...fairly low in trees or bushes." Bingo! (And no, they do not home their way down to the Grand Ol' Opry wearing spangled boots and fringed vests; they were just named by a guy who first saw them there.)

This isn't the first time that I've (maybe) identified a bird using behavioral profiling along with appearance.  Plumage changes with the season, life phase, region; but we all of us show our true colors in how we get our grub and where we spend our time. 

Photos: Top, Kevin T. Karlson, bottom, Greg Lavaty.

 This was an elegiac weekend, one in which to contemplate the swift passage of life's richest gifts. It was also a time to elbow people in the stomach on my way to a crate of produce. This, friends, was the last weekend for fresh corn at the  Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket. It was also the last real weekend for field-grown tomatoes (and what other kind is worth bothering with?)--there may be a few stragglers ripening half-heartedly under row covers, but today the Beefsteaks and Brandywines and I knew it was goodbye.

Not that the family won't have plenty of heavy tote bags to drag home on our autumn Saturday morning sorties.  We got a fine, somewhat triangular pumpkin (let's see if the kids in the street will spare it from beating or kidnapping this year).       

I've gotten a few mums (not this many);

I am especially proud that one of last year's plants, which I stuck in the ground after it shot its bolt, came back and bloomed this year, right on schedule, without a commercial nursery's worth of forcing.

I hope the grapes will last another week or so ...they are the juicy passion that eases my heartbreak over tomato- and corn-withdrawal. The names alone--"Seneca," "Canadace," "Jupiter"--are like poetry, conjuring the mythical upstate New York of Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale with its mystical "Lake of the Coheeries."

I love trusty earthy things for making soup. Okay, half the time I buy them meaning to make soup and then let them get all slimy and neglected in the crisper, but who can resist the notion of earthy soup-making?

And of course, everywhere there are squash, from tiny "Delicata" to monstrous grey Hubbards. I happen to like winter squash, if I'm feeling energetic enough to whack away at it with a cleaver, scrape out seeds, and hack it into chunks for baking or boiling. But this year, I decided that one of those vaguely menacing pod-shaped ones should be pressed into service as a Hallowe'en decoration more menacing than any Jack-o-lantern. Here, on our table, a tribute to the Invasion:

Now that's what I call a festive fall centerpiece!

"Do you not say, 'There are yet four months, and then comes the harvest'? Behold I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest." John 4:35

I don't watch much TV, so maybe I'm the last person in the world to catch the latest Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" ad, but in case you missed it, here's what Advertising Age called "a worthy cause, a brilliant strategy, a flawless video." It is called "Onslaught," and if you're the mother of a daughter, it is downright painful to watch:

I love the Dove campaign, and not just for the obvious reason that I am the mother of a (beautiful) daughter who is already grappling, before her teens have begun, with these devouringly powerful ideas and images. I am also the daughter of a mother who was beautiful and glamorous in her youth, and whose self-esteem was destroyed by the minor cosmetic flaws left by a skin condition in middle age. As a girl, I winced inside as my smartly attired mom, having touched up her lipstick and given herself a dab of Chanel No.5, would turn one last time to the mirror and say, "God, how I hate my face." Now I do my own share of kvetching in front of the mirror about encroaching signs of age and long-resented imperfections, and wince again to hear my daughter say with exasperation and a note of pain, "Mommy, you look fine!"

She thinks the house is beautiful, too. Maybe I should shut up and listen.

...there, beneath the blue suburban skies...Ahem, and now we return to our regular programming [shifty eyes].  Go figure: My pal Kevin Walsh of Forgotten New York links to CrazyStable as a font of information on Victorian Flatbush (or at least our little corner of it), and a wave of guests click over and encounter...posts about a cat show and a mouse embryo. Sorry, we're a bit distractible here. It's why the house isn't done yet. (Well, that and the money.)

I've actually been planning to share my discoveries on (a) our surrounding micro-neighborhood of "Caton Park," or, as I like to call it, NoProPaSo (North of Prospect Park  South) and (b) the True Actual Recorded History of the Crazy Stable (it actually had some illustrious residents back before its precipitous fall from grace). I will do this very soon, but meanwhile, here are the most Caton-Park-o-centric posts from the archive, all staggering works of heartbreaking genius, as Mr. Eggers would say:

On life next to, but definitely not in, a posh historic district: here.

Our William Styron/Sophie's Choice connection (it's a doozy): here.

Exactly what I think of Dodgers/egg cream/stickball nostalgia addicts: here.

Demographics, or, the gorgeous mosaic meets reality: here.

More multicultie follies--our racial steering story: here.

A walking tour of Prospect Park South: here.

Coming soon: cool facts about Caton Park yanked from the mists of Flatbush history, including True Crime Stories and Tales of Primeval Brooklyn Golf. Meanwhile, below is a chunk of a 1908 map, which doesn't show our streets south of the Parade Grounds laid out yet, although by that time, they were. I guess the "Electric RR" was the trolley along Church Avenue, long gone and surely much more fun than the lumbering B35 bus.