Crazy Stable

With autumn’s first chill, let me introduce one of the CrazyStable’s more disreputable tenants: Bagel. He has a brother (or perhape a wife) called Smeagol. I don’t suppose it’s the same two squirrels who have tormented us for 19 years, but I regard them as one malign entity, an Ur-squirrel, lacking even in the few redeeming features of squirrelhood itself.

Industrious little fellows in all those children’s books they are. Bagel and Smeagol are squatters, looters, junk food junkies, and would-be murderers. They are a laughable excuse for wildlife. And, like their psychopath cartoon brother Foamy, they laugh at us. (Link to Foamy’s web site for some warped fun, but be warned: Foamy’s wrathful language resembles mine when dealing with Bagel and Smeagol.)

A partial list of Bagel’s squirrelly crimes and misdemeanors:

• Hanging upside down from a hole in the ceiling on our stairway landing, so as to encounter me at eye level as I descended our center hall stairs.
• Circling the living room like a rocket, destroying all my snow globes, and inducing our most reckless cat to follow him out a second-floor window. (Cat was reeled in by the last third of its tail.)
• Setting up leisurely housekeeping between our joists. Rolling something nutlike up and down above the kitchen ceiling bocce-style to taunt us during dinner (riddly-riddly-riddly-CLUNK.) We beat on the soffit with sticks and bells; he ignores us, but we feel better.
• Engaging in noisy turf battles with other squatters interested in the cozy confines of joist-land.
• Eating all my little Japanese eggplants—one bite each, then toss.
• Digging up my seedlings and pitching them around.
• Fornicating brazenly on our porch roof. (We have never observed a single baby, for which I’m very grateful.)
• Dropping an apple core on my head from a tree branch.

But Bagel’s hallmark offence is the idiotic storing of scrounged carbohydrates on the exterior of the house, typically in the corner of a windowsill. Here we see a classic example: a gobbed-on bagel deposited on the porch chair. The “ground” into which these “nuts” are delusionally “buried” has lately extended to the windshield of our car, which on a recent morning sported a half-eaten granola bar, in its wrapper, stowed beneath the driver’s-side wiper blade. To complete the tableau, the tree rat had left a nice little pile of turds glued to the car roof. If anyone else has experienced this sort of urban squirrel dysfunction, please comment below.

Darling Daughter, by the way, thinks these creatures are precious, clever, and in all ways delightful, and takes their side in everything. She would be horrified by this account of early American life by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1735-1813), a gentleman farmer from a time when men were men and squirrels were flail-ties. Pass the exhilarating cup, and let the mirth and jollity begin!:

At this season another animal comes out of our woods and demands of Man his portion. It is the squirrel…If there are but few, a gun and a dog are sufficient. If they openly declare war in great armies, men collect themselves and go to attack them in their native woods. The county assembles and forms itself into companies to which a captain is appointed. Different districts of woods are assigned them; the rendez-vous is agreed on. They march, and that company which kills the most is treated by the rest; thus the day is spent. The meat of these squirrels is an excellent food; they make excellent soup or pies. Their skins are exceedingly tough; they are stronger than eels’ skins; we use them to tie our flails with. Mirth, jollity, coarse jokes, the exhilarating cup, and dancing are always the concomitant circumstances which enliven and accompany this kind of meeting, the only festivals that we simple people are acquainted with in this young country.                                   -- Sketches of Eighteenth Century America

As promised, some Multicultural Musings on our life as Cream-Faced Loons in a predominantly minority neighborhood…

Our swath of Flatbush is the multiethnic frontier that lies beyond Prospect Park and “brownstone Brooklyn.” The usual stereotypes (both positive and negative) have seemed not so much false as irrelevant here in an area where “black” may mean Nigerian, Trinidadian, Jamaican (the Caribbean) or Jamaican (Queens), and “white” may mean yuppie, Russian, Albanian, or Hasidic. The hip-hop culture is not our dominant one, although we receive its emissaries now and then; reggae is more likely to pump from the speakers of passing SUVs than rap. So I can’t weave a spellbinding tale of being white in Da Hood.

Stereotypes, a cumbersome filter through which to encounter others, have seemed particularly inadequate to process experiences like these, scattered over the past 19 years:

• The hired hand at the Korean fruit vendor on Church Avenue who pinched the pallid flesh of my upper arm, then pointed to himself conspiratorially with a big grin, and said, “White!”
• The refined African-American homeowner who, complaining of Haitian immigrants who partied after dark in a nearby schoolyard, began by saying, “I don’t want to sound like a racist, but…”
• The black couple fighting in front of my house in broad daylight—he chasing her around a car with a heavy bicycle chain, in deadly earnest—who together bawled up at my window, after I threatened to call 911, “F*** YOU, WHITE B*TCH!” (I hope I occasioned their fond reconciliation by providing a common enemy…)
• More violence!: The two aging white “Sunshine Boys” of our block association, who once started a geriatric fistfight in the living room of our aghast Trinidadian neighbor
• The black cop writing up the report on my elderly Irish-American mother’s purse-snatching in front of our house, asking (about the perpetrator): “black?” with a tone of rote familiarity (and my mother being pained to answer “yes,” because, she said, “the policeman was one of the nice types”)
• Same mother, now lying delusional after hip surgery in nearby Caledonian Hospital, raving about a “voodoo plot” involving the staff, her family, and Geoffrey Holder…while patiently cared for by a largely Haitian nursing staff
• The black Jamaican entrepreneur who saved our block from fast-approaching ruin in the depths of the 1980s crack epidemic by buying the crack house from the mother of the dealer…the white dealer…and driving out his zombie-like white (well, grey) minions with attack dogs
• Did I mention the other drug problem on the block in the bad old days? The elderly white doctor who did a brisk business in bad prescriptions? For, you guessed it, mostly Caucasian pill addicts.

These last two tales are so seared into my consciousness as reversals of the urban script that I have developed an awful compulsion to blurt them out, Ancient-Mariner-style, to every black person I talk to for more than 5 minutes. Then I immediately double over in silent mortification, a la Chandler on Friends, wondering what kind of IDIOT would tell that story to a black person 5 minutes after meeting them. If you are one of these people, now at least you know that I felt like an idiot telling you that story about the white drug dealer.

Of course, over nearly two decades, we’ve had some close encounters with the headline-making pitched racial battles of Brooklyn, most notably Crown Heights and the “Korean fruit store boycott.” Crown Heights was three nights of incessant din, as helicopters crisscrossed constantly over the roiling streets around Eastern Parkway; the trouble zone was a good brisk 20 minutes’ walk away, but for the very first time it crossed my mind to own a gun. Then I sat on the porch, as my neighbors came home from the train in the twilight, and felt rather foolish.

The “Korean boycott” was a nastier business for us, because it happened on our own scruffy but proximate commercial strip, and to a produce store I often patronized, picking happily over plantains and mangoes and browsing the jerk sauce and ginger beer. As noted above, the Koreans did seem to have some “issues” with their black clientele (although, by stocking their shelves with obscure Caribbean speciality items—“gripe water,” anyone?—it seemed to me they had achieved a reasonable sort of symbiosis.) Then one day there appeared a circle of people holding signs out front and chanting about racism. Story was, a Haitian lady had been accused of shoplifting and roughed up by the Korean owners. (The woman’s injuries remained vague but dire.) This quickly escalated into charges that Koreans treated black customers with suspicion and disdain, refused to hire them, and “took” from the community without “giving back.”

The basic fishiness of the story, which was credulously reported by a three-ring media circus, became evident early on. First was the little old Haitian lady who prodded me with a bony finger as we watched the demonstrators together. “I saw the whole thing—nothin’ wrong with that woman, they do nothin’ to her!” Then came the realization that these demonstrators appeared to be aliens to the neighborhood, bussed in to picket. (They stood out easily, in their angry-message T-shirts and kente-cloth caps, from the careworn ranks of Church Avenue’s usual shoppers.)

Gradually, the media lost interest. The offending Koreans closed up and reopened elsewhere. And, seemingly in response to the charges that the lucrative mango-and-plantain franchise was being systematically denied to blacks, a supposedly black-run produce store was opened up across the street. It was mediocre, and soon went out of business.

But the entire mess left a legacy of press clips about “racially tense” Flatbush, when in fact we had served unwittingly as the staging area for a cynical publicity stunt by a cadre of veteran agitators and career race-baiters. These rascals surfaced again a short while later, in a noisy campaign to disrupt meetings of our local community board; their tactics were so absurd that the whole thing never went anywhere.

For a decade or so, no bonfires of the vanities have burned in Flatbush, thank God. If anything, the immediate neighborhood has become even more diverse, with an influx of Bangladeshis—rough-and-ready home-improvement contractors, mostly, shuttling vanloads of Mexican day laborers to and fro. I’ve read demographic trend articles suggesting that we stand, literally, on the front lines of the newest revision of the American dream—one in which “minority” has lost its meaning, both numerically and culturally. The tired old hateful call and response of white racism and black revolution seem like echoes from a distant past around here—a place where “race relations” are more likely to mean a Haitian homeowner paying a Muslim contractor to hire a Mexican crew to fix his roof. Of course, this is Brooklyn, not some rainbow utopia. Now, instead of resorting to simplistic black-and-white stereotypes, we can become annoyed with one another for a gorgeous mosaic of reasons.

For example, my Bengali-speaking neighbor has learned some rudimentary Spanish to talk to his hired hands.  I’m betting they make fun of his accent.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.        -- Galatians 3:28

Only a few weeks since the debut of CrazyStable, and I stumble upon a novel phenomenon: Blog Lag Guilt (BLG), the shame and anxiety experienced when one has noisily announced one’s personal online ruminations and then neglected to update them for a while. Freelance assignments with preposterous deadlines take the blame for this early episode of BLG, but it’s not too late to recount the week’s most astounding Flatbush event: a one-time-only, live, professional, performance of a dramatized version of To Kill a Mockingbird, staged on the adjacent porches of some of our rambling “Victorian” homes on nearby Westminster Road. Although I couldn’t attend, the Spouse did, and reported (still teary-eyed, bless him) that it had been incredible, in the good sense. (I had suspected the entire affair would be more akin to the Monty Python “ladies” enacting historic battles on the village green. I was also peeved that we couldn’t have participated as Boo Radley’s house, for which the Stable would be a dead ringer.)

Of course, there is an easy irony in performing Mockingbird in what we tirelessly point out is Brooklyn’s most diverse census tract. Behold us enlightened arts lovers and neighbors of every race, swooning over a seminal depiction of social justice in American popular culture…right on our own front porches! But the true connoisseur of irony eschews the “easy” kind, and when it comes to the realities of a multiracial neighborhood, ours has always provided a fine mix of more complex and obscure ironies. The lived reality of “diversity,” in our experience, diverges from the cinematic canon of tales of injustice or uplift: both more mystical and more mundane, at once ordinary and surreal. Our stories of black and white are better suited to weird graphic novels than Harper Lee, much less Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Our Diversity Journey started with house-hunting itself precisely 20 years ago. It would’ve made a lovely headline for the New York Times’ Real Estate Section: “White Couple Finds Racial Steering isn’t Just for Blacks.” Yes, we were steered away from any racially mixed neighborhood by every ratbag Park Slope realtor we met. We hadn’t requested this service, and apparently we didn’t have to. But there was just one problem: No predominantly white neighborhood in Brooklyn contained a house we could afford, not even a shell. So our pathetic little index cards were presumably “steered” into their wastepaper baskets. We would register, humbly assert our willingness to view fixer-uppers, and hear…nothing, except strained demurrals that “in your price range, you’re not gonna see much.”

Silly wabbits! It took us ages to figure out that, while the tabloids’ gritty real-estate classifieds listed many houses under our drop-dead barrier of $180,000, none of “our” real-estate agents were showing us any. Presumably they sat in their smoky, fly-specked storefronts, breaking into maniacal derisive laughter at the pale, clueless young couple who couldn’t afford to be white. We started waving clipped ads for affordable houses beyond the yuppie pale (so to speak), and noted their altered visage. Subtlety was not their strong suit; neither was eloquence. “That’s, ah, probably not an area you’d be interested in, ya know?” was a typical comment. Our favorite “coded” message was this apologia from a broker for what he deemed a marginal area with a mere sprinkling of offensive demographics (Kensington, perhaps?): “Ya got yer element in this neighborhood, but it’s spasmodic.” We treasure the image of homeboys and Crips falling out of doorways in tonic-clonic convulsions.

We finally got somewhere after staring the ratbag brokers in the eye and demanding, “START SHOWING US HOUSES IN INTEGRATED NEIGHBORHOODS. WE ARE OKAY WITH THAT.” Ah, well! In that case, madame, come see our back room! So began the house hunt described in the Bad Beginning, and thus we wound up settling in this leafy precinct of globe-spanning diversity and porchfront dramaturgy. It is indeed a “black neighborhood” at first glance (and a “black neighborhood” immutably in the minds of my mother and many now-erstwhile friends), but in reality it is a patchwork of well-off white liberals in landmark enclaves, Caribbean immigrants of widely varying ethnic stock, Chinese apartment-dwellers, Cambodian refugees, Hispanic working-class folks, and elderly Jews too stubborn or principled to catch a white flight to the suburbs back in the Seventies. (A nearby commercial strip adds the grouchy charm of Arab and Hasidic Jewish merchants selling their wares virtually side by side; where the F train emerges onto the elevated line, a day-care center run by a mosque sits next door to one run by an Orthodox temple. Still some cheap irony left.)

It is notable that we did not seek this neighborhood out of a giddy Bohemian white-folks desire to stroll down the street humming “It’s a Small World After All.” We looked first in familiar neighborhoods because we felt safe there, and because the commercial strips provided goods and services in our cultural comfort zone. (A butcher store that advertises “cow cod” and a fish store with “parrot fish and jacks” and a deli with “doubles and bakes” made for an intimidating market day, at least in the era before search engines.) But when we discovered that the premium for a neighborhood of white faces and walking distance to sun-dried tomatoes (one a surrogate marker for the other) was an extra $100,000 in 1986 dollars, it seemed an absurd reason to despair of ever becoming homeowners. We got a house with a garage and a driveway, so we could keep the car and drive 10 minutes to get sun-dried tomatoes. And we got Haitian and Trinidadian next-door neighbors who would have given us the proverbial shirt off their backs if we'd needed it.

Our neighbors welcomed us, or at least were kind enough to pretend to do so, long after we proved a washout as property-value-raising white gentrifiers. As our inability to lift the CrazyStable out of its “eyesore” status became evident, many seemed to grow downright solicitous, as if we were joining a fraternity where survival sometimes has to make do instead of progress, and avoiding foreclosure can seem as sure a victory as renovation. Since any of our non-Caucasian or even Jewish neighbors would have been detested in the lily-white suburb where I grew up back in the Sixties, (that would be Little Neck, Queens), this remains for me a touching act of historical reparation, a sort of community-wide, unspoken Atticus Finching. We have reaped what we did not sow.

Stay tuned to learn about how racial cross-currents have swept around the CrazyStable spasmodically ever since…often in ways more akin to Monty Python than Maycomb County, Alabama.

Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.

Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Yes, a good rain has finally managed to reach us--not enough to flatten the bushes, but enough to bring everything to renewed life with astonishing speed.  The despondent Japanese eggplant seems to have pumped out a flower overnight; the tardy tomatoes suggest ripening, perhaps in January; the guys in pots express a vibrant joy that no hose or watering can ever gives them; and, incredibly, the brown stubble of lumpy lawn has sent up an inch of grass (tufts, but they're green) overnight!

And things are finally verdant enough to start showing you some pictures.

Here we see the faint imprint of those hours spent drooling over garden design articles: Climbing up fence is morning glory "Grandpa Ott" (heirloom I grew from seed), in pot of ivy is mignonette (supposedly mad-fragrant, actually has a slight scent like a long-empty perfume bottle), and in between is Another Purply Thing whose name I forget; I bought 3 in a feeble attempt to plant "drifts" instead of lone stragglers, but one died. But there's a sort of lavender, horizontal/vertical thing happening here, no? (Whoever Grandpa Ott was--a short-lived and purplish-hued patriarch of some sort?--I bless him, because these are the first morning glories I have ever germinated successfully, despite trying every germination strategy (soaking, nicking, sanding) short of tap-dancing on the damn seeds.)

Here is the magnificent cranberry bush viburnum, a native American shrub with delusions of treehood. This year, it covered itself in lacy white flowercaps in spring, and here is the fall show--gorgeous ruby berries,  allegedly  a feast for birds (although our chief  bird populations ,  starlings and sparrows,  prefer curbside junk food crumbs). 

In the background is a partial rear view of the CrazyStable. In this view, and the one that follows, you will see how important it is to guide your eye to its most appealing aspects, and avert them, like a chivalrous lover, from the wrinkles, scars, and deformities. You can see the fan light in our simple brick "extension" (or "mud room" or "garden room"), a rare elegant touch in this place that seems to have been built plain. Don't gaze above it at the  rusty fire escape, a relic of a long-ago effort to win a certificate of occupancy as a dreary and overcrowded boarding house.

Here, the same viburnum branches (and rose "Katy Road Pink," a variety found wild in Texas that likes to grow tall)  screen our view of our neighbor to the rear, a hulking day care center encased in mud-brick-red vinyl siding; if you looked down, you would also note how well they conceal the compost pit. I tried one of those clever black bins, but its design (a screen down below, to "aereate" the stuff and keep it off the ground) proved my suspicions correct:  Worms cannot jump or stand atop one another's shoulders to breach a gap of several inches between earth and a tasty skyscraper of leaves and kitchen scraps.  Wormless, the stuff remained as incorruptible as a medieval saint; I ditched the bin and went back to the pit.  All composting books could be summarized as follows:  Put stuff on the ground, and it rots.

And then there are places where there's no place for the eye to turn but inward, to the imagination. Here is the garth, a medieval word I just learned on my last visit to the Cloisters: It's an enclosed garden, as in a monastery.  Right now, it's a vestigial chunk of driveway with cracked cement and garbage cans, but I envision a garth just as soon as two middle-aged people with no budget and bad backs can figure out how to break up the concrete without requiring vertebral reconstruction.

The driveway gate was erected to keep the world out, or at least discourage its incursions. The Stable bestrides the pathways of countless schoolkids, soccer players, shoppers from a nearby commercial strip and others, many of whom would simply drift into our garden to pursue activities such as pot-tossing, flower-pulling, hangover-sleeping-off, bladder relieving, etc.  Since invocation of the "social contract" had proved inadequate, we invested in these big gates, which shut from inside with a satisfying clang. But surprise! from within, they  had produced a cozy garth-like space, an intimate cul-de-sac.  I have already pried up the concrete in a small patch and put in yellow cherry tomatoes, a hyacinth bean vine, and lavender, all of which are flourishing. Who knows what will happen once we lift the cement lid off the earth and expose it to more glorious rain?

May He come down like rain upon the mown grass,

  Like showers that water the earth.

In his days may the righteous flourish,

  And abundance of peace till the moon is no more.

                             Psalm 72: 6-7

Departing from our house-centered narrative for a pressing ideological matter, it has come to our attention, by way of the New York Times, that the movie March of the Penguins has been turned by conservative groups into "an unexpected battle anthem in the culture wars"--monogamy, life is precious, Intelligent Designer and all that, with the added bonus of "soft-peddling topics like evolution and global warming." Of course, the filmmakers deny such ulterior motives, but frankly, there is plenty sinister to be found by both Left (no pun intended) and Right in this seemingly innocuous flick about the plucky Arctic birdies. I will leave it to future editions of Cahiers du Cinema to sort out truth from speculation, but meanwhile, here are:

This  subversive "documentary":

10. offers implicit support for gay adoption in its depiction of men tenderly nurturing eggs in the absence of any females.

9.  tacitly promotes a positive view of global warming, because a lone baby penguin quickly freezes to death, whereas in several more decades it would merely shiver.

8.  puts forth a thinly veiled advertisement for Scientology, as the penguins march in lockstep over the ice, in demented-looking and seemingly leaderless unison, notably without the aid of psychiatric drugs.

7.  undercuts two-parent families, by depicting females officiously taking over egg care en masse from males.

6.  reflects our depraved Zeitgeist, by depicting sex-crazed creatures willing to procreate with precarious resources for the support of their offspring.

5.  reinforces “looks-ism,” as the audience is encouraged to root for the “cute” penguins versus the mean-looking seal trying to eat them.

4.  cynically exploits the evident lack of prompt Federal aid to these distressed penguins for short-term political gain.

3.  avoids any honest conversation about the role of racism through the clever ploy of depicting a community whose members are all black and white at the same time.

2.  dodges the issue of whether penguins really have a constitutional “right to privacy.”

And the number-one hidden agenda of “March of the Penguins”:

1. It promotes atheism, because no benign Creator would ask mothers to travel all that way for a seafood dinner and back only to vomit it into their offspring’s mouths.