Entries from September 1, 2007 - September 30, 2007
In Spite of Hell's Might
The following letter was written on September 26, 1940 by my aunt, Beatrice Warde, an expatriate New Yorker living in London through the Blitz. It appears in her collection of wartime letters, Bombed But Unbeaten (1941). The letter pays tribute to the ordinary workers of the city struggling home through the disruptions of bombing barrages, and then, this:
…There are suburbs and outskirts-streets around New York; there are miles of Brooklyn and Jersey City in which the streets have always seemed hideous to Manhattanites. Tell them from me that some day the Little Men may be trudging down those streets with fighters roaring overhead, shrapnel falling, fire-engines clanging by, and the sky all melon-pink; and they’ll be coming home in spite of Hell’s Might, because it is their home, and seeing nothing in the world so beautiful as Number 57 still there with its windows all shiny with unbroken glass and the still unbroken Family waiting under that roof. And when they ask the Little Men, and the little typists, “Why go back to Jackson Heights to-night? Why not sleep in the office shelter?” the answer will abash the questioner: “But I must get back to my family.” If and when that day comes, you’ll find that the people of the Bronx would rather pick their way past craters and crowd into a neighbor’s house when their own goes, rather than leave the Bronx! You’ll know what the word Brooklyn means, and it will never sound funny any more.”
With prayers and gratitude to all those who have sacrificed to protect our families and homes, and with inextinguishable love for the city of New York--BLB
Illustration: Woodcut, Beatrice L. Warde, by Bernard Brussel-Smith, 1950
Brenda from Brooklyn
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Here's to Golden Come-What-May
Quite a weekend around here...your StableMistress turned 50. Curiously, what bothered me was not the age itself, but the inarguable corollary that 20 years ago, I turned 30. The onset of those two prime-cut decades is indelibly easy to remember. In September 1987, in rapid succession:
...after a year of struggling to carve out a habitable oasis in this house, we moved my widowed mother into the downstairs apartment...
...where she seemed to thrive for one "honeymoon" month...
...and then I went freelance to pursue my dream of working as a writer/editor from home...
...and then my mother started to lose her mind, conveniently situated within vocal hailing distance of my home office two flights up.
What followed were two decades (ouch, keep saying it until you toughen up, girl, two decades) of freelancing and caregiving, snarled together in a wildly unpredictable roller-coaster ride, with motherhood added on halfway through. The cast of elders requiring my services as Medical Advocate and Hospital Fool-Killer expanded to include various well-loved aunts, uncles, parents-in-law, and one treasured friend. No longer just a medical writer, I would acquire intimate firsthand knowledge of wound care, mechanical ventilation, the titration of anti-psychotics, post-op care for cardiac surgery, and home morphine infusion therapy. I would learn exactly what Medicare does and doesn't cover (hint: "doesn't" doesn't begin to describe it) and would hire more than a dozen home health aides from as many different countries. Somewhere in the middle of it all, we had a baby, and kept trying to renovate chunks of the house.
The house, you've heard about; the baby is now 12 and magnificent; and the elders have all gone to their rest...but my resume, not surprisingly, is a little short on worldly achievement. (I keep recalling the midlife jibe of an erstwhile colleague as we car-pooled to our jobs at a publishing firm in New Jersey: "There comes a point when you realize you're never gonna win an Oscar.") But everyone around me has conspired to kick some sense into my sorry birthday butt. The Child and I went swimming yesterday at Brighton Beach, where summer refused to be over despite the lack of lifeguards, and then we all stuffed ourselves with Porterhouse at that temple of beefy ecstasy, Peter Luger's (probably the only place in Williamsburg that is hipster-free). A wise friend of mine who also recently turned 50 reminded me to embrace God's mysterious will, and then danced with me on the sidewalk outside our church; and my garden gave me an astonishing gift of raspberries.
The thing about the raspberry canes is, they are out of control. This spring, after years of offering up a few berries a day, they marched right over the vegetable bed and pumped out two successive flushes of fruit. This weekend, they outdid themselves, knowing that the Child and I cannot resist them. The entire garden is neglected and wild now; cherry tomatoes and some unidentified squash sprouted from the compost and, as usual, I get suckered into sparing them to see what they'll produce.
But the garden is full of gifts: a lilac-like buddleia given to me as a shoot by one friend, along with the third generation of Thai peppers sprouted from the long-ago dinner-garnish of another friend (the dancing one--he also cooks). 
Plus, a feathery white wild clematis of some sort has scrambled up the rosebush--where on earth did it come from?
Every year, the garden does this ...extinguishes much of what I've planted with hope and ambition, and instead offers up its own tangled harvest. Time for acceptance, and possibly a Raspberry Dance.
...anything that grows for us
is wild or thrives by luck, our prized
but accidental garden full
of unruly roses, unlooked-for lilies.
Our blow-ins have become perennials
re-christened every spring: Windbloom,
Randomflower, Golden Come-What-May,
Weather's Will, Common Chance-Blossom.
James Scruton, 'The Accidental Garden' by way of 'A little cup of poetry' blog
One stable, Augean, to go, please
I always knew it would be hard, this part. I mentally rehearsed for it over the years, but now it is upon me: cleaning out my Uncle Don's apartment, a stable far crazier than ours, in preparation for selling his co-op.
My uncle and aunt were among the very first "co-operators" to inhabit Morningside Gardens when it opened 50 years ago on Manhattan's Upper West Side. 
It represented the urbane side of their life plan, the one centered around exotic cultural events, clubs devoted to UFOs and other esoterica, photography, and sundry enthusiasms that filled and energized their childless life. The rustic side would flourish in Brookside, their little old white house in a wooded valley in New Jersey, where they spent weekends gardening, reading, feeding birds, and tooling around the backroads in my aunt's collection of vintage Volkswagens (beetles as well as buses, all painted blue).
That was the first of their Augean stables. When my aunt died almost 11 years ago, leaving the childlike Don alone at age 83, I signed on to facilitate his final years of feisty--okay, completely wacky--independence. The first order of business was clearing out and selling that wonderful country place, buried under years of clutter and falling to ruin in the woods. This turned into an exhausting, amazing journey of discovery, as I unearthed several Tut's tombs' worth of family treasures and secrets; my aunt turned out to have been, not just a compulsive pack-rat, but an obsessive diarist as well. As her strength for manic bouts of organization failed, she took to dumping all the detritus of their lives into undifferentiated piles, squirreled away in a dozen mouldering outbuildings. The clear-out job was a heartbreaking one, since this house was a mystical shrine of my childhood, scene of family summer picnics and Thanksgivings, and a place of deep respite and peace for me even in adulthood.
Don didn't seem to miss Brookside after we sold it, and kept busy loping about the city on public transportation (assisted by his trusty crutch), taking pictures, attending free concerts, and rewiring lamps with terrifying creativity. He proved as adept at unloading clutter as Louie was at collecting it; he'd often call me to announce cheerily, "I'm eliminating!" I suspect he gave away lots of stuff, valuable antiques as well as junk, to assorted home health aides, repairmen, and strangers. The Morningside apartment thus had three incarnations: the delightfully Bohemian refuge I remember as a kid (with a Buddha statue and a beaded curtain!); the Collier-brother elder-nest crammed with my aunt's books, homeopathic remedies (hundreds of jars' worth), and tchotchkes; and, finally, the widowed Don's increasingly bare and filthy rooms, filled mainly with piles of assorted photos and paper memorabilia that he proudly called his "museum." At the end, there was hardly more than a bed and a few sticks of furniture to hold the teetering piles of stuff.
Oh, and there was some old pre-digital photography equipment and supplies, offloaded to a member of the co-op's camera club. And now even the "museum" has been cleared out, much of it awaiting a final sorting in bags all over our house. The piles are 95% garbage and 5% priceless family pictures or terrific Don photography, all in manila envelopes with nonsensically wrong labels. An envelope marked "Italy, 1939" in Don's wavering hand might contain take-out menus from his favorite Indian restaurant down Broadway; a box labeled "best India slides" might turn out to contain an ancient cache of Fig Newtons; and so on. Don's mother, another clutterbug, saved 4-year-old Don's first drawings. So did Don. Half the family was involved with light opera; no one ever threw out a program in 125 years. I lifted a pile of letters from a grubby folder marked "Interesting People Known by Family"; among the thank-you notes and Christmas cards from long-forgotten acquaintances was a letter to my grandfather from Albert Einstein. (And a Publishers' Clearinghouse pitch from the mid-1980s--you get the idea.)
As Spouse and I wandered through the emptied-out rooms, now awaiting the anonymity of plaster and paint, I left one task for last: taking down the portraits of a young Don and Louie drawn by their family's friend, the legendary eccentric artiste Paul Swan. 
While no masterpieces, they are reasonable likenesses, and Don taped them up on the wall at the foot of his bed. During the final few days of his life, when we got him home from his purgatorial nursing home, they were the first thing he would see upon awakening, and the last thing he would see before turning out his lights. Removing them felt like lowering the flag before abandoning an embassy or a military base.
Their home for half a century, I thought, now dissolving back into a blank template of empty rooms. They moved here the month I was born, and now as I prepare to turn 50, I erase the last traces of their sojourn. Back in our own CrazyStable, it is impossible not to envision a time when these rooms, too, will stand empty again. But I find myself smiling; they had an awful lot of fun along the way, and by God's grace, so do we.
We still have that Buddha, by the way; he's sitting on our landing now, serene and inscrutable. There are some things you just can't get rid of.
