raccoon

when you live in brooklyn you tend to think of yourself as this special sort of creature that's neither of the city nor of the suburbs. it's one of those best of both worlds deals where you're ten minutes from everything but you might actually have a yard and see trees from your window. sometimes, though, you're reminded that you live on an island full of wild animals. and not so wild animals. and plain ridiculousness.

there is, of course, the ocean and all its attendant wildlife- fish, crabs, mollusks. and if you live near prospect park you might see the occasional horse crossing the street. then there's flatbush. a few years ago i heard a sound that was at once completely familiar and also simply not placeable in my set of neighborhood sounds. i looked out my window and saw a massive bay horse prancing down the sidewalk. not the street. the sidewalk. one morning i found myself face to face with a fairly large rooster. worried he'd be hit by a car, i tried to catch him. do not try to catch a rooster.

last spring there was a family of opossums outside my school. construction had confused them and they didn't know where they were said the animal control people. does it matter where in brooklyn you are if you're an opossum? you're still in brooklyn.

today i let my dogs out into the backyard. there was a cat creeping along the fence that separates the yard from the subway cut. it was large and it waddled. with a stripey tail. it was not a cat at all. what is a raccoon doing in the middle of brooklyn in the middle of the day? okay, the obvious answer is having a wicked case of rabies, so i shooed the hounds in and kept my eyes peeled.

what i'm really waiting for is one of those sewer alligators. or a white tiger. maybe even a monkey of some sort.

skull, bones, yarn, fascist ideas about babies

warning: knitting content.

my baby sister and her husband are all sorts of pregnant and just so you know, almost every female i know of childbearing age has been pregnant during the last three years. it's like they all joined some cult and instead of shaving their heads or drinking kool-aid, they got knocked up. this means i've been knitting baby things nonstop for a while. baby things are nice because they're small and quick and i can use my littlest dachshund for sizing. yes, i do. i did a blanket for the first baby i knew and hated it. this was back when i was knitting for the parents and i picked a cuddly pale yellow yarn that had the word "baby" right in the name and a promise that "acrylic" wouldn't make the baby irritated. what i made was a stupid yellow blanket that looked like scrambled eggs. i named it after the hayden carruth poem scrambled eggs and whiskey, but i think i may have damaged the poem instead of helping the blanket.

the thing about babies is that although they are, for the most part, sort of cute, this does not mean they want treacly crap strewn about them in soft pastels. babies like bold colors. babies are not exceptionally passionate about bunnies and kitties. they like hard things to bang on and throw. babies are dangerous. so i made my sister's new kid a blanket in black with a bone colored skull and crossbones in the middle. although the basic pattern is the same as the scrambled eggs blanket, making this one did not destroy my dignity or my sanity. i used alpaca wool. it knits up nicely and is quite warm. if he wants, the kid can sleep outside in winter. really.

i knit on the train and at work and in a cafe some days and people always ask what i'm knitting. "a baby blanket for my new nephew," i say, smiling. "oh, how adorable. what's on it?" "a skull and crossbones," i reply, holding it up proudly because it's my first successful attempt at intarsia. i am like a five year old holding up a finger painting masterpiece and i want praise. generally the praise comes in the form of something like, "oh, that's not really for a baby!" or "are you sure?" or something equally likely to be stupid. when i say, "of course i'm sure. yes, it's for a baby," they say, "oh, well, i guess if you want to..." and things trail off. thank you for your permission. i do want to. now that i've met you, i really, really want to. the best part is that even if coworkers and total strangers manage to wrangle their comments around to something like, "how unusual," the facial expressions are unmistakable. most folks look like they're smelling something awful and experiencing searing gas pains at the same time. some actually cringe as though the blanket will get them if they stay too close. it will. the blanket gets stupid people. yep. i couldn't find a fairy godmother for the kid so i made him a stupid-people-getting blanket.

for those of you who might want to make yourselves something like this, i'm pretty halfassed with patterns. the border is moss stitch and the skull is something i found online. if you've never done intarsia, a flat project in one color is your best bet. because of the crossed bones and eyes and all, at one point i had seven or eight balls of yarn hanging off and endured multiple jokes around the subject. putting them in ziploc bags made things slightly easier. the balls, not the jokesters. although... check the link to intarsia chart paper over in that links section and if you're feeling like doing your own pattern, there's a link to an intarsia pattern generator. you download any image (even a photo) and it will grid it up for you in a variety of sizes.

7th grade boy

this won't turn into a blog about every time i see freaks on the train, but this week has been quite bountiful, freakwise.

thursday morning on the bus in brooklyn from midwood to bensonhurst, somewhere on bay parkway a teenage girl says something ugly to another teenage girl. after a few unbelievably boring exchanges ("go make more girls!" "we'll see!" repeat 7 times. really. and i have no idea what they meant.), the girl standing lunges at the sitting one, the one who started. it's nearly a year since i've witnessed an actual physical fight on public transportation. neither girl is a good fighter. there's lots of kicking and bear hugging. the bus driver threatens to call the cops. he stops the bus. both girls are too stupid to stop and finally a man manages to pull them apart and shove one out of the bus. at 7am. but before that, it was wednesday.

wednesday, d train just after school lets out. wild little boy on the train singing, eating cheetos and smacking any available surface with a half-empty bottle of ginger ale. 7th grade or so. only a few other people in this car and he's not my kid so i knit. sit back. watch the show. his rendition of the real slim shady is brutal, off key, reedy. "i am i am i am the real slim shhhhhhhady!" isn't it painful enough when eminem does this? he leaps from seat to seat, swinging cheetos everywhere, banging his ginger ale bottle. finally, a woman asks him to stop. he pauses, looks at her like he's trying to figure her out, then begins banging the bottle on the nearest metal post as fast as he can.

it has been a while since i've spent time with the seventh graders. mine are ninth graders and although you're probably saying, "what's the difference?" it's shocking. like tadpole and frog. this particular tadpole has hit two men with cheetos and scattered the rest of the bag on the floor. he steps on a few, smearing orange powder on the floor of the train. i am tired. i have just come from a two hour class with a roomful of children nobody else wants to teach. i look across at him the way i look at my own students when they call each other retards or fags. eye contact. he looks at teachers all day. he knows what's next. "little boy," i say, loud enough to make sure he's not the only one who hears me. "little boy, are you okay?" this is not what he's expecting, but he's quick. "i'm fine. are YOU okay?" so we've established that we're not afraid of each other. wonderful. i decide to go with what i know and say, "did your mama teach you to act like an idiot?" you're saying it's not nice to say things like that to little boys. idiot is a mean word. but i would never call a child an idiot. i just asked a question. besides, he's in seventh grade. have you interacted with a boy that age? other people on the train are giggling. he hasn't thrown a cheeto or banged on anything since i first made eye contact.

the banter continues until i get tired and say i feel sorry for him because nobody taught him better. he's ready. "i feel sorry for YOU," he roars, then stammers while he thinks, "because..... YOU DON'T MATCH!!!" wow. seriously. i know, man. i know. i just can't figure it out. blues, greens. all those browns. i never match. i try not to laugh because really, this is a pretty impressive thing to say. that's the meanest thing he knows to tell me. i don't match. at 36th, he gets off the train and i go back to my knitting, unmatched, amused. the doors open and close several times, then stay open a minute or two while someone somewhere fixes something. the bell dings for them to close and i feel something small land on my foot. i look up and he's still standing on the platform at the door of the train, smiling. he's flipped his bottle cap at me just as the door closes. i wave, tell him i hope he has a nice afternoon. the train starts rolling.

bobbin

this new house is quite an adventure. it was remodeled just before we bought it by the type who flip houses for a living. they got it from someone who appears to have been feral. the house is old. 1925. there's an apple tree in back probably as old as the house with branches clawing at everything. there are three large closets upstairs (each the size of a manhattan loft- i'm not kidding- 6x12). on the inside of the door of one closet someone has carved "glen is a jerk" and then put stabby holes all around it. of course it stays. along the inside door frame of another, someone has written "jennifer's closet" in chalk with rainbow hearts and flowers running down the sides. the stair railings are chewed at the corners. one of the doors is chewed from floor to doorknob both on the door and the door frame. there are hook locks on the outsides of some of the bedrooms. it seems that dogs and children spent considerable time in closets here, sometimes with sharp objects.

then there's the yard. we've been picking up trash since november. there's a depression in the ground behind the house we think was a trash pit that got out of control. today was warm so i got a bag and went around picking up some of what was left behind. much of it was construction related. the renovators (or perhaps previous owners) appear to have smashed all the windows out from the inside. there are shards of glass under every window, roofing shingles and bits of wood, much of it with large nails and screws sticking out. some is household garbage. i dug a plastic tampon applicator halfway out of the ground before realizing what i'd unearthed. this is when wise people go in the house for gloves. black plastic bags, shoe laces, bits of toys, ziploc bags, plastic cutlery, plates and cups. ribbon, bits of food wrappers, scraps of fabric and buttons. string, twine, rope, wire. the black plastic buried a few inches down was difficult to pull out. a writhing mass of small, red worms spewed out with the last tug. worms are not horrible until they start spewing out in writhing masses.

the tree in the front yard is ringed with large, smooth stones. for some reason, the yard here is covered with what looks like wet toilet paper in small wads. these are taking the most time because there are hundreds of these small, cottony piles and they manage to attract even more bits of the aforementioned clutter. everything is shreds, remnants of someone else sticking to the house, the yard, the trees. i know this is what archaeologists do. sift through garbage. needles from the big spruces gather in wet clumps on the stones around them. in the middle of one clump is a bobbin, threadless, unbroken, bright as anything, waiting.

train i ride

ian frazier once wrote a piece called, i think, "take the f" in which he describes his community by taking the f train from one end of brooklyn to the other, just telling what he sees. i use it in class to help my students pay attention to detail and setting and to notice small things that might be big. they like it because, as they say, there's no end of crazy on the trains.

i ride the train. if you ride often, you see plenty you wish you'd never seen. there's the easy stuff- the woman hitting her kid while swearing at him, the constantly scratching guy hallucinating things crawling on him, the homeless guy peeing on himself, the floor or a seat, the teenagers who think you want to know why someone who isn't even on the train with you really really really is a bitch, the guy with the kilt and no underwear sitting across from you. but i seem to attract the unusual. friends insist they witness a greater spectacle when they ride with me. i am a magnet. people are more likely to rock, shake, chant, howl when i am in their car. homeless folks don't just sit next to me. they introduce me to their invisible companions and they always, always hold my hand.

i was trapped for ten minutes between stops alone in a car with two teenage boys who ingested a large quantity of something that made them want to kick out all he windows on the train while eating funyuns. i sat at one corner of the d train from coney island while an old man hunched over a crack pipe at the other end and smoked until bay parkway when another passenger got on. the problem, according to friends who also ride, is paying attention. when a tall, disheveled blind man with a harelip began pacing the car screaming "bell harbor, bell harbor. where my dogs at?" on the train a few years ago, i tried the not paying attention. when screaming people smell like pee, they'e difficult to ignore.

i have twice been on the train with someone promising to have a bomb. you think you know what you will do in this situation because you think you know what everyone else will do. "in this post-9-11 era...." blah blah. but when a drunk, deranged, dirty guy in camo starts screaming about the bomb he has and how everyone is going to die, what you don't expect is that the entire rush hour train will ignore him, continuing to read books and magazines, continuing to listen to whatever is pouring out of headphones while you begin to dissolve inside because you are foolish enough to think that a man with a bomb on the a train at rush hour would announce what he's doing before doing it.

the ones i like best, the least scary ones, are the guys who just yell information endlessly. the q train, 7pm on a wednesday headed toward brooklyn. cold outside. stink inside. packed in like overcrowded sardines with laptops and i-things, and this voice clawing its way over all the other stupid conversations on the train, grating and shrieking with a cadence like that of children i know with autism. he was sitting down and at first seemed to reading one of those stupid brochures about the bridges and the trains. we are, of course, going over the manhattan bridge at this point and he's saying, "some say the brooklyn bridge is the more famous bridge........... manhattan bridge is the only bridge with four trains going over it- the b, d n and q.... titanic..." so now it's not just some jerk reading something obnoxiously. he's starting to get strident. to get "all het up". i peer back though the tired, sweaty, wrapped up messes on the train and see this perky older gentleman with bright white hair and muttonchop sideburns bellowing from memory all this information.

as we leave atlantic another passenger, one who has not yet figured out that this train crier is, well, a little unusual, begins to argue with him about the very loud free tour of the bowels of brooklyn we're enjoying. or not. perhaps because the narrative had turned to a terrible crash on the brighton line during a strike when the driver/engineer was unlicensed and was travelling in excess of 70mph around a 6mph curve, at least according to our tour guide, the passenger felt a friendly little "shut up" was in order. it may be helpful here to let you know the q travels the brighton line and we were nearing (well, not really, but for the sake of the story we were) the site of this crash. it was how the historian (of sorts) responded that was so beautiful, though. his voice rose until it sounded like speaking was painful. "i do not do this all the time!" he shrieked indignantly. "in fact, the only time i give this particular speech is on this particular train line at this particular location! this is the brighton line! a brighton line train crashed into the wall right here! it is important for people on this train, here in brooklyn... brooklynites many of you, you should know this! if we don't know history...."

he really meant it. imagine. so much passion every day. such faith in the importance of his work.