frying pan

http://www.fireboat.org/
http://fryingpan.com/

if you walk on 26th street toward the hudson river you will eventually run out of 26th street at a stubby pier with fat railroad tracks on it. if you walk along this pier you will see a real live railroad caboose right out over the water. anyplace with a caboose is worth nosing around. when i was a child there was a caboose cemented to the ground at schifferdecker park and there's one in the middle of a town some guy bought in missouri and i know i've eaten pasta in caboose somewhere in syracuse with a poet named b.j. they're decorative, i suppose. they make folks hearken back.

walk past the caboose onto the barge floating in the hudson. you will see a place where all sorts of tasty food, but mostly fries, is being prepared and then a small hut with beer and wine. get yourself something. there's draft guinness and the fries are seasoned with old bay. if you don't quite have your sea legs yet, you'll want to stay here on the barge. find a place on the south edge, preferably upstairs, where you can be next to the john j. harvey, a 1931 fireboat with more stories to tell than even your wildest grandpa. the harvey was rescued from the fate of most small old boats- the scrapyard- by a group of folks who planned to spiff up the boat and prance around in it from time to time. it went back to work as a real live fireboat when planes hit the world trade center, where it was a small but valiant part of a large effort to add sense to a place where there was none. the boat itself is still in need of much help and is not yet spiffy, but like an old dog, spiffiness hardly matters. you love what you love. you know about the harvey and so it is nice to sit next to it and think for a minute about how such and old boat still had things to do. and if you don't know about the harvey, maira kalman has written and illustrated a phenomenal children's book about the boat's exploits called fireboat. do not make the mistake of thinking you're too old to read a book written for children.

if, however, you do have your sea legs, you'll want to walk round by the harvey just the same to see it and maybe look at whatever sign happens to be on it at the time. but then you'll head back past the little shack with the beer and the place where the good food smells are hovering and you'll want to walk up a ramp to the frying pan. this is about when you realize maybe you're in not quite a ship graveyard but something more like a retirement home for working boats. the frying pan is an old light ship. like the harvey it is neither large nor showy, but it is a good place to be. if you meet the challenge of walking aboard a boat carrying a beer and a plate of food, you'll be just fine the rest of your stay. get there early, before the businessy folks with ties and heels show up, although generally the ties and heels sort don't make it out onto the frying pan itself. the fact that it spent three years underwater may have something to do with that.



climb the ladder stairs to the platform on top of the main cabin. there are seats and tables here, just like on the deck, but you want to go up a bit further. this is where it will help to have pals with you, because climbing this last short ladder with your beer and fries isn't going to get you, the beer and the fries all three to the top. so you'll send someone up, pass up food and drink, then you'll climb the ladder to the top of the boat. there are only a few seats there so although it's good to have friends, it's best to have a small number of them. you will want to sit up there on a day that looks like it might storm, but it is good to be there any time at all. because you are at the highest point on a small boat, you will get the most out of the waves.

if, at some point, you are thinking about bathroom options and considering how far away the barge looks now that you're on top of this small boat, never fear. prepare for your first ever tour of the inside of a light ship. get yourself back down to by climbing the two ladder flights and turn right once you're on the main deck. you'll see a large opening with not much but darkness, especially if you've been sitting on top of the frying pan on a sunny day. you will think your eyes will never adjust and you are right about that. if you are tall, begin to duck now. continue ducking. walk inside. you will be vaguely aware of stairs ahead of you. grab the rail and descend. you will be inside the boat. there are no lights during the day. there are probably some at night, so go during the day. it's more interesting. you will see ahead of you and to the right a bit a huge set of gears, all on a horizontal plane. all smelling like dust and oil. because this is a comforting smell you will not be so frustrated by the fact that you are inside a moving boat without really much ability to see and no idea where the bathroom is. this is because most folks who have been have no idea how they got there and how they got back. so you will not know where you are, but you will be inside. which is when you will notice that you would really, really like to find this bathroom. move right of the gears into a small room. you will notice two or three other folks wandering about. they can't see much either and are also on a bathroom quest. they walk hesitantly like the newly blind and their movement will be exaggerated by the waves shifting the boat. there's an open door to the left with several toilets in it. try to get one with a port hole so you can see out. how often will you get an opportunity like this?

when you walk out you will be tempted to assist others who are looking for where you've been. don't. let them find it on their own. the walk out will seem too easy and you will realize you could live on a boat, could stride from port to starboard with the waves crashing and would not falter. and you may even stride right out onto the main deck without holding onto anything, remembering a different you, minutes ago, who could not walk across a flat surface here without clutching onto something. and you will not even know how you got up those two ladders putting you back at the top of the lightship. but you are in a good place. you will listen to the stories your friends tell and you will tell yours. you will laugh and they will laugh and as the sky begins to turn you will notice how this river is really full of ocean and the salt of it seems to make the breeze coming off the water just a little more heavy on your skin. and you will know that it will be a shame to have to go back to the land.

this little light

brooklyn is an opportunity to experience anything. and flatbush, right in its middle, is everything, but crowded right up onto everything else. if you live in the middle of flatbush and you happen to be fortunate enough to have found an apartment in one of the old victorians whose butts meet up with the subway cut, you can get everything, right off the back porch. you can get a live rooster running down your street and a guy being chased by cops on the railroad track below your house. there are opportunities, i tell you.

this evening, i was in the bedroom at the back of the house. we sleep just a few feet away from the rumbling b and q trains and ignore it all, but tonight when i walked into the room i heard something at the end of one of the trains. gospel sounding something. and i don't mean that awful whining that passes for gospel some places. i mean serious, get happy, jump around, slap jesus on the back kind of gospel. so i went out onto the back porch to investigate. the singing got louder. there was clapping. quite a few voices and all of them fitting together to make a little song pretty big. this little light of mine, i'm gonna let it shine... i kept trying to look through the trees, through the fence, looking for those voices. i never did see them, but they were right across the train cut, in the backyard where, three years ago, i saw a man pee off the back fence into the cut in broad daylight. a man who lived there, yelling while he peed over the fence. i got the impression maybe that man had moved away. these folks didn't seem like fence peeing types. when they got tothe hide it under a bushel part of the song, a woman's clear voice hollered NO! in response. this was my favorite part of the song when i was little. we'd stand up all of us and scream it as loud as we could. anytime you get to yell in church is a good time. and any time you get you yell no in church is a serious good time. and then the b train came through on purpose like a tornado. and then nothing. but i stood there in the dark on the porch a while just in case.

the white whale

the folks in the catskills have plenty to say about the ground here, but to boil it down, it's like this. for every dirt, there are three rocks. basically, having a yard is like having a slightly silty riverbed. you get some moss, an occasional wildflower. but the rocks aren't really there to help create lush flora. or even a little space for a fern. just so you know.

the sweetie and i inherited a spectacularly dilapidated fence when we bought our house. fearing it would fall and kill the next door neighbors, or at the very least, the cat that roams their yard, we began to pull down the front sections. this is when we realized why the fence had been put up in the first place. the yard itself is not so bad. it has plenty of spruce and day lilies. but it is also a monument to disuse and neglect and brokenness. there's not a thing in the yard that exists in a functional state, or even in a non fallen over state.

now, you already know we're bordered on two sides by an abandoned factory so this little tribute to not throwing away what is broken is certainly not the most brutal view in the house. but it is also not the mountain we see from quite a few other windows and we'd like to make it just a little bit less depressing. we could probably go next door and pick up the brokenness from the yard, but the neighbor would likely come flying our her door after us. it has been our experience that she generally communicates through yelling and screaming. so we're planting a hedgerow. that's right. one dirt to three rocks. and we're digging. to be fair, it's a fifty foot long section of the yard. not much. we're saving our little pennies to fence the back yard so the dogs can roam free. and so we won't be able to share quite so freely the view of the same neighbor's fifty seven plastic trash bags full of trash that accumulate before someone hauls them off to the dump. although it is a fascinating sight.

so we bought a few plants. some rhododendrons and mountain laurel . evergreen plants with sassy flowers, some spring and some in a few weeks. and figured we'd add a few arborvitae in the spring. foundation plants, the folks who sell plants call them. then all the small stuff later as we're able. and while the sweetie was furiously digging a hole for one of the rhododendrons, i wandered off to find a place to put some potted ferns i knew wouldn't last the winter on the porch. just below the rock wall seemed like a good, shady place with plenty of water. and i got the shovel. and i stabbed it into the dirt. plus three rocks. and it turns out that little saying isn't so accurate. because the shovel went in about an inch. now, i'm not the strongest person in the world, but i know how to use a shovel and i know that when i step my foot on the back of the shovel and put all the pounds i keep on my body behind the force of that step, i should get a little further than an inch.

after several tries, i called the sweetie. he's quite a bit sturdier than i am, with nearly an extra foot of person and the accompanying pounds of force to get things a little more done. and what he got was about an inch and a half into the dirt. plus three rocks. which you already know is an inaccurate ratio. let's amend it. for every dirt you have seventeen rocks. this is not an arbitrary number i picked just because it is prime. it's what you see when you pull your shovel up from what you intend to be a hole in the ground. those are the small rocks there in the screen. it's a large screen. it fits over the top of a wheelbarrow.

so the sweetie established that i was doing what i could with the tools i had so i simply got more tools. i managed to bend the tip of a very sturdy garden trowel on one fierce rock and then my little claw tool came out of the hole with one of its claw fingers bent nearly straight. the tools were finished. they were threatening mutiny. they looked like the sorts of sad metal things we'd find next door. so i adopted a new strategy. i began to dig by hand. it works for the dogs. the little stones came out without protest and i found that the larger ones were easier to grab if i loosened the dirt around them archeology dig style. it was difficult to channel the aggression and fierceness of stabbing a shovel, trowel or claw into the earth into such small, delicate movements, but this poor fern needs a home in the ground if i'm expecting it to survive the winter, so i continued.

until everything stopped. midway down i struck a rock that looked like iron. i'd been so successful pulling out the seventeen rocks to a dirt that i wasn't even worried. i began brushing the dirt from around it, making a trench. small rocks fell away everywhere and even larger rocks were no match for me. word had gotten around, i guess. but this rock, my nemesis, my white whale, was just sitting there, taunting me. moby rock. but i was mad with desire to plant this fern and no giant rock was going to stop me. there was no way to start digging somewhere else. it's all the same. in retrospect, digging within ten feet of the hole i'd started i probably would have ended up unearthing some other section of moby. i dug. i pried. i unearthed enough of this rock to think i had it. but it was like an iceberg. the part i'd cleared was only a tiny part of the monster below. i bent every tool i owned trying to unstick the horrible rock. i pulled so hard i forgot to breathe and saw stars. i even convinced the sweetie to have a try with the shovel. the rock didn't even move. it just sat there, grinning in its awful rocky way. i am immovable. but in my zeal to dig this hole, i'd forgotten completely what i was doing. i looked at the fern, pulled it from its pot and looked back in the hole at moby. and then i dropped the fern square onto moby's stony head. there was more than enough room. take that, immovable stone. the sweetie helped me fill in the hole with dirt from our compost. there wasn't enough dirt from what came out of the hole to refill it. and i have vanquished my foe, the giant stone. not exactly how i'd planned it, but vanquishing is vanquishing.

as i write this, the squirrels are thundering above my head, having some sort of horrible wrestling match. it sounds like maybe a death match. we can only hope. i can't manage so many nemeses all at once.

dragon whisperer

warning: knitting content

back in may when the older nephew was visiting, i gave his mom some things i'd made for the newer nephew. a hat maybe. mostly pants. the older nephew liked the pants. they were baby alpaca and very soft. striped. "i sure would like to have some pants like this," he said, touching the fuzzy yarn. now, maybe he was being polite, but it's too late now. he's got pants. the last few years the kid has been getting the short end of the knitting stick. when he was three or so i made him a baby alpaca sweater. i knit it top down in seed stitch. to most of you this is meaningless. let me translate: i was in a constant state of fear about screwing up for about a month. big projects are awful. so he's been getting small things. hats. scarves. the poor child probably has fifty or so handknit hats he'll never need.

those of you who have been visiting for a while will remember that this child hoped i would knit him a something with dialga from pokemon on it. a sweater. a hat. intarsia (the magical knitting skill required to do such things) is not something i do well if it involves more than one contrast color so i explained how dialga wasn't going to happen. but striped pants are easy. there's no reason i couldn't just have someone measure a pair of the kid's pants and then add an inch or two everywhere and knit him some sassy lounging around pants. out of baby alpaca. but i forget from time to time why i don't make clothing for myself. it's not just about the time. it's about the yarn. baby alpaca yarn enough to make loose comfy pants for a child nearing eight would require its own security guard. no kidding. it's a house payment. and not a missouri house payment. so i started thinking about the silk/cotton stuff i use for devil pants. which no longer exists. what i settled on was a trio of synthetic yarns. i don't generally like synthetic yarns because they creep me out while i knit, but these felt soft. really soft. like wool. and the colors were insane. supersaturated.

i called, got measurements and started knitting. wait. let's talk about getting the measurements. first i looked up average measurements for children his age to have a reference point. because i'm clever. then i called his mom. all i needed to start was a waist size. "i don't know. sixteen inches," she said. now, i see him maybe once or twice a year and even i know he's bigger around than sixteen inches. there are days i can't remember if he's six, almost seven or seven, almost eight, and i know the kid is skinny, but come on. i have knees nearly sixteen inches around. so i called her parents. my parents. the grandparents. and the two of them together found and measured a pair of the child's pants. and i started knitting.

when i finished the first leg, i realized the math and i had somewhere had a communication problem. these were some long, skinny pants. fortunately, as i've mentioned before, the child himself is lean. and pretty tolerant of less than typical things. he will figure them out.

if you frequent yarn stores, you know they always harass you about whether you got enough yarn for your project, menacing you with threats about dye lots that won't match and how the yarn won't be there in that color if you have to come back or it won't exist anymore so you better get it now. so i bought six skeins of yarn. i did this because i didn't have a real pattern and had no idea how much yarn it would take to make pants for a skinny boy who might be six going on seven or seven going on eight but is more than sixteen inches around. so i pranced home with three fat skeins of teal, two of leaf and one of grass green. happy happy happy. and the first pair knit up quickly. and i had not used up a full skein of anything.

so i decided to make the new nephew a matching pair of pants. i figure they're both supernatural. the older one likes dragons. the younger one probably does, too. and they're dragon tending pants, really, anyway. besides, my own parents dressed the older child's mother like me although we were more than two years apart in age. matching raggedy ann jumpers. so i figure this will be fine. or only slightly scarring. and after i finish, i find there is still one skein i've not even touched of the teal and one nearly whole skein of each color left.

these are not meant to be worn in public. they're just for tending dragons, or for lounging afterward. tending dragons is difficult for the faint of heart but i'm sure both nephews will be up to the task. but just in case they have to go walk dragons in the evening just before bedtime and it's dark and maybe a little on the cool side and the wind is howling, i made the pants extra warm and extra stripey for courage.

leaf blower

no, we do not have a leaf blower. leaf blowers are stupid. feel free to disagree, but they're still stupid. we have all the other necessities: lawn mower, weed eater, metal rake, bamboo rake, wheelbarrow, shovel, wood chipper. you know. things we all need in order to survive. because survival begins with a pretty lawn.

but here in brooklyn, the landlord and the surrounding neighbors have all purchased the same lawn service. i should probably explain here that the "lawn" is a patch the width of a brooklyn victorian house and it's about three feet from the porch to the sidewalk. you could mow the thing in one pass, except there's a raggedy maple sitting right out my front window, which means it's right in the middle of the strip of lawn. you'd have to detour a bit. i should mention that our neighborhood was designed a little more than a hundred years ago to be pretty. most houses have massive london plane trees shading the "yards" because they are the ultimate victorian trees. i don't know why. for those of you from the midwest or texas, think sycamore. but we have that ratty maple, which is decidedly unvictorian and very obviously a replacement for something more majestic. and a hydrangea on either side of the steps up the porch. usually they bloom beautifully with fat blue and green clumps of flowers, but the lawn guys pruned them funny last year and now they match the maple. dismal. and there are a few raggedy mystery shrubs plopped on the strip of dirt between the sidewalk and the street. there is very little to do. except blow leaves. and this is the problem.

around eleven am i looked out my bathroom window to see a man wearing some sort of jetpack contraption with a vacuum cleaner hose hanging out the side. he looked like ghostbusters. seriously. and he fired the thing up. now, i have to admit i'd spent the last half hour or so stalking dustbunnies with my own ancient electrolux canister monster, a beast older than i am which emits a howl that generally gives me a few minutes rest from my tinnitus, which it simply overpowers. but i heard the roar of the leaf blower over the vacuum, over the roar of my own stupid haunted ears. so i looked outside. it was dark outside. i did mention that this was 11 am, right? i had been so terribly involved in my own fascinating housecleaning and the occasional snippet from npr on chinese culture that a rather magnificent storm had snuck right up on me. i looked out the window just as the folks at npr started to crackle and fade. then the sky got in on the act and there was an entire thunderstorm outside, complete with wind, rain, thunder, lightning and the promise of hail. i love the promise of hail.

now, being a homeowner for the first time and being the owner of a car that is not the same age as me, you'd think i'd worry about hail. nope. i can't help it. i like the thunderstorms and i really, really like the hail. hail comes sometimes after tornadoes and when i was a kid, our freezer housed more than a few hailstones. there's something about ice falling from the sky in summer that's just dizzying to a kid. and to me. still. so i looked out the window, waiting for the hail. then i ran to the tv. the tv promised hail on three channels. and lightning and damaging winds. so i ran back to the window. bring it on. i was ready to run out just as soon as i heard the first ice-on-metal crash. i was frightening the dogs.

but leaf blower guy was still out there. wind whipping everywhere, lightning threatening to help him with his questions about an afterlife. and leaves scattering every which way. but he kept it up, blowing lawnmower gas scented air back over the ozone smell of a good storm.

later, the monstrous part of the storm has passed, i think. no more thunder. no more lightning. the hail went over to queens, i guess, and there was a tornado warning for some part of the middle of long island. the leaf blower guy and his pals are gone, too. nobody got struck by lightning. nobody got beaned by hail or washed away in a flash flood or sucked up into the sky. that's happening on the news further east on the island. flooding. suffering. threat of being sucked up into the sky. awfulness. but it is nice out now, cool. the sky is starting to lift a bit. and there are leaves everywhere.

the passion of the log

when i was young, my mom always promised, "you girls will end up with someone just like your dad!" i saw this as a threat of sorts. i couldn't see myself with a man who wore cowboy boots and managed to char every piece of meat he put on a grill. and lets not even discuss the stubbornness or how he votes completely contradictory to how he lives. this is what concerns you as a teenager. but after several years with the sweetie, i'm beginning to see the similarities. both can look at any object and figure out how to repair it, rebuild it or improve it somehow. both have an excessive passion for ugly vehicles they've owned and both love fire. and both believe they know how to violate laws of physics.

so this morning the sweetie was building a fire. things weren't going well. there was a huge rainstorm yesterday and the wind blew sheets of rain up onto the porch, spraying all the dry wood. this is because we didn't have a tarp ready before we bought the logs. we moved the whole rack back a foot or two but to no avail. so the sweetie spent much time muttering about how the problem was wet wood and he didn't think he got wood that was actually cured (none of the logs we burned before this morning brought forth this complaint). there was a subtle hint at some point that maybe i'd simply picked inappropriate logs to bring in this morning. i let that slide. i selected the highest quality logs.

but the sweetie's frustration continued. to his credit, in the past ten years i've seen him build countless fires in fireplaces, woodstoves and campsites. he is competent. but not today . today he opened the ashpan to create draft. this is when the specter of my dad showed up. to many of you, opening and ashpan is meaningless. you should know that the men who installed the stove said, "do not ever open the ashpan to create draft for the stove." to men like dad and the sweetie, advice like that translates, "most idiots can't figure out how to open the ashpan the right amount and they catch things on fire or blow the fire right out, but you could probably do it. you know what you're doing." i could actually see him remembering it that way, so i said, "cut that out," and the sweetie said, surprisingly innocently, "i'm not doing anything." this is what little kids say when you walk in and there's a tube of toothpaste smeared all over the bathroom, the child is covered in toothpaste and is holding the tube in one hand. i'm not doing anything. my high school kids would know to come up with something. "i was asking for a pencil." "he didn't know what page we were on and i had to tell him." that type thing. but the sweetie is no good at subterfuge, just like the dad, so this was his response as flames whooshed through the stove and probably sent fire out the chimney to scorch the local birds.

"you're not supposed to open the ash pan. the guys told you". i tried to say it in such a way the dangerous translation wouldn't slip through. you could do it. no such luck. "i'm only opening it a little, just to get a draft going." the problem with opening the ashpan is it creates a draft so strong a nearby dachshund could be sucked right into the woodstove and up the chimney. well, maybe not the pudgy one. and probably not the old one because he would just give the stove a look. but it creates quite a draft. and this is not good. "i know what i'm doing," says the sweetie. and i could almost see my dad standing behind him, a hand on the sweetie's shoulder, nodding.

so, on to the firewood. i mentioned to a friend recently that i've looked at quite a few canvas tarps. this is because the sweetie is all about protecting this precious resource we now have in surplus. the firewood. now that we suffered so greatly with damp logs. it is possible to buy wood covers but they're disturbingly expensive and they're really just tarps. they're cut to a certain size to keep the top wood dry and keep the bottom wood exposed so it will get air. all this is more than you need to know, but it will help you experience this fully. and you need to. the sweetie, being who he is, would rather make his own cover. i am all for this as it will probably end up saving us quite a bit of cash which i can then invest wisely in arborvitae and rhododendron.

you make your own log cover out of a tarp. but not just any tarp. because plastic tarps are ugly. that's right. a grown man with a job says he doesn't want to put plastic tarps on the woodpile stacked up next to an abandoned factory because they would make the woodpile ugly. i think that is just precious, so i agree. plastic tarps would be ugly. whatever are the other options? canvas, he says. but you have to be careful. plenty of folks advertise tarps as canvas and they're really polyester or plastic, he says knowingly. when did he become my grandmother? so we look at cotton canvas tarps. they are beautiful. beautiful enough to cover logs stacked in our yard. absolutely. and the sweetie wants to know what i think about colors. i am barely able to pick out my own clothes but i am lucky. cotton canvas tarp choices tend to run to the browns and greens, both of the two colors i wear. green would be nice. but the sweetie hesitates. what about brown? it would match the wood. match the wood. really? i look at him and he's serious. it will blend in. i'm just not that worried. it's a tarp covering hundreds of logs. right now the logs are blocking our view of an old loading dock and one of those pigtail propane tanks that sit at the front of the abandoned factory next door. i guess we might as well go all the way and get our cotton canvas tarp with reinforced grommets in a color that will smoothly coexist with the landscape. but there's a snag. the sweetie notices two shades of green. one is hunter green and the other is- be still my heart- olive drab. and it is darker than the available brown. this is important because darker colors absorb more heat which means the logs will be warmer and therefore, drier. dry logs are happy logs. happy logs will burn with a ferocity most people can only imagine. i am absolutely sure dad has used this same argument to select the color of something. a car. roof shingles. patio furniture. so olive drab canvas tarps are on the way.

log

because of decisions made by some folks who are not me, the price of fuel oil has gone, shall we say, excessively high. right when we bought ourselves a house with a fat fuel oil tank and furnace sitting in the basement. after a winter of handing over piles of cash to the fuel oil folks, we've broken the shackles of oil. sort of. we got ourselves a sassy wood stove and now that everything is in place, we're ready to fire things up.

on to the wood. the sweetie ordered a cord. for those of you who don't know, a cord will be more than plenty for weekend burning. but the sweetie got a bee in his bonnet and the day of delivery called and asked for a full load. a full load is 2 1/4 cords. this is a lot of wood. the sweetie worried that we'd somehow run through the whole cord of wood in a season and then would suffer the consequences of being unprepared- wood at five bucks a log or something. the sweetie is very mellow, but he can become very apocalyptic about what will happen if we don't prepare for the terrors of home ownership. the truth is, he had no idea how much 2 1/4 cords of would might be.

i did. i grew up in a house with a fireplace. i stacked quite a bit of firewood as a child. it's very soothing. very therapeutic. when you're twelve. even fifteen. i was not looking forward to taking my 40 year old self out to stack all those logs. but then the sweetie got a bee in his bonnet about having a firewood rack for the porch before the logs got here, and he ran off to the hardware store 30 miles away to get said rack.

and firewood delivery guy arrived right on time. as the pouring out of logs was happening, i saw the sweetie drive by and park at the abandoned factory next door so the firewood delivery guy would be able to leave. i could see him grinning from across the yard and i was worried he'd be so excited about the logs he'd forget to breathe. after firewood delivery guy left the sweetie pulled into the driveway. "that's a lot of firewood!" was all he said. right. i know. and we filled the four foot porch firewood rack in about five minutes without making a dent in the pile. the forecast was promising rain and the sky stayed black most of the day with rumbles of thunder, but we managed to get everything stacked up before supper.

and the sweetie came in to build a fire. turns out the stove works nicely for our house. the stairwell makes itself into a little chimney for the heat and i suspect we'll be toasty all winter. this morning the sweetie woke up unable to move, but then he is a few years younger than me, being only 37. me, i feel great. like i'm twelve again. or fifteen.

crawly

warning: a few possible bad words in here, depending on how you read.

so the new nephew calls me today. "how long," he snarls, "will i have to continue this charade?" no hello, how are you or anything. we have been over this several times, but because he's only four months old, i'm trying to cut him a little slack. he is, however, really starting to push it. his impulsiveness and refusal to see any side of things but his own are reminiscent of one of his grandparents in the late seventies. but i love him and it is very, very difficult to be a supernatural child. "what is it you're having trouble with?" i say, light and cheery like we're in a restaurant and he got diet soda when he ordered regular. "have you seen her blog?" i have. he reads my blog pretty regularly, partly for practice and partly because he thinks i have a nice sense of humor. he reads his mom's blog for damage control.

"the crawling!" he wails. "and it's not just the video she made of me doing what you told me to do (i told him to hang back, that human babies develop agonizingly slowly and he doesn't want to blow his cover the first year- pretend it's tough learning to crawl is exactly what i said), it's the comments. everyone cheering for me if i roll over or poop or eat peas. are you kidding me? is this what regular humans do?" i try to think about my answer. i didn't make any of my own children so it is not what i do, but it does seem to be the way of things, at least in first world countries. which is what i tell him.

"and this is why i can't eat pizza?" he screams. yes, i tell him. i explain he will slowly be introduced to foods, one at a time to test for allergies. he interrupts. "allergies? you mean like weakensses? like kryptonite? regular people feed their children poisons to see what their weaknesses are? that's horrible!" i know it is. i've always thought so and i'm glad to have someone in the family of a like mind. "i can't take it. i'm gone!" he yells, but i yell back before he can slam the phone. "you sound like a teenager! cut it out. you know you're here for something better than eating pizza. get over it." he is mildly shamed by this and asks again how long he has to hobble himself, pretend he can't talk or walk or text message. i tell him when he's about eight he'll be competitive with most adults, but that walking and talking start this side of a year. i think he will be happy about this.

i mention the babbling. it is, developmentally speaking, time for him to start making strings of sounds, which must make him happy after being mostly silent for four months. i can almost feel his smile through the phone. "yeah, that's been pretty good," he laughs. i'm not sure what he means but he sounds suddenly like his other aunt and i worry a bit. "i babble all the time," he says. "they love it. they babble right back which is pretty funny, and they kiss on my belly and toes. and once in a while, to make it all a little more bearable and sort of pay myself for the waiting and pretending to be incompetent, i add in a little word or two. nothing they recognize." this is not good. not good at all. words like what, i want to know. "listen," he says, "i'm pretty good at it. babababaassssshitbrbrbrsnrkleeeeeeshitshitshitcoooheeprrrraaaaaaasssshit." he chuckles to himself. and i know the other aunt is teaching him this.

max factor

there is no end of mystery about max. this year he'll be turning 80. his speckled sidekick guthrie will be 40, which is where i landed this year, so it's all very something. none of us feels as old as we are, although max has his moments of drama. some days he practices ancientness. now, it's likely real ancientness isn't a shroud that falls over a body like everyone fears, but a fog a body wanders in and out of. and max does quite a bit of this wandering. some days he's jumping around, chasing toys, battling with guthrie. other days i have to poke him a few times a day to be sure he isn't dead. this can be espeically unsettling because he is a very heavy sleeper and because he spends more of his time than you'd think asleep with his feet in the air. maybe he's not so much practicing ancientness. it's possible he is ancientness. in that case, he's quite impressive.

three or four years ago, max had problems with arthritis. his bony self would curl into a creepy comma and he'd be unable to lie down or sit. he'd stand in the middle of the room, all arched, and wait for someone to rescue him. we'd have to pick him up and hold him, slowly relaxing his short legs and rubbing his back until he'd be able to rest. this was when we got the doggy arthritis medicine and the dog steps so he could get up and down from the bed on his own. and of course, then max and guthrie found out what happens if you eat a several month supply of doggy arthritis medication all at once (see entry max pants). they are still paying off the vet bills from their chew toy allowances (which is why they're playing with a sock in the photo below, heh), so no more arthritis medicine. actually, we were worried about permanent damage to his filter organs and had to take him off the meds for a while. the strange thing is max seemed to shake off his arthritis after his overdose. sure, he needs the dog steps to get up on the bed and when he does his little dog stretches, downward dog, upward dog, he has to stretch his back legs one at a time, but there have been no more dog commas or awful frozen hot dogs.

so we've been complacent. we know he's going deaf. he rarely initiates any barking on his own, but waits for guthrie to start and then barks his support. it is no longer possible to call him from another room. this allows us to do all sorts of sneaking up on him, but he doesn't respond the way people do when you do that, so it hasn't been as exciting as you'd think.

mostly, at this age, max has convinced himself that he can will things to happen simply by thinking about them really, really hard. he's found support for this in his method of waking me up in the morning. he sits up, a foot or two from my face, and just stares at me. who knows how long he sits there, but most mornings when i wake up, he's all sphinx-like and the first thing i see, staring not really at me so much as through me. generally around five or five thirty am. because it is summer and i am on vacation, we generally go back to bed after our little early morning bathroom stroll and a little bit of dog food for max and guthrie. the sweetie is never aware of this. neither dog ever attempts to wake him. it is difficult enough for me to do. they know their limits.

so they eat and i fall back into bed. max always finishes first. his mostly toothlessness allows him to take in considerably more food per slurp than guthrie, and i can hear his claws clacking as he roams around the bedroom, thinking. eventually, he takes the stairs up to the bed and sits near my feet. he does this every day. he sits and waits for guthrie to finish. this takes about half of forever because guthrie is a piddler and he's easily distracted. breakfast sometimes takes him as much as ten minutes, during which time max will sit on the edge of the bed at my feet, staring at nothing with his foggy eyes. then i hear the clatter of smaller claws and the more aggressive trip up the stairs. guthrie passes max and curls up next to me on the bed, nudging himself under my arm and curling his butt up under my chin. the sweetie is asleep, guthrie is immediately asleep and i am drifting back for another hour or so. but not max. never max. generally, it takes him twenty minutes or so, but at some point i wake up because he is there again, sitting on the bed near my hip, staring. accusing. only for this second wake up of the morning, he's vocal. he makes a sound like a sick horse. it's a cross between a howl and a moan and it's low and scary. for the first few weeks, i'd lift the sheet over himi, thinking he just wanted to be under the covers. both dogs sleep under whatever covering is on the bed, even in summer. i'd cover him without opening my eyes but the awful sound would continue. when i'd finally open my eyes, max would be there, terrible chestnuts of eyes in his skeletal head, moaning a sound no human being could sleep through. this, by the way, is how i found out the sweetie certainly can't be human. the howling moaning awfulness continued, not matter what i tried. finally, exhausted, i picked up the small dog sleeping under my neck and plopped him on the sweetie's chest. the small dog is very pliable in sleep. he never even opened an eye. the sound stopped and max stomped his way up the bed and curled himself up on the warm place the small dog had been sleeping, scrunching his butt up under my chin, tucking his nose under his tail.

and he does this every morning. gets on the bed first. waits. watches guthrie go to sleep where he wants to be. waits. gets frustrated. yells. yells some more. gets guthrie relocated. goes to sleep in guthrie's vacated spot. i know what you're thinking and i've tried. i've grabbed max when he first hops on the bed and put him in the spot i know he'll sleep in eventually. he gets up and goes to the end of the bed to wait for guthrie.

back at the waldorf

i started this a bit ago but it got lost. here it is. this isn't stevens' best poem. it's just part of a story. there's a nice website at the bottom. visit. it's funny.

Arrival at the Waldorf

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.

You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse,

A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.
-Wallace Stevens

okay, i know the poem isn't really about what i'm getting ready to say, but wallace stevens is dead, so what's he going to do about it? a friend gave me this poem nearly 18 years ago. made me memorize it because how else do you give someone a poem if you don't want them losing it? and i know the poem is about the struggle between the real world and the world of image or language and how no matter how beautiful language is, you have to be in the world. really of it. and that can be so much less or so much more depending. so i know all that, but every time i come back to the city from away, the poem slips into my head like a tiny celebration even though the poem is a lament of sorts, or at least a tired realization. you know how maybe you like a song and it makes you feel happy and you don't think about the fact that the lyrics aren't so great or at least aren't what you feel. you just like the tune. so the first part always feels like a welcome, especially. home from guatemala. back at the waldorf, this arrival in the wild country of the soul, all approaches gone, being completely there. maybe because i am never completely anywhere. and especially now, because i have been tromping around in that alien, point-blank, green and actual- well, not guatemala, but arkville. and we do come back to the waldorf, or to within a few blocks of it. to new york city. and always before i've just given myself those first few lines in my head, glad to be home.

but this time the whole poem unspooled and although i already knew it, really, it finally settled in. there's the real world where you live and do. then there's the pile of language you swim through (carruth's bucket of language-minnows), but it's not real. it's symbolic. representative. it's a movie set where you can move around all the parts and make them what you want. a rock here. a tree there. already i was thinking about the last time anyone saw an eagle floating over this island and where i would put one in my poem, in my own bucket of minnows. the dirty seagulls eating trash and fighting over broken crab legs. i thought about the green and actual while driving through nothing but not green.

and in the sunsety light we drove across the brooklyn bridge and i saw it. the first waterfall. i had heard but did not believe. nothing like the cataracts leaping and singing all through everywhere i'd just been. it was massive. like stone. like someone turned on the largest faucet in the world. falling from one even point straight down into the hudson. flat. lit up with lights. lit up with lights. and at first my heart sank because this is what old wallace was so worried about, maybe. that we'd always be willing to settle for fakery, for charlatans. for words. i'm sure he had plenty else on his mind and hideous fake waterfalls lit up at a cost of millions of bucks was maybe not even something he could imagine back when he was writing about the waldorf. world war 2 was heating up at the time, you know. other fish to fry.

but i kept looking and i kept wanting to look. off the bridge and onto the b.q.e. i spotted another. then another. symbolic. representative. finally, "look!" you should never tell the driver to look out into the hudson while he's driving the b.q.e. on a sunday evening. "there are four! four waterfalls!" sort of like "it's an eagle. eagle eagle eagle." i am fickle. i am easy to impress. i am simple and pretty lights and falling water make me feel happy just like pretty words, how they sit next to each other and pretend to be something. i buy it. i buy it every time. and you say, "the world in a verse..."

i think about old wallace, working with numbers-law, insurance, banking- scribbling poetry when he could, holding everyone at bay. he'd be horrified by the idea of those ridiculous waterfalls, too. just like me he'd see them coming over the brooklyn bridge and he'd start railing. in my mind he's got a cane and he's waving it, although i'm not sure there'd be room for that in a car. still, he would. and he'd use all sorts of salty language, lament how far we've fallen as human beings to create such a joke. and as his car neared the brooklyn side the monstrous cascade would disappear beneath the bridge and he'd be straining to look back and see just a little bit more.

www.newyorkcitywaterfalls.com/index.html

shoes

it started out as an innocent bunch of errands. when you don't drive, there's really no such thing as an innocent bunch of errands. when you don't drive and you're a little, well, susceptible to paranoia and it is nine million degrees, nothing is innocent.

mostly i needed some shoes resoled. i like the little places with old guys and strange sewing machines that look like something my grandma and h.r. giger collaborated on. once in a while you can get a place where the guy wears a visor. initially i settle on a place on court street. it's a hike, but it's called shalom and is right by the courthouse. both pluses. in the end i decide to go to a place in park slope that's nearer to my other errands. so i hop on the bus. then i walk seven or ten or twelve blocks to the shoe repair store. called bravo. and it's closed. the hours promise they open at 8:30 am and it is nearing eleven, but sometimes places in park slope just don't open until the owner wakes up. i figure i'll just saunter the two and a half miles on over to court street. two and a half hot miles carrying stupid dr. scholl's wood soled shoes and knitting.

a phone call from the sweetie convinces me to hop on a nearby train that will take me to within a block of shalom. fine. if i have to. on the train i discover that the knitting i'm counting on for sanity while underground is missing a working needle. this means very little to you except that i can't knit. this is very, very, very bad. no knitting means no sanity. well, what it means is that my ability to be my calm, happy self is far more easily compromised because i can't filter out anything. i know what you're thinking. of course you can do it. you're you. my sinisterness filter seems to have been broken for quite some time and generally i use knitting or a book to keep sinisterness at bay. no book. so today when the train stops in the tunnel, i begin very deliberate slow breathing. yoga breathing. this keeps me from throwing up on innocent bystanders. i do not, under any circumstances, make eye contact with anyone over the age of five. and everything is cool. for a while. but there's another one on the train. one of us. one of me. he can't breathe, either. the train is getting smaller and the people around him are growing fangs and claws. he has no water or food to last him the days we'll be trapped here (i do) and he has no tools to help him escape (i have a flashlight, sewing kit, fan, nail file, etc.). clearly, he has not done his yoga breathing because he is not aware of his own craziness. and he begins to lose his battle. the train moves but he still looks like he will cry. the train keeps moving, right into the station. he is angry and shaking. i am wishing i hadn't looked up because now i can't be on the train anymore. he is safe now but he cannot calm down and this will certainly keep me from being calm. so i go. off the train.

i've traveled about half a mile on the train and i walk the last mile and a half over familiar terrain to the court house. to court street. and the shop isn't there. the address is there in big numbers on a dirty door but there's an empty storefront behind it. i called in the morning. nobody mentioned being at a new address. suddenly the shoes feel very heavy. i've walked about three miles at this point. no wonder my shoes need new soles. i decide i'll just go get yarn. this is how i reward myself for struggle. yarn. chocolate. books. on the way back, i stop in at a bookstore and do not, at first, realize that the man in front of me (wearing a coat of some sort and a hat in this heat and flailing his arms) is a little unusual. the employees at the top of the escalator notice about the same time i do, when he reaches the top and growls. he turns and stomps down the main aisle, coat billowing, shoving people aside and knocking books off the endcaps. he snarls and mutters. there are words, but i know if i bother hearing exactly what they are it will make things worse. i am no longer here to browse the gardening books. i am just here for the bathroom and i'm quickly back on the escalator down to the exit. and so is the growling. i guess we had the same idea, because he is stomping toward the escalator, muttering, just as i step on. i do not want him to shove me. i don't think i have the energy to keep all my sanity where it's supposed to be if i have to interact with him. two crazy folks battling on an escalator in a bookstore in the heat of summer is not what anyone wants. as i near the bottom, he is a giant bat above me in his awful coat. i am out of the store before he's at the bottom of the escalator and he's so wrapped up in his own world of monsters he doesn't even know i was there.

i walk down atlantic and find that my yarn store does not believe in air conditioning, although the door is shut tight. i guess to protect against breezes. the yarn is sweating. it is so hot in there i can't think and the yarn i use to make devil pants is being discontinued. discontinued!!!! i grab the last three skeins, walk out into the 87 degree afternoon complete with humidity around the same number and actually feel cooler than in the store. this is when a woman asks me if there's a starbucks nearby. no. surprisingly, there isn't. i can see a block ahead of me my favorite cafe and suggest it to her, tell her it's wonderful. they have things you wouldn't expect like nutella panini and pms tea and, once in a while, home made peanut butter cups. no kidding. i mention that a mile and a half back, down on court, are several starbucks. i say this jokingly. i laugh. nobody would walk that far for overpriced coffee. not in this heat. not when such a nice place is right there on the same block and will not ask her for four dollars in return for a cup of coffee. and she turns around, a block away from some of the finest shade grown coffee around, and walks the mile and a half back to generic, overpriced coffee because it is what she knows.

map of mom, bionic highlights

the parents are up to more shenanigans. as a result, i bring you the map of mom. this is a map of the ways my mom and a bmx racer, snowboarder or other extreme sports participant are similar. well, besides their obvious collective total radness and disregard for convention.

this particular map only highlights structural damage to my mom. this is similar to what building code inspectors would look at. each star represents a fracture, shattering or attack by aliens requiring some sort of repair and replacement of something. if you ask my mom about the structural damage, she will tell you she has had a string of bad luck, that each bit of damage was caused by some freak accident that could have happened to anyone but should happen to no one. if you ask a competent medical doctor, you might hear that a thirty year span with no dairy products, combined with a surprisingly willful refusal to take (or forgetfulness, about according to some more generous than the author) calcium supplements added to recent senior citizen status could COULD sort of shape up to create a little bermuda triangle of osteoporosis. you know, with the brittle bones that are always breaking if you don't put some calcium in them. the sort of thing that could possibly be managed with some of those sassy chocolaty calcium supplements you see everywhere or even that once monthly stuff the flying nun is always selling on tv. possibly. that's what i hear. i am not a doctor, so i don't really know. my mom, however, who evidently became a doctor recently on the sly, says i'm a smartass. she knows.

the nice thing about science and modern medicine is that the two communities together have worked to create some spectacular bionic elements for human beings. mom has most of them. some would call her a collector of sorts. i am grateful to all these science and medical folk for their hard work. it would be difficult to spend time with a boneless mom, just lying in a puddle on the floor or being carried everywhere in a plastic sack. and i've been impressed with their structural repair work. it's much higher quality than what the landlord did in our bathroom here in brooklyn when water started falling from the ceiling or what he did when the porch fell in.

lagniappe

note: click to enlarge photos. there's eagley goodness in some.

we were back at that little bridge fishing place. the sweetie was interested in evening fishing as he's not so much a morning person. i did not try to explain that all those famous fishguys are morning people. we went around six, to the longer side of the trail. after an hour or so of uneventful fishing, i switched to the camera. it was about time to eat and as i've mentioned before, everyone fishes at the same time. the little birds were getting feisty.

a tiny green blur caught my eye and i noticed a hummingbird right next to me across the railing. this one was celery colored, so pale i hadn't noticed it in there with the weeds. my first thought was that there aren't any celery colored hummingbirds, at least around here and i figured i'd found something fancy. it was darting around fast in among the thistle and queen anne's lace. hmmm. pale purple flowers. white flowers. i've found some sort of mutant pastel hummingbird that feeds on pastel flowers. surely this is something special. i fumbled to get the camera ready. you may remember that i use the automatic setting which can take some serious managing on my part. there's a considerable amount of time between when my finger snaps the button and the camera chooses to open the shutter. the camera and i are developing an increasingly hostile relationship which appears to be entirely my fault for not learning how to use manual settings. and the little bird was gone up over the river. my eyes tried to follow it but there's not much you can do when a celery-pale bird smaller than most butterflies goes flying off against the sky.

but i looked up at the sky anyway and there it was, a black dot on the horizon. i already knew. and it was flying right toward me down the river. it wasn't one of those brown headed juvenile birds. it was a great big monster full grown bald eagle. now, i know. you're already sick of my eagle fascination, but i grew up in missouri in the seventies and early eighties. sure, i knew about noodling 30 years before anyone ever put it on tv, but i didn't know about eagles. in my mind, there were about five eagles in the united states and they all lived high on craggy edges of the oregon coast and nobody ever saw them because they only flew at the altitude of large jets. i'm sure you hold fast to some ridiculous ideas, too. as the bird got close enough for the white head to be visible, the folks fishing the other side of the river oohed and aahed and i kept snapping away. right along after it came one of those crazy necked herons. fantastic. this is really why i fish.

i wandered around a bit more, snapping stormclouds and mountains like you'd see in sympathy cards or those "footprints in the sand" type inspirational cards, when another heron sat itself down right across the little side creek from me, taunting me to get a good photo. i made so much noise tromping through the brush to get a good view the bird flapped up and down the creek a bit, but still in sight. so i walked up the trail toward the car and found a good spot. i took maybe twenty blurry photos of a white bird with black and gray decoration doing all sorts of acrobatic preening, but he never flapped up again.

restlessness and hunger overshadowed my interest in this lazy bird and i walked back to the edge of the bridge railing to see what the sweetie was up to. just one or two more casts with a new lure was all he wanted and he climbed down the bank and disappeared at the edge of the water. it was about 7:30 and just starting to feel like evening. the sun hit the edge of one of the mountains and the shadows got serious. i was leaning on the railing, just enjoying how nice it was to be out in such a place but at some point i looked back toward the car. my, the shadows were really quite deep back there in all those trees. that one on the left looked like night. and then that shadow over on the left moved. it walked from the brush to the left of the trail right out into the open, onto the grass. this might be a good time to remind you that paranoia is a part of my brain's little toolkit. chainsaw wielding lunatic was the first really good idea it came up with. and the shadow kept moving. it was black. it was furry. it had shiny eyes when it stopped and looked at me. bear. my brain amended its earlier serial killer idea and i looked again. it shambled over into the path a little further. it was about three quarters of the distance between us and the car (look at the path right down there). bear. definitely.

i know i've mistaken deer for bears in the past when they were stomping through the forest, but this was standing out on a grassy path the width of a road and it was looking right at me. it didn't seem worried. i said the sweetie's name several times. he was down at the water, about twelve or so feet below the landing i was on and he was right in the middle of catching a fish. i kept saying his name and kept watching the bear. the sweetie thought i was getting ready to take a picture of him with his catch when i leaned over the rail and said a string of words that included bear. the words didnt' sound as scared as i was. bear. are you sure? he asked. definitely. never been more sure of anything. the bear kept walking slowly right on over the path and onto the other side, down into the brush. and this is when my brain got really excited and started to celebrate. i'd seen a bear in the wild! i'd survived a bear attack! well, really, i'd survived a bear sighting. but that was fantastic. i was thrilled. nothing could be better.

and then the sweetie came up the side of the embankment. i was ready to go. he wanted to know where the bear had been and where it had gone which was when i realized we would be walking by the bear to get to the car. i had not yet survived a bear attack. not even a bear sighting. the walk back to the car was uneventful. the bear was busy somewhere else, probably fishing or telling his bear pals about his human sighting. "they're bigger than you expect, but they smell like chocolate." we got in the car and headed back on the old road that winds along the river. as we turned a curve we saw him. the chainsaw wielding lunatic was wandering down the road. he didn't have the chainsaw with him at the time, but even the sweetie recognized him.