Little Bears Who Wash

July 28, 2016 by Leave a Comment

I dreamed this morning that raccoons were in my house.

I discovered this while running water for a bath. One had knocked over a dish of cat food and was lounging in the scattered snack tray, picking at it, disinterested in me. I fetched a broom in case he gave me any guff while I chased him out, and discovered another was terrorizing the cats in the bedroom. I figured I’d better turn the faucet off, since this could take some time, and discovered a third raccoon splashing around in the few inches of bath water. I approached, and he laid his humanoid hand on the knob, as if to say, “It’s not full yet.”

Raccoons in my neighborhood are no joke. A friend of mine spent $1,000 paying a trapper to take one after another from her yard and walls. If we leave food for the outdoor cats after dark, we watch them eat it, then take in the leftovers, or else raccoons will come and finish them. Something killed our neighbor’s cat by chewing on its leg, leaving it to bleed to death. Some say it couldn’t have been a raccoon, and must have been a fox, but I’ve never seen a fox around here.

The first time I saw Grey Gardens I was struck by the raccoons in the attic. The Beales are a fallen American dynasty, like the DuBoises in Streetcar, partly because Little Edie and her mother are absolutely nuts. The raccoons were the bats in the belfry.

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If you leave a cat dish out at night…

I can tell, in the morning, when a raccoon has visited overnight because I can see the water in the cat bowl or bird bath is dirty brown. They have a fantastic habit of washing their hands. The Italian phrase for them is orsetti lavatori, “little bears who wash.”

What does it say about me that I dream about little bears washing themselves in my house? Am I a bit crazy like Little Edie Beale? I just know it takes a lot of concentration – and it causes a very different flavor of stress – keeping the indoor animals from going out, and the outdoor animals from coming in.

 

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The Great Mother

July 26, 2016 by Leave a Comment

A thunderstorm tore through New York City yesterday – the sky got that yellow, dirty glass color. On my back porch I resisted the urge to record it with a phone camera, so I could show you all. I knew others were probably on that assignment, and they were, but what does it say that we no longer experience something so elemental as a thunderstorm without reaching for our iPhones like a smoker relieved to be out of a meeting.

“It’s rainin’ it’s pourin’/ The old man is snorin'” I said, and it occurred to me for the first time in my life that the old man in that rhyme may be The Old Man. God snoring, that’s what thunder is. Kids in Catholic school in the late ’70s used to say it was angels bowling.

So I called my friend Mark in Connecticut, a potter who blogs at Offers to Raven, and who’s always ready for a mythic or poetic question. He agreed that even though the old man soon after “went to bed and bumped his head/ and couldn’t get up in the mornin'” that the snoring did imply thunder.

At this point I was sitting under a steel awning with an electrical device in my hand and lightning crashing nearby, so we said good-bye and I traded the phone for a collection of one of the great poets, Wislawa Szymborska.

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From 6,000 BC in Iraq, now at The Louvre.

I’ve memorized her poem “A Paleolithic Fertility Fetish” in the past. Though it fades and comes back in pieces the way memorized-then-forgotten poems become circular loop-de-loops, I often go back to it. “The Great Mother has no face,” it starts. “Why would the Great Mother need a face?”

I always assumed this poem refers to a statuette of a woman from pre-history, Szymborska finding reassurance and peace from the incompleteness and abstraction of the holy object. It ends:

“The Great Mother barely has a pair of arms,
two tiny limbs lie lazing on her breass.
Why would they want to bless life,
give gifts to what has enough and more!
Their only obligation is to endure as long as earth and sky just in case
of some mishap that never comes.
To form a zigzag over essence.
The ornament’s last laugh.”

Goddess forbid, if I get hit by lightning and die, one of you please read that poem before you lower me into a grave with nothing except possibly a sheet between the earth and me. You can read the complete poem if you scroll down here.

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A Neighborhood Fights For a Landmark

July 13, 2016 by Leave a Comment

4th Avenue in South Brooklyn isn’t anybody’s favorite road, not to drive on, certainly not to walk on, nor even – let’s be honest – to live alongside.

Historically, 3rd Avenue was the commercial strip south of Prospect and Hamilton Avenues, until it got an expressway built on top of it just before World War II. Now, if you’re driving to New Jersey or Queens, you take 3rd, at least till you find an entrance to the highway; if you’re driving ten or twenty blocks, you take 4th.

Despite all its traffic, 4th still has a thriving retail life – bodegas, dollar stores, and affordable restaurants, good and bad, not to mention the storied Irish Haven at 4th and 58th. It’s heavier on schools and neo-classical government buildings than 5th Avenue, its more pedestrian-friendly, two-lane neighbor, but most of those buildings are from before the 1920s, when it was still a grand thoroughfare, before the subway lines got built underneath it, and before cars became omnipresent.

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The city proposes demolishing the NYPD Precinct House that dates to 1886.

4th Avenue also has two historic gems. One is the Brooklyn Lyceum way up north in Park Slope, at 4th and President. I’ve always figured “President Street” was a placeholder, waiting for another president to die, one the locals liked enough to name a street after. The Lyceum is just down the slope from the case study in gentrification, Park Slope, and it sold a few years ago for $7.6 Million.

A 30-40 minute walk to the south is the other gem, the NYPD Precinct House at 4th and 43rd. This is my neighborhood, and has been for 11 years now. I’m about 100 or so feet from 4th Avenue. Like many people who’ve been here much longer than that, I’ve been waiting for that building to come around. Sunset Park recently got named one of the coolest neighborhoods in America, whatever that means – no, I know what that means. It means college-educated people from out of town are moving in and changing the rental and retail markets.

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The neighborhood has been rooting for something special to be done with the space.

I’m no knee-jerk critic of gentrification. I’d be a hypocrite if I were, but a person has to be sensitive to the changes they’re bringing to the social landscape around them. Let’s face it, we wreak havoc on storefront churches and tire shops, and make a hard rental market even harder for working people. One of the few benefits we bring is attracting investment to historic places that have fallen vacant or need repairs.

What a shame, then, to hear that the precinct house is likely getting torn down to build a school. They found a developer for the Lyceum, but not this gem full of architectural luster,  just when the time is just getting right to do something with it. Sunset Park community activists generally have more immediate problems to worry about – rent spikes, sink holes, and broken promises politicians make about jobs in the new developments – but one did post on Facebook that the precinct house was at risk. They advised sending a letter or an email by July 15th.

The 15th is this Friday! So I emailed:

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New construction on 4th Avenue generally looks like medical parks, in Syosset.

Dear friends at the New York City School Construction Authority:

We who live in the neighborhood can see that changes, including changes in the physical environment, are coming our way, and we only have to look at 4th Avenue around 3rd Street in Park Slope to see what that will look like: Soulless, boxy condominiums that could be in Brooklyn, or could be in Piscataway or Houston, or anyplace.

We understand the enormous pressure you are under to find politically feasible spaces to build schools on, but we object to the false choice we’ve been given, to have enough classrooms or to preserve some semblance of historical integrity in our neighborhoods.

And when I say “historical integrity” I don’t mean to imply that this is some dilettante-ish desire on our part. We’re talking about those same children who would attend that school you want to build on 4th Avenue at 43rd. What kind of city are they going to grow up in? What sense of New York’s past are they going to have? What kind of respect for classic architecture and aesthetics will they have?

We know, it’s a balancing act. City administrators have to choose between meeting our other goals and saving some bits of history, but let’s agree on one principle. If a building is historically important, and another use for it can possibly be found, and it’s clearly just a beautiful site on the face of it, then let’s always err on the side of saving it.

If this were 1986, when Brooklyn was desperate for investment and public sector improvements, this choice would be a lot more forgivable than it is now. That gorgeous building did not sit empty for a generation for someone to knock it down now that construction crews have finally come back. Do us a solid, and do those future students a favor, and save that building.

Best regards,   Charles Bowe

You can email too: sites@nycsca.org

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For many of us this is our first encounter with the NYC School Construction Authority. Email them at sites@nycsca.org

 

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Going Home

July 12, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Coincidentally, I was asked to dig a grave for a cat last week, within days of long-standing plans I had to get together with friends and watch a documentary about “green burials” for humans. (Some people watch soccer, but this is what we do.)

Most of my friends and neighbors rent apartments here in Brooklyn, and few of us have access to any patch of dirt large enough to bury a pet in, so once in a while we’re asked to inter someone’s beloved cat. It’s a favor, but one I’ve honestly begun to enjoy. I’ve learned to pick a good spot, away from any other skeletons that might be sleeping, and to record where the surrounding flowers are, the way the art department on a film does while location shooting.

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I’ve learned to wet the ground a day ahead of time so that it’s soft but not mushy, and to use the square-edged shovel to dig turf up first, and to keep it separate, and then to have plenty of tarps and tubs on hand, since dirt takes up so much space when it’s lifted out of place. I’m cautious of roots, but you can’t kill privets, so those I just chop through. Incense does wonders for the smell of outdoor cats whose bodies took some time to find.

For indoor cats – someone’s dear friend – usually, the moment of death has already been chosen mercifully. Then, I find, smaller mercies such as herbs and flowers to cover the body with, go a long way toward helping us envision them meeting the great unknown with dignity.

The 2013 documentary was called A Will For the Woods, written and directed by a young Ivy League film-making team. It’s about a psychiatrist in North Carolina named Clark Wang who faces an increasingly long-shot struggle against lymphoma, and prepares for his own burial by asking all the hard questions. Why do I have to be embalmed? Can’t you just stick me in the ground?

Funerals, even more so than weddings, make us susceptible to the salesmanship of propriety, since the dignity we are preserving belongs to someone who can’t speak up. “I’d like to use whatever time I have left to help set a pattern in our community of going back to really traditional and natural ways of handling our dead,” Clark says, and the rest will melt your heart.

Clark makes a superb poster child for green burial since he’s so articulate and dispassionate. This, and because he and wis wife – a charmingly geeky doctor-nurse duo – are so endearing, and partly because it pays equal attention to the obvious love between them, this documentary about death and burial is moving without being maudlin.

Baby boomers are dying now, and they haven’t done anything else according to the old script, so green burials are going to be more and more of a thing, I’m sure. I can already attest to how lovely and more than appropriate many of them will be.

 

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