oswegatchie

You Just...

2009-06-27T07:27:00.004-04:00

A recurring joke around our house, since we decided to move, is the sentence that begins with "You just...," as in, "Oh, that's not hard to fix, you just knock out the old plaster and re-do it," or "Why don't you just refinish all the floors downstairs? It will make the house sell faster," or "If you just get rid of half your stuff, this space will show better," or "You just seal all that up with some caulk."

I've had four months of "you just." I'm starting to relate to the people who have to flee after foreclosure, the ones who don't have the time, energy, or space to "just" take their plasma TV with them, or their books or tchotchkes or anything, so that it all winds up in a dumpster when the inevitable strangers come to clear the place out. Why didn't they just take some of their cherished possessions? They'd reached their just limit.

Goodness knows, it's great to have a shelter over your head, especially a beautiful, well-tended one like the one we hope to pass on to an equally enthusiastic occupant, this museum of fine details from a time when craft, taste, and material each held their own and justified the others, this archive of happy family memories—ours and, you can feel it the moment you walk through the door—many others'.

But an old house, above all, is a giant neon sign flashing "You just." If I didn't have so many other "You just" lists, I wouldn't so much mind the length of this one. Still, there's something supremely satisfying, even amidst the smoking embers of burnout, about crossing items off the "you just" list. Tick, tick, tick.

Grahampa's Chair

2009-06-16T22:55:00.005-04:00

My Grahampa Graham (I'm spelling that the way I thought it was spelled when I was a kid) was a doctor. This was his chair. When I was growing up, my dad used it as a desk chair. It was stained a dark wine color, and there was gray vinyl padding covering the back.

In the early '80s my parents decided to get rid of the chair. Periodically, they would shed old stuff, and the chair's time had come. But I liked it; I thought it had historical value, or at least sentimental value. I had never known my grandfather, who died of pneumonia overworking himself during the war. He had told women they were pregnant while sitting in that chair; he had a maternity ward named after him in Syracuse; the chair was important. Besides, I was sure it would look good if I sanded and refinished it.

So I did, and it then accompanied me to each of my seven New York apartments, beginning in Brooklyn, where my childhood friend and first roommate painted a portrait of it (see below), and on to one house, the dream house my husband and I are about to sell.

I can appreciate my parents' urge to give away the chair 30 years ago. I have read a lot of books about organizing and simple living (in lieu of organizing my stuff and living more simply), and one thing they say is, if you put something away for six months and don't miss it, just lose it: you don't need it.

I'd been noticing that I don't actually sit in Grahampa Graham's chair that much. Mostly, I throw a sweatshirt on it. It takes up floor space. Months go by and I don't so much as look at the chair or think about the man who sat in it. So I came to the conclusion that I should let it go. But before I did that, I emailed my siblings to tell them my plan, just in case any of them wanted it. One of my sisters thought she might, and she mentioned it to my dad.

As it turns out, my dad passionately wants the chair. Nearly 30 years without it, and he now wants it back. What do you think of that, professional organizers? Toward the end of his life, my dad finds himself needing to sit in his dad's chair. How fortunate that it's still in the family. So, my sisters and I (and Grahampa) are giving it to him for...you guessed it, Father's Day. A variation on the theme of regifting: passing heirlooms around from one family member to another. A lot of that goes on with us. When Dad's done with it, maybe I'll need it back again.

Sometimes it's hard to predict when, and how much, it will hurt to have given something away. I'm trying to be careful what I let go of right now, because after seven years of accumulation in a house with an attic so big my husband and I could have started a sofa collection, I'm ready to part with stuff impulsively, brutally, and, I have to remember, irrevocably.

Red Eft's Homeschooling Burnout Kit

2009-06-06T06:46:00.005-04:00

A friend emailed my local homeschooling list and asked what people's strategies are for handling burnout. Here are my biggies.

1. Do less. During burnout, I have to pull back and ask if I'm worrying too much
about field trips, what the kids are doing, etc. I remember I can trust them to be
doing interesting things. I'm still wading through all the books, art, media, etc.
they have produced while I had to attend to other things.

2. Go away—have an R&R weekend with a friend or family member, go to a conference or colony or institute of some kind. It helps to have a supportive partner who works at home, but family and friends may be willing to help.

3. Attend to your own creative life. I can't let that slide too much, or on top of burnout, I'll have rage. This one is hardest because I have trouble not comparing myself to others in various fields that I feel have 'accomplished more' during the period I
was homeschooling. Also, I now have to work for extra money so where's the
time for creative stuff? But I do what I can work in, knowing that I go through cycles when I have more time for myself.

4. Remember that hs'ing is "a front-loaded proposition." A woman my husband and I met with early on to explore hs'ing called it that, and the phrase returns to me often.
All the time we put in during the early years helping our children develop into self-directed explorers of their interests makes it easier, year by year.

5. Find families that fit for childcare trades. We've done a bit of this, I'd like to have done more. The kids love it.

6. If you're feeling burnout, do something about it right away. Have an arrangement
with your partner and/or closest friends where you can say "Emergency! I need a day
off right now!" I could be better at this. Right now it seems like all my friends are equally overloaded, and there's no one to appeal to. That makes it trickiest of all.

7. Keep the Teenage Liberation Handbook or some other ridiculously inspiring book
nearby to dip in when you need fresh inspiration. Even a phrase to call on in times of need is helpful (like the above-mentioned 'front-loaded proposition.' Another one I like is from the Tao Te Ching: "Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.") You need a mantra to remind you that it's not all on your shoulders. You're only one element in the garden.

"My dreams torment me, but they're not bad..."

2009-05-29T10:20:00.004-04:00

My daughter is writing a story about a place called the Valley of Sadness. In order to write this, she sometimes sits at the computer, sometimes writes in her journal, or, like this morning, puts sentences on little scraps of paper, ideas that come to her that she must hurry to the page, any page, and write down before they disappear.

This is the luxury of creative process that I would like to see everyone have: enough solitude, enough time, and enough lack of tampering to hear those voices and run to scraps of paper to record them. It is only by living apart from other interfering voices that we can hear the ones we carry inside us.

The snatch of monologue above is a perfect example, I think, of what the voices say when you listen to them. "My dreams torment me, but they're not bad." People who work with the human energy field as healers sometimes call it 'being in allow': in this case, the idea that if you allow emotions their honest expression, they may surprise you. What seems negative may not be negative. You may be tormented, but that might not be bad.

The above picture shows how she holds her pencil between the third and fourth fingers—in standard parlance, the 'wrong way.' But it's her way, and I can relate: after trying to sit cross-legged to meditate, and finding again and again that I'd rather kneel with my cushion under my butt, I have abandoned the correct position for my own. Now I can focus on my breathing!

So-Called Friend of My Youth

2009-05-28T16:24:00.003-04:00

When I was a kid, traipsing up and down a little grassy hill from our summer camp in St. Lawrence County to and from the lake where I swam, I delighted in the sight of the orange flower we called devil's paint brush. I loved its yellow center with orange ring, its fuzzy green leaves, its sprightly emergence from the grass around it, I even liked the way it died when I cut it and put it in water, the way a dandelion does.

So I was moved to see it on my back patio last year, hundreds of miles south of the lake, right here in Ulster County. I thought of the herbalist's maxim that the botanicals you need tend to follow you, and I was seized by the mystical notion that I needed this blossom, vibrant with lower chakra energy, in my zone. Then it occurred to me that maybe, more prosaically, it had hitched a ride back from the lake on my shoe and fallen on the patio while I was hanging laundry. I pried it out from between bricks to plant it in a proper garden plot. I even tried to get it to winter over inside, though it wasn't happy and shriveled in my window. Here in the picture is the first one up this spring.

One problemo: this lovely flower, brought here from Europe by enthusiastic fans, is taking over the country. Considered a major pest out west, Orange Hawkweed, as it's more commonly known, or Pilosella aurantiaca as known by botanists, is warned against by those who have seen it overtake meadows, fail to nurture livestock, and even kill plants trying to bed down next to it. My little buddy is an Invader and Pillager!

I will have to think of another botanical friend of my youth to get all misty-eyed about—maybe Indian pipes or water lilies. The New York Flora Association is a nonprofit field botany education group that's creating an atlas of native flora in the state. Looks like a good resource for running a background check on one's little seed-spreading friends.

Loan Modification Diary #2

2009-05-19T08:49:00.002-04:00

Monday, May 18, about a week after requesting a loan modification, we got the "worksheet" from our mortgage company to fill out and fax back with a "hardship statement," a copy of our last tax return, and copies of our income.

The letter wasn't signed, and the phone number went to the top of the tree, so that required going through their system again.

My husband faxed the form and called to verify that it had been received legibly, as we were instructed to do.

"It takes three days for the form to show up online," said the representative.

My husband found this irritating, since he wrote a program in 1994 that allows one to fax a document to the web instantaneously. According to this representative, somebody has to scan the fax so it can be viewed online.

"That's not what the rep said last week," I said. "She said the fax would be electronically captured and viewable online right away—that's how the loan will be reviewed."

Just a single facet of a huge, sparkling bureaucacy.

Let's hope the loan at the end of this costs less than the one we have now. This article in The Nation (More Mortgage Madness, April 29, 2009) is not raising my hopes.

It's a Mod Mod Mod Mod Mortgage: Loan Modification Diary #1

2009-05-15T06:58:00.007-04:00

If you're trying to renegotiate your mortgage, some info here may help you...GOOD LUCK!

One of the many paths my husband and I are scurrying down at present relates to mortgage renegotiation.

I can't go one step further in talking about our mortgage without pasting from etymonline:

1390, from O.Fr. morgage (13c.), mort gaige, lit. "dead pledge" (replaced in modern Fr. by hypothèque), from mort "dead" + gage "pledge;" so called because the deal dies either when the debt is paid or when payment fails. O.Fr. mort is from V.L. *mortus "dead," from L. mortuus, pp. of mori "to die" (see mortal). The verb is first attested 1467.

Could there be a better name for this system than "dead pledge?"

Like I said, I'm scurrying down many paths, but I'll have to forgo that one and talk about the stimulus package, which, after being shooed away by our Wells Fargo mortgage broker on our first try, we now seem to have a hope of qualifying for. In case you do too, and you are utterly confused, here's what I can share:

The first hump to get over with the stim package is finding the right website. Apparently, everybody and their sister wants you to know they are offering "Hope for Homeowners." Save yourself some google pain and a visit to Mr. ScamMan and head right to:

http://makinghomeaffordable.gov/

Here you will find a nice big button to click on that says "Find out if you are eligible." Click it and take the test, grateful that it could lead to thousands of dollars of relief, more than you can say for the "Are You a Music Master?" quiz on Facebook. This is the first screen for eligibility for refinancing, or for loan modification, which offers more relief.

Because my husband (primary earner) was laid off one year ago, and therefore can show one and not two years of self-employment on our taxes, we were ineligible for refinancing before the stim package. Our other roadblock, believe it or not, was that our payments were current. The stim package money, unlike everyday bank refi, apparently is not contingent on your failing to make payments.

The governmental program is confusing, because it's called variously "the stimulus package," "Hope for Homeowners," "Making Home Affordable," or "HARP" (that's the refinancing portion), depending on whom you're talking to.

In our case, we went back to our mortgage broker and said the magic words: "We took the eligibility quiz at the Making Home Affordable website and it says we are eligible for both refinancing and loan modification. We would like to be considered for loan modification under the Making Home Affordable program."

That led to two more phone calls—one to a more central office of the bank that holds our mortgage, and a second to an 800 number of the same bank that is taking all requests to apply for this program.

The agent interviewed us at length about our mortgage particulars and expenses, then we were told an application will be sent out. Here's what the schedule looks like as of May 2009:

-5-7 days to get application
-30-45 business days to hear anything

They are getting a lot of calls. I called back a few days later to see if the application had gone out. It had, but the helpful person I reached gave me the following good advice:

-call back twice a week to see how your application is progressing
-anything you fax is being captured electronically, and there can be problems with transmission, so call after any fax to be sure all pages were received and that they were legible

Mileage may vary with your bank, but if you're in this process too, good luck

Stray Thoughts Found Under the Ceiling

2009-05-14T17:05:00.004-04:00

Latest project: replacing a small bathroom ceiling, the casualty of an old leak from the days before we put a giant rubber diaper on the roof.

I'm not a fan of exposed lath. Something's hiding behind there in the dark. It makes me think of every horror movie I've ever seen. I don't even want to say their names—you know the ones I mean, the ones that resonate with the theory popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point that broken windows and other signs of dereliction correlate with increased crime rates.

I think about this a lot, because I live in a neighborhood where the homes run the gamut from kempt to unkempt, words that derived from the Old High German for "combed." The fanatically tidy properties are just that: they look like their caretakers comb the lawns, paint constantly with a nail brush for added accuracy (though you never see them do it), and buff their windows with rabbit muffs. In their way, they make me as uneasy as the unkempt places.

We lie somewhere between on the kemptitude scale. Having read that health favors a grown-in lawn, I keep ours at four or five inches, mowing with my rotary pusher from Sears,leaving the cuttings as fertilizer, and I gotta say our grass is lush. Our yews are tangled, with shoots of lime green waiting to be lopped off. We are capable of leaving a frisbee on the lawn or a scooter on the porch. It's the 'lived-in' look you want in a community. You want evidence of human habitation, and broken windows and empty half-inch lawns, abandonment and sterility, say the same thing: nobody is around.

I'm trying to imagine a movie in which broken drywall is as scary as exposed lath, but I can't. Broken drywall isn't scary. Drywall is scary when it's perfect and new.

Going back to our kemptitude scale, the horror genre has, on the one hand, unkempt broken lath horror films, and on the other, fanatically kempt one-inch grass horror films.

Lath-and-plaster aren't scary when they are perfect and new because they are never perfect and new, the imperfections of form and surface are what make these materials sing.

That said, I think we're about to cover that ceiling lath with a big piece of plywood.

Meet the Comparables

2009-05-12T22:44:00.006-04:00

Yesterday I went with an agent to check out houses that fall roughly in the same range as our house (although it still hasn't been priced). The idea was for me to see what's out there, what's selling or isn't, how much and what kind of work people are doing or not doing before putting their house on the market, and most important, how much should we charge? I didn't get an answer to my question—so much is uncertain right now—but I did discover that I'm plenty opinionated when it comes to home decorating.

The first house was a Victorian-era brick affair with lots and lots of rooms, including a ground-level apartment with a separate entry. The owners had done a great job spiffing up the place—muted paint colors, a new kitchen with simple cabinets and soapstone counters, and a wood deck out back with a view of the Catskill mountains, if one's chair were carefully placed.

After that, things got ugly.

A house with a generous wraparound porch that promised a lot delivered a dreary vestibule painted the darkest possible shade of olive green. The kitchen had been redone, in defiance of the period architecture, with 70s track lighting and vinyl flooring. The bedrooms had that "asymmetry is interesting but where will I put the bed" configuration, and in the finished attic we found not just tin ceilings but tin walls, which, I learned, cause vertigo, at least in this experimental subject.

There was a mansion that had the feng shui of a fun house, with passages leading to dead ends, pillars without purpose, and a kitchen counter jutting from the stove at a 45-degree angle that gave my hip a bruise just to look at it. The furniture said, well, screamed actually, "Don't you dare touch me!" Nothing personable had been left to help a visitor envision living there. Such is the fallout of the methods of staging. More on the loathesome practice of staging homes in a post to come.

One house with tons of square footage had it oddly distributed: a tiny vestibule that made me duck opened to a grand but useless hall lined with metallic, tropically themed paper from the 70s (19-, not 18-); a suite of parlors painted espresso brown—I'm being nice by calling it espresso—were unable to be illuminated (for some reason the switches weren't working), so they hid whatever treasures they may have offered to make up for the wall-to-wall olive green shag. I like olive green in the right place at the right time, but I don't think a potential buyer should be wandering through a home saying "I can't see a thing in here; is that a door or a book case?"

Then there was the place that hadn't sold after months on the market. The other realtors had been beating their heads against the wall trying to figure out why. My guide and I walked in, turned to one another and said, "It's the smell." In the kitchen, a loud belch erupted from the plumbing. I made a note, "the sink has something to say." A house with a strong odor—whether from bleach, a burning scented candle, or in this case, I suspect, a toxic chemical cleanser—has something to hide. So does a house with wall-to-wall rugs. Why are people so enamored of woolly, dust-loving fibers under their feet? I left with a sore throat and that Matrix sense that the house was an illusion disguising some horrible truth we'd need a red pill to get to the bottom of.

If this sounds like a cranky rant about people's rotten taste, it is. Since I'm flapping my gums about this, here's how I think a house should be prepared inexpensively for market: repair cracks and prime the walls that need it. If painting, light, airy shades show a house off best, and my guess is, neutral is preferable. There's a dark shade of purplish-red that is quite common in decorating, it's a color that comes with an odor, or maybe that's my own synaesthetic response, but imagine a cloying, commercial smell, let's call it Country Berry Pie; it makes me nauseous—especially in bathrooms and in wallpaper strips people inexplicably love to paste under perfectly beautiful moldings. When I see this color I'm done. A few steps away from blue toward yellow on the red scale, though,and I'm fine. Maybe everybody has these sensitivities; maybe they govern the pace at which a home sells.

Color aside, working lights and plumbing are most appealing; I'd go so far as to say: necessary. As for the bayberry tea lights some folks leave mysteriously burning to welcome visitors, I wish they'd save them for a romantic evening. They make me gag.

The Parlor Plaster

2009-05-11T10:40:00.009-04:00

We have two parlors with marble fireplaces and antique mirrors, behind which we never looked until recently. In our seven years in this house, we've never gotten around to painting these rooms and filling them with bookshelves. I imagined a little window seat in the front parlor, and cupboards below the shelves, for board games. The back parlor is our music room, it's where we keep our piano. The mirrors are a bit over-the-top for me—we didn't buy a Victorian house because we like the Victorian aesthetic. We bought the house because it's a happy, rambling, lovable house.

As it turns out, the mirror in the front parlor concealed something rather unfortunate and scary, a bulge like something out of a Cronenberg movie.

No matter how much you love your house, you don't want it to breathe.

You don't want the sense that your house is about to vomit on you, or something worse.

This wall was that kind of wall. Creepy.

Once we had carefully and nervously removed the heavy, valuable mirror from the wall without breaking it, I got a good look at the bulge. As if I didn't need more evidence that my house is just another version of my body, the damage, most likely the remains of a long-ago-addressed leak, reminded me of the belly cast my husband and I tried—and miserably but hilariously failed—to take when I was nine months pregnant with my son.

Well, we got our restoration craftsman to come, circle the room in plastic, and knock it out. Now it's looking fine.

It never ceases to amaze me how frightening it is when even a hairline crack appears in one's house, yet how relatively easy it is to address most problems. Most, anyway. Maybe a house with nothing wrong, nothing showing that's wrong, is similar to a false sense of security. It's just a matter of time before things get thrown out of balance. Lately, I'm getting to appreciate the false sense of security. It's better than no security at all. In fact, we should be really grateful for any sense of security. Its falseness matters no more than an effective placebo's falseness matters. What matters is the effectiveness. What matters is feeling good, right?

Knocking out old crumbly walls and laying down a fresh skimcoat feels good: cool, smooth, clean plaster. No cracks here.

Reclaim-It-Yourself

2009-05-06T08:12:00.005-04:00

We're in the process of replacing some basement windows that have rotted around the edges because they were in contact with the earth. Of course, plenty of people replace perfectly good windows for other reasons, e.g., to replace them with more efficient ones, and they leave them out on the street. A special little truck comes and takes them, but anybody could take them.

We have a bunch of bricks in our backyard sort of lying around, that we're about to put on the Yahoo group, Hudson Valley Ecycle. And bricks wash up on the shores of the Hudson River all the time thanks to the old brickyards—aesthetically distressed by the tides! It's a public service to haul them away. A former next door neighbor of ours scored some large bluestone tiles to use on his patio, when he noticed that the town of Hurley was mysteriously yanking and trashing its historic sidewalks. And there are abundant sources of junk metal for the enterprising welder.

It strikes me that Ulster County is a good place to build your own house of found materials, if you're handy enough, have the time, and own a pick-up truck. What you don't find by driving around, I imagine you could find on Ecycle or elsewhere on the internet, or through Hudson Valley Materials Exchange, or some other way. How about an annual award for the most recycled+reclaimed house? It could be the sadder-but-wiser sibling of those fancy LEED competitions. I'm willing to bet that the lower carbon footprint is made by the scavenger.

Oil Up with Golden Flax

2009-04-24T07:02:00.005-04:00

It's a smell of after-hours, moonlighting, passion; it comes with images—slugs of paint in all colors, with a tactile sensation—the slide of oil paste beneath a thin metal palette knife, with a sound—a clinking brush stirred quickly in a baby-food jar of turpentine. Smell of linseed oil, and memories of watching my dad paint, after he got home from work and on weekends.

I spent a weekend recently rubbing linseed oil into the wood in my dining room, wood once covered in a lifeless shade of blue paint, which was only the latest of around ten layers I think I counted at one point. As I scraped I could sometimes see them all at once, like the rings of a tree, from wood to creamy milk paint to something scary from the 50s or 60s right up to the blue. I could almost hear the wood's sigh of relief as I scraped all that gunk off it.

I don't like paint on wood or walls. I like a nice plain of plaster with its fine grain, hairline cracks, and skid marks from the trowel. (I hope I can tolerate going back to the construction equivalent of fast food after living here, 'cause Sheetrock, USA is most likely where I'm headed).

Give me some raw woodwork and a bottle of linseed (I used it straight, but I also used a nice polymerized linseed oil by Tried and True in Trumansburg, NY). Give me a tablespoon of flax oil on my oatmeal every morning and I feel even better. You can make clothes out the stuff, too...flax and hemp, the basic needs-meeters.

People who come into our dining room now are moved by the scent; they comment on it. Either they are artists and they love it because they're at home in a linseed atmosphere, or it brings back a happy memory of making art or being near art making. There's no pattern in A Pattern Language for smells, is there? —maybe there should be: Lavender Drawers at the Top of the Stairs, Aromatic Pathways to the Kitchen, Pockets of Linseed Memory...

The Missing Prosperity Corner

2009-04-17T11:40:00.005-04:00

^ BEFORE ^

It goes something like this...I am reading about feng shui, a sporadic hobby that coincides with my feeling like things are sliding out of control, in other words, my husband has been laid off again.

"Here's the problem, honey. No prosperity bagua! Look, that whole corner of the house is missing—there's nothing there but that brick patio with the moss and the tufts of grass."

My husband objects to the theory that the root of his professional rootlessness can be explained by feng shui. It's the economy, and before that it was the dot-com bubble pop, ya dope!

"Ah hah! But the last time I put a purple flowering plant in our prosperity corner, you got that job with the emergency notification people!"

Why did I lose that job then?

"Because the purple plant died when winter came, and I didn't replace it with another purple royalty object to draw prosperity chi to the missing bagua!"

My garbled, simpleton's rendition sounds strange even to myself, but I know there's wisdom in philosophies of color and placement in the home, whether feng shui, Vaastu Shastra, or just common sense. Lately, I'm willing to go around closing toilet lids, which everyone is always leaving open, draining chi out of our bank account. "Cluttered house, cluttered mind!," I have been known to snap at others (though I may be the chief pile-maker around here). I am not too proud to sleep with a box of coins under the bed, and there's that new energizing-red front door, mentioned in my last post.

Comparatively speaking, of course, my husband and I are materially and metaphorically prosperous. We are rich in children and the time to be with them, we are healthy and happy, and if neither of us has hit it big in the fame and fortune category, it's been because our definition of prosperity is what it is, what we've chosen.

But none of that stopped me from marking our prosperity corner with Plum Pudding Coral Bells the other day, in the hope of getting our asking price, in honor of spring, to summon a nice family to take over for us here, or as a wish that everybody everywhere, government and governed alike may be wealthy, healthy, and wise...take your pick.

v AFTER v Plum Pudding Prosperity Plant

All Hands on Deck

2009-04-14T07:18:00.005-04:00

I think we identify with our houses like we identify with our cars (I can't be the only one who feels sated after a filler-up at the gas station). Working on my house, better yet, having a crew of other people work on my house, has always felt like self-care to me; the confusion runs deep enough that it didn't surprise me when a friend, offering to help paint, said "Benjamin Moore is my boyfriend!"

But the labor gives me sore hands and shoulders, so I've resorted to less metaphorical body work twice in the past two weeks. I'm fortunate to have had someone recommended to me—two years before I finally went to see her, unfortunately—who is extraordinarily gifted, and achy shoulders and that twinge behind my left scapula are already nearly gone.

I wonder why, when some of the most gifted healers we have are massage therapists, reflexologists, and people who fall under the hazy but nonetheless invaluable rubric of energy work, our plans for better national health coverage don't include these modalities as 'preventive medicine?' Preventive medicine is still viewed largely as screening programs, which are fine as far as they go, and sometimes fitness club memberships or a nutrition class here and there, which are also fine as far as they go.

I can feel the pain draining down my arm and out my fingers as I write this. Massage is good for the muscles, the lymph, the adrenals, the spirit. Maybe it could be the tar and paint job for our ship of state, too. With the stress of economic and other upheavals, with all our knots and blockages related to addictive military spending and gay rights, with all the bold and subtle signs of imbalance around us, mightn't our body politic benefit from a crew of massage therapists?

Kingston Retrofit

2009-04-13T08:30:00.003-04:00

For a time I considered calling this blog "Kingston Retrofit," and focusing on our slow and careful process of remaking our 19th-century Victorian house into a 21st-century sustainable refuge. I decided instead to blog about whatever interested me on any given day, but as I look back over the years writing this blog, which is mostly about my children's youth, our field trips and holidays and dreams, our unschooling experiences, and our aspirations toward living more sustainably, what I've blogged about has always circled around the house. It's the column that's supported our life for seven years, and like any good column, it shifts with the movements of the earth, it's sturdy yet flexible. "My staircase, my spine," as I called an early post.

My husband and I have loved living in an old house, and all it has to offer: the craft involved in the building and all its details, from mouldings to plaster to stone; the great ventilation that makes an absurdity of an idea like air conditioning; the pride of preservation. We've had a great life here, and it's ending a little sooner than we thought it would. Halfway to adulthood, our children find their parents looking for a new place to raise them, when we thought it would be here, just here.

Speaking as one of millions of people putting their homes on the market right now, I have to say the hard part is dealing with change and uncertainty. We don't know where we're going, if we'll buy again, whether we can keep some bigger things like our piano. All we know is: smaller place, lower expenses. I'm having to get used to not knowing, and not forcing the issue before its time.

Meditating helps. Contemplating impermanence helps. But what triggers anxiety about impermanence and change more than the loss of home? The word "home" is a promise of stability, reliability. Home is a repository of memory; without the home, where are the memories? Home represents the meeting of all the other basic needs: home is shelter, food, warmth. This is why homelessness, and a country that doesn't address homelessness, is such a core issue of justice and compassion, why "foreclosure" sounds like "murder" to many of us.

So right now I'm scraping and painting, sifting and weeding and ecycling, raking and edging and planting, making nicey-nice and staging. I'm finishing household projects (for someone else) begun years ago (for me). I'm re-reading books about feng shui and hoping the chi starts bum-rushing this place soon. How do you like the red front door, by the way? I can feel the pumped-up chi traffic already.

I'll blog the journey, knowing it's one a lot of us are making these days.

Aria Grill, Kingston, NY

2009-04-10T14:32:00.004-04:00

It took me six months too long to check out Aria Grill on Broadway in Kingston.

Its owner, Peter Barak, is also owner of Peter B's, a deli run by his parents and brother (the family moved here from Queens several years ago) on Wall Street in Kingston, a good place to pick up warm bagels and a cup of coffee.

Peter returned to his roots to make the menu for Aria, which serves Afghan and Persian foods in a soothing, candlelit open space. My two children, my husband, and I had sambosa with yogurt sauce, naringe palau (rice with saffron, orange peels, almonds, pistachios), shrimp kabob, and lamb korma—all delicious and prepared with care. We sprinkled just about everything with a table condiment we had never tried before, but are now devotees of, made from dried, ground sumac, commonly used in Mediterranean kabob rubs. The Afghani green tea spiced with cardamom, hot and fragrant, came in a nice big kettle. Peter visited the table to chat and see how we liked everything. We gushed.

We were too full for bakhlava, firni (rosewater pudding), or sheer biringe (rice pudding). Lunch special is $8.99; it could become a habit.

STAR Exemption for NYS Homeowners

2009-03-03T08:56:00.003-05:00

What is a STAR Exemption? I never heard of one when I lived in Brooklyn. I moved to Kingston and didn't hear of it for six years. Then, last year, a dear friend who is also a realtor mentioned it to me and my husband.

From the New York state web site:

"The Basic STAR exemption is available for owner-occupied, primary residences regardless of the owners' ages or incomes. Basic STAR works by exempting the first $30,000 of the full value of a home from school taxes."

You have to get the form from the web site, where you can download a PDF, or go to the assessor's office for your municipality. Both last year and this, when I looked at the forms with my husband, we got confused and thought we made too much money for the Basic Star exemption. We didn't. No one does.

But the form asks for your age and your income. This is only to determine your eligibility for the second kind of STAR Exemption, called "Enhanced." If you live in your home and it is your primary residence, you qualify for the basic exemption.

We almost missed yesterday's deadline of March 2. Luckily, our above-mentioned friend walked us through downloading the forms, found out that the deadline was a postmark deadline, so that as the day grew longer, city offices closed and the post office closed, we still had a chance to squeak our form in. "Go to Staples," she emailed me at 8 pm. "They're a UPS center and they're open until 9."

So we did. And as back-up, my husband went to City Hall at 8:15 am to hand another application to a staff person as soon as they arrived. We need every penny now, and so does everyone else.

I hope this info finds its way to another person who didn't know about this program!

New Owners at Burgevin's

2009-03-02T16:32:00.003-05:00

Uptown Kingston is a little less gloomy since new owners from Fleishmann's (if I and my husband remember right, their names are Al and Lydia) took over Burgevin's Florist. They bring a touch of the much-missed Well Seasoned Nest to the digs, with some home-furnishing type stuff and a less kitschy aesthetic. They also bring cats with them: Smokey, Cali, and Midnight. Having cats in store windows goes a long way to making a shopping district look lived-in. Uptown Kingston could use more store pets. At any rate, you are safe ordering your next bouquet from these folks, you'll get more than carnations and baby's breath.

Inauguration of Barack Obama as U.S. President

2009-01-20T10:09:00.004-05:00

From Online Etymology:

inauguration
1569, from Fr. inauguration "installation, consecration," from L. inaugurationem (nom. inauguratio) "consecration, installment under good omens," from inaugurare "take omens from the flight of birds, consecrate or install when such omens are favorable," from in- "on, in" + augurare "to act as an augur, predict" (see augur).

augur - c.1374 (implied in augury), from L. augur, a religious official in ancient Rome who foretold events by interpreting omens, perhaps originally meaning "an increase in crops enacted in ritual," in which case it probably is from Old L. *augos (gen. *augeris) "increase," and is related to augere "increase" (see augment). The more popular theory is that it is from L. avis "bird," since flights, singing, and feeding of birds or entrails from bird sacrifices were an important part of divination (cf. auspicious). The second element would be from garrire "to talk." The verb is 1549, from the noun.

Omens, predictions, consecration, increase, birds, flight, singing-talk-oratory, divination.

It really does feel like an inauguration day.

Girls and Monsters

2009-01-17T18:24:00.004-05:00

I've been paging through Lynda Barry's writhing, book-length doodle-for-your noodle, What It Is.

There's no section that isn't my favorite section. One of them is about monsters.

She says that the monster that most scared and fascinated her when she was a kid was the Gorgon, who could turn anyone who looked at her to stone. She reminded Barry of her mother, and working up the courage to look at the Gorgon helped her cope.

"We never need certain monsters more than when we are children," she writes. "And a furious woman with terrifying eyes and snakes for hair was the perfect monster for me...What was yours?"

A bunch come up.

The first one I thought of was a woman in a Twilight Zone episode I saw when I was five. We had just moved from Syracuse to Baltimore, and were living in an apartment while we waited for our house to be finished. I was sleeping in a room with my three sisters. I imagine the situation was somewhat stressful, but I remember very little from that period other than being traumatized by Rod Serling.

In that episode, called "The Eye of the Beholder," a beautiful woman, on a planet where the people most prized look like wild pigs, gets plastic surgery to make her more acceptable. She spends most of the episode wrapped like a mummy, which was scary in itself. When I think about that I stop breathing. If I remember right she screams at the end when they take off the gauze, because she's still pretty. I had lots of nightmares after that. I imagined a figure standing on the wall above my bed. Plastic surgery still makes me want to scream.

Most of us are shown The Wizard of Oz when we are too young to keep our eyes open during the Wicked Witch of the West parts. You have to grow into that part of the movie.

In my baby book, it says that Hansel and Gretel was my favorite fairy tale at age two, so I guess witches were on my mind from a young age. I always thought of Dorothy as the fourth witch in Oz (there's no witch of the south, a gap she fills when she drops out of the sky). There were other good witches in movies too, like the herbalist-healer in The Three Lives of Thomasina.

Then came Cruella DeVille. When I watched 101 Dalmatians with my kids several years ago, it seemed odd that I had ever been afraid of her, but I trembled whenever she came on screen. I couldn't believe Dalmatians was a movie for kids, with a villain that frightening.

Like Lynda Barry's Gorgon, Cruella DeVille reminded me of my mom when she was angry. They both had long nails and voices husky from smoking. (My mother later quit and her five kids grew up, making her life easier and more enjoyable, but her smoking was a big issue throughout my teens; particularly her habit of lighting up after dinner while we were trying to enjoy brownies she had baked us).

As I entered my teens I watched a fair number of Godzilla movies, usually with my brother. We liked to laugh at the dubbing. I wasn't afraid of Godzilla. I thought she was female, since she had a baby that seemed to have hatched from her egg, and maybe because boys called a girl at my high school Godzilla, as an insult. They stopped calling her Godzilla after she, in a Dalai-Lamaesque maneuver, hosted a formal-dress party at her house and invited the perpetrators.

Godzilla got me imagining what fun I'd have as a skyscraper-smashing giant. Godzilla also set the stage for the unquestionably-female monster of the Alien series, which, together with the hero played by Sigourney Weaver, was a touchstone throughout my 20s.

I agree with Lynda Barry that we need monsters, to help us be brave, to give us an outlet for our own monstrous feelings, to show us what's intolerant and uncivil in our world.

I wonder if the Other Mother of CORALINE will give my daughter something to brood about.

Children need monsters; do girls need female monsters?

I think so, and female heros to tussle with them.

More Lines on CORALINE: Boys' Emotions

2009-01-17T17:46:00.003-05:00

Last night I took my kids to see The Wizard of Oz on the big screen at Ulster Performing Arts Center. It was an experience like they'd never had at a movie. They'd seen it many times on video and DVD, of course, like any nine or 11-year-old. But here was a giant auditorium of people and images many times their height; people clapped for every actor, sang and chanted along. A father with his daughter on his lap sat in front of us; in front of them, three men leaned their heads on one another's shoulders.

Before the picture, my son and his friend (another unschooler) discussed CORALINE.

BOY 1: So how was CORALINE?

BOY 2: Sad. And scary. But mostly sad.

BOY 1: I almost never cry but sometimes I do. If I'm hurt. Or at a movie if someone is hurt.

ME: If you're injured?

BOY 2: He means if his feelings are hurt.

BOY 1: Yeah, if my feelings are hurt.

It was a privilege to listen in, and I wondered how many conversations between boys go into that territory. Maybe it happens all the time and goes largely unreported, or maybe it had to do with the kind of people these particular boys are.

I asked later what was so sad about CORALINE.

"When she goes to bed and makes dolls of her parents," my son said. "And when she puts all the dolls in the chest and locks it [in the other world.] I didn't like that at all."

Preview + Review of Long-Awaited CORALINE

2009-01-15T20:31:00.009-05:00

CORALINE is scheduled for release to theaters on February 6, 2009.

My son Ray has been making movies since he was six: stop motion animation, live action, and lately, CGI parodies of Star Wars. He reads film production books and bios of animators like Chuck Jones, and loves ‘making-of’ bonus features and little biopics about revered figures like Ray Harryhausen. One of his ‘mentors’ is Henry Selick, who has just completed his adaptation (for 3D stop-motion animation) of Neil Gaiman’s novel, Coraline.

It was our enormous good fortune—mine, my son’s, my daughter’s, my husband’s, and his mother’s—to visit the set of Coraline a couple of years ago, and a real treat to see a preview screening of the finished work the other night in Manhattan, with Henry Selick on hand to answer audience questions.

Ray, who is 11, wasn’t sure he wanted to see what he called a ‘horror’ movie. His 9-year-old sister, who acts in most of his movies and in her own monologue-driven shorts, was firm: she wouldn’t go to the screening. The monstrous Other Mother of the previews, and the prospect of having her lunge from the screen, were horrors they could live without.

So, Ray and I headed into NYC with the plan that he would shut his eyes, pull his jacket up over his face, and hold his hands to his ears if it all got to be too much. He was willing to endure, if only for the Q&A portion of the evening.

As it turns out, he didn’t have to worry too much. He only shut his eyes once, and not for long. While the idea of Coraline is truly terrifying—a girl is left alone to rescue her supernaturally abducted parents—its creators have allowed the idea to carry most of the weight of emotion, as with the best fairy tales, and haven’t piled onto it with 3D shock effects or long, anxiety-provoking suspense sequences. The Nightmare Before Christmas, with its cast of characters in varying states of decomposition, is more horrific—at least to me, and I think my son, who got to an age where he felt too uneasy to watch it, and wouldn’t go near the undead-dominated Corpse Bride, would agree.

Henry Selick has done a beautiful job of reconceptualizing the novel for the screen and for stop motion. From the first moments, when metal hands sew up a doll-sized version of the title character and cast her into a void, this is a movie that invites contemplation of the animator and the animator’s art. Our first view of the hands of the evil Other Mother, creator and destroyer of the Other World, are bare of fleshly trappings, primordial armature. We come to find that the energy of children is what makes the Other Mother’s material other world, and it is their life force that makes it beautiful, whimsical, and inviting.

If you have watched any of the featurettes about Coraline, you have seen artist after artist toiling and tinkering away, as artists always do on these projects, though now, with the Internet, in less obscurity. They can even blog about their work for Laika Studios. It’s hard to watch that image of armature hands making the Coraline doll and not think of all the human hands that have gone into the making of this supremely hand-made movie, and seeing in these moments a tribute to them all (certainly they deserve a tribute, including those several dozen Laika workers, I was sorry to read, who were recently laid off).

OtherMotherWorld is especially fanciful and so packed with detail it's hard to imagine not seeing the movie many times to try to take it all in. Henry S. has ensured that the Other Mother’s overture to Coraline is suitably seductive. She—and we—are truly tempted to stay and sample more delights from the animators’ cabinet of wonders. The wonders really are wonderful; we laughed throughout the early other world scenes. In the post-screening Q&A, Henry S. talked a bit about his motivation for shooting in 3D. He wanted the audience to have more access to the animators' world—2D doesn't really allow it. So the other world—more colorful, more fanciful—really is the animators' world. (One could imagine a version that is flat when we're in Coraline's world and 3D only in the other world, like the sepia vs. color worlds of The Wizard of Oz.)

Henry Selick’s Other Mother is a kind of ‘50s fantasy mom—she cooks brilliantly in heels, make-up, and manicure and wears a stainless, starched apron. Other Father is affable, doting, and fun (aside from the saucy, riotous French and Saunders as the Misses Spink and Forcible, my favorite vocal performance is John Hodgman's as the Fathers Real and Other).

Coraline's real world parents, by contrast, are familiar to us as contemporary, overworked telecommuters (fortunate in that sense, they write at home on gardening) who share the work of their life equally, don’t exactly excel in the kitchen, and don’t have much time for their daughter, who learns what it means to have 'good enough' parents.

That Coraline's creativity will rival the Other Mother's is intimated by a lovely scene that is not in Neil Gaiman’s book. Having returned from an early foray into the other world, Coraline finds her apartment empty; her parents have not come home from work and grocery shopping. Newly arrived in a strange place, friendless and now abandoned by her parents, she goes to bed alone, making pillow-people versions of her mom and dad to comfort herself—the Other Mother isn't the only one who can conjure power from a doll. I think Coraline's realization that they're not coming back is the scariest moment in the story (though Gaiman's protagonist is pretty brave at this point, as I recall). Henry S. wisely lingers long enough for us to feel her loneliness and her sadness.

A resourceful adventurer who is, like too few movie protagonists—even at the dawn of the 21st century—a girl, Coraline would be perfect if not for Henry S.’s addition of a boy to come to her aid in her time of need. Or so I thought when I heard about him. But Wybie (nicknamed "Why Be Born" by Coraline—I guess Henry S. knew some of us would resist), who gives Coraline someone other than a (really cool) cat to dialog with, adds a melancholy element to the other world, where he is more expressive for his muteness.

When my son and I came back up the Hudson River the day after the screening, and made our report to his sister, she said, “I think I’ve changed my mind. I do want to see Coraline.” I look forward to seeing it again with her.

We were too shy to ask for a shot of Henry S. with Ray, but here he is after the Q&A. Be sure to view through your 3D glasses.

The Age of Innocence at 32 and 47

2009-01-15T10:13:00.006-05:00

When The Age of Innocence came out in 1993, I was 32. I went to see it with my boyfriend. We were living together in a committed relationship, and our lives had become routinized and boring.

After the movie we strolled into the East Village and he began yammering in an easy, superficial way, much like the way May Welland tells Newland Archer all the society doings in her winter resort of St. Augustine. Like Newland Archer I tuned out my partner in order to pursue my own reverie about, actually, Newland Archer, in whom I thought I saw myself.

I had left the film sad at his fate, and his separation from his soulmate, Ellen Olenska. I was on a cliff I might soon fall off of, into marriage and a lifetime of predictability. My partner’s wisecracks about Michelle Pfeiffer’s hairdo, or whatever he was talking about, added annoyance to my despair. He wasn't moved by the story the way I had been, and I took it as one of many signs that we didn't belong together. Within a year we had broken up and gone our separate ways.

In my eleventh year as a New York resident, I moved into my own apartment in Chelsea, where I lived happily, without a roommate for the first time. I bought a VHS copy of The Age of Innocence and made a habit of watching it once a year.

I like to see it during the winter holidays, not so much because it is a winter film (like Meet Me in St. Louis, it encompasses all seasons, but like that movie it leaves you with a sense of having been snowed on), but because of a particular memory I have of its being shot in Park Slope, around the corner from where I lived with my boyfriend.

One summer evening I came home from work to find a block of Eighth Avenue closed to auto traffic. Blowers were creating an artificial snowfall so that Ellen Olenska, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, could descend the steps of a brownstone, enter a carriage, and drive away. (I later realized this scene must have taken place after she says goodbye to Newland Archer, played by Daniel Day Lewis, for the last time, closing the door on the possibility of their ever having the affair they’ve been contemplating).

Passersby dressed in shirtsleeves or shorts and flip-flops, had gathered to watch Ms. Pfeiffer mount the carriage and depart in the blizzard, and I stood with them for a while, enchanted by the giant snow globe Martin Scorcese had created in our neighborhood. When the movie came out, this made me more excited about seeing it, this tiny role I’d already played as a spectator of its creation.

It was wrenching, this meditation on sacrifice and lost possibility. Newland and Ellen represented all the things people give up when they settle down. Newland's story was a warning about how commitment undermines creative freedom and atrophies intellect and authenticity. Marriage even seemed to ruin his appreciation for art and literature.

Even after a few more years had passed, and I was happily married to someone I regarded as a creative soulmate, and had two children, and a family life full of art projects, and experiences worth making art about, I watched The Age of Innocence with this focus on loss, summed up in the tenor of a scene at the end, an exchange between Newland and his son Ted. Ted reveals that May, on her deathbed, told him about Newland’s affair with Ellen Olenska. And that his mother had said that she would die knowing that Ted and her other children would always be safe with Newland, because “once, when she asked him to, he gave up the one thing he wanted most.” In answer, Newland looks ahead and says bitterly, “she never asked. She never asked.”

His choice of whom to marry, in a society which, he tells Ellen earlier in the film, does not arrange its marriages, had been determined by power brokers in a system of invisible signs and symbols that moved in mysterious ways, with curious and sometimes surprising endorsements.

(Julius Beaufort, for example, who winds up as Ted’s father-in-law, is able to conduct a series of scandalous affairs and even survives a Madoff-like collapse of his investment business, all because he is able to surf the changing times better than Newland).

This past New Year’s Eve, 15 years after my first viewing from a bachelorette’s vantage point, I decided to watch The Age of Innocence again. I had missed a few years of viewing, and I wondered if I’d see anything new in it. Right from the beginning, I noticed more details about Scorsese’s adaptation of the novel, how he used cinematic means to literary ends so brilliantly. But a new emotional response surprised me.

This time around, I was drawn to a different most-significant moment. Ted has arranged a visit to Ellen Olenska in Paris and sprung it on his dad, asking whether he might like to meet again the woman he almost “threw it all over for.” Newland, alone in the Louvre (throughout the film, the contemplation of art brings this character closest to his emotional truth), thinks to himself, “I’m only 57.” He meets Ted outside Ellen’s apartment, but can’t bring himself to visit her.

“Just tell her I’m old-fashioned,” is the excuse he gives his son, “that should be enough.” He then walks away, and the narrator (Joanne Woodward) tells us that the fact that his wife had appreciated his sacrifice, and pitied him, moves him inexpressibly. Yielding to May's subtly-expressed deathbed wish that he stay committed to her beyond death, he walks away.

“Just tell her I’m old-fashioned.” With this remark Newland sides with May and the old order. Her comment to Ted about the family’s safety has ensured that his commitment to her will never end; propriety has spoken through her and he will listen.

Ellen is indeed only one of a series of ghosts in his life, one of a number of people, places, actions given up in order to experience commitment. Newland’s way is a fundamentally conservative one, and though Beaufort, with his philandering, and Ellen, with her “eccentric and incoherent education” and possible divorce, represent a new, chaotic, even dangerous order, Newland’s choice, which he finally recognizes as a choice, and stands by it, is in favor of stability and tradition. Not to say that the path he picked was better than if he'd chosen Ellen, or lived like Julius, but I no longer see it as quite so miserable and suffocating. People who commit give up all kinds of transitory pleasures; people who don't commit give up the possibility of ever standing in the room where 'all the great events of their life' have taken place.

In Newland Archer, Edith Wharton wrote an expansive character that allows for identification (as much as a woman can identify with a man) from very different vantage points—Archer’s yearning for freedom versus the decision to forgo it. Is Newland disgusted with Julius Beaufort or envious of him? Is his marriage to May the result of societal coercion or choice? Either, or both, depending on who's watching, and when.

Cranberry Sauce Flotilla

2008-12-18T19:31:00.003-05:00

Cranberry Sauce Flotilla is a song by Dog On Fleas that I sing whenever I'm around cranberries.

What I really want to talk about is how I make cranberry sauce. If I say so myself, this recipe is yum, and I made it up myself. Don't know why I made it rhyme, though.

Cranberry Sauce a la Red Eft

8 oz or so of cranberries
1/4 c or so maple syrup (grade b!)
apple or apricot juice
2 tbsp or so agar agar or kanten flakies

Put those crans
in a saucepan.
Cover with water, bring them to simmer.
Start to look forward to an excellent dinner.
Let them cook until they look soft and stuff.
Add some juice. Not too much. Do this part off the cuff.
Maple syrup at this point will make it sweeter.
Just stir some in, you don't need a beater.
Add agar agar or kanten to make it firm up.
Pour into a bowl, or for each diner, a cup.
Refrigerate. Let it set a spell.
This will allow your sauce to gel.

Eat while singing Cranberry Sauce Flotilla. Good on toast, with yogurt, or mixed with rice and bright orange squash like kabocha or butternut.

Out of My Way Or I'll Eat You!

2008-12-02T11:02:00.006-05:00

The Sinterklass Revels (scroll down for my first post about this) got underway this weekend, and I roared with great joy as the dragon pitted against St. George.

Bellow, growl, threaten to eat everyone around you! It's therapeutic. I recommended it to my sister in California. She emailed back, "I wish I could roar but houses here are so close together that even my unattached next door neighbors would hear me!"

So inhibited are we from unleashing the dragon that we can't even do it in the privacy of our own homes.

A few years ago I took Alan Arkin's excellent improv workshop at the Omega Institute, and on the last day the students designed our own improvs. I was drafted by a woman (who typically worked as a clown in her home city) to be in her improv. I would sit in the dark by a campfire, and she, a monster, would crash through the woods, grab me, carry me off. It was great fun screaming, but my pleasure was nothing like hers. Afterwards, she told me with tears in her eyes how profoundly it had benefited her to be the monster.

Now I know what she meant. Be the monster!

After St. George slays me, I am revived by The Fool and transform back into myself, but different, lighter. More Sinterklaas pageantry this Saturday, December 6, 2008 in Rhinebeck, New York.