A Big Storm Knocked It Over

Like Fire wasn't the only thing that got its germination at BEA last May. I also, if you remember, picked up a bunch of seed packets—seed packets were popular giveaways in 2009—including these sunflower seeds from, appropriately enough, Columbia University Press.

I did in fact plant them on the weird elevated platform in front of my house, and not only did they grow but they grew HUGE. Every day for the past few weeks I meant to go out and take photos. Seriously, every day. They were monstrous and cheerful—you could see them from a block away. During the last two weeks of September I was vetting new tenants for the downstairs rental unit, and I always got a kick out of telling people who wanted to come see the place "It's the house with the sunflowers."

And then last Wednesday we had a big old windstorm. Tree limbs went down, chunks of the city lost power, and I came home to find my giant sunflowers broken, every one of them, hanging down with their faces to the sidewalk. I wasn't brokenhearted, though. They probably wouldn't have lasted another month, I had found a nice tenant for the apartment, and really—if that's the worst thing that happens to me all week, I'll take it.

The next evening I came home and even from the bottom of the hill I could see they were all gone. We live across the street from the neighborhood community center, and I figured some bored kids messing around after school must have pulled them out. But once inside I saw that Jeff had gotten home early and cut the survivors down to fit in a jar.
So that's it, summer's over. The cats are quite taken with the sunflowers, and every time I look at them (the flowers, that is) I think of Van Gogh. I turned the heat on last week. And off we sail into fall, and whatever the winter holds. Life is good.

Thanksgiving in July

Saturday was one of those really rare stunning New York summer days -- hot and sunny but not sticky or heavy. It's been notably cool for July anyway, but to get true summer that's not disgusting -- that's a thing of beauty around here.

I went into the city to see my friend Heather, with the idea of hitting up some galleries. But they were all closed -- odd for a Saturday, but we guessed everyone was off in the Hamptons. So we did what we would have done anyway, which was walk and talk -- she's someone I can talk to all day and never get tired. We hung out on the 23rd Street pier for a while, which has gotten a nice makeover since I was last over that way. Everyone was out taking the sun, with sailboats tacking across the Hudson and the water sparkling. I could have jumped in.
Then we walked over to Tenth Avenue and climbed up to The High Line, which I've wanted to see since it opened last month. It's a length of elevated freight rail tracks built in the 1930s and abandoned in 1980, reclaimed at the beginning of the '00s as park space and spruced up super nice. It's all concrete and wood and steel in perfect proportion, filled with indigenous, New York State prairie-type plantings, and all sorts of great detailing that fits in with the existing cityscape -- no small feat when you consider the whole crazy pentimento effect of New York City in the 21st century. There are some ridiculously cool sleek highrises towering above it, and crumbly roofs from the century before last with rusty watertowers alongside. My favorite thing was a long stone wall of tall multicolored mullioned windows -- I'm a sucker for colored glass and this was really classy.
After walking and talking and walking and talking, we headed up to the Bronx and had a big grilled feast, salmon and corn and black bean/mango salsa and salad.

And then Sunday night? We had our friends John and Margarita and their dogs over for a big grilled feast, chicken and burgers and corn and summer squash and salad.

That was a lot of feasting in one weekend, a lot of talking and drinking and passing food around the table and pretending we didn't see Mr. Bonkers stick his entire head in the salad bowl, looking for cucumbers. Forget Christmas in July -- this weekend was our Thanksgiving in July. I can go back to my hermit ways for a while, but it was nice doing some extended bread-breaking with friends.
Sunday was the fourth anniversary of Milo's death. I didn't dwell on it much during the day, but this morning around 4 I woke up with a little indigestion, a little of the dreaded Monday hangover, and lay in the dark thinking about him. I'll always miss my boy -- he was a shooting star and his time with me was far too short. You know how when you're a kid you get this vision of how you're going to be as an adult, this very personal archetype that you either ditch or hang on to or some variation thereof? I always wanted to be a cool artist lady in a beat-up pickup truck with a dog in the front seat. Not a mommy, not a businesswoman, not a nurse or a fireman. She was it. And though I lost track of her for a while -- my childrearing years weren't really conducive to keeping that particular vision alive -- I got her back. I got to be the cool artist lady in the beat-up pickup truck, even if I was really a slightly geeky publishing lady in a beat-up Blazer, and Milo was that dog. He was the key that turned in the lock and gave me a second chance to be what I wanted. He was my good dog, sitting in the front seat.

The thing is, though, if Milo were still alive there's a very good chance we would never have adopted Dorrie. And she's my good dog too. It's just one of those things that there's no way to really think about in a straight line.

So I woke her up and pulled her into my arms with her head on my shoulder, and snuggled with my good dog until it got light out and I figured I might as well just get up. Milo always liked being held that same way, and I guess wherever he is he must appreciate the fact that I'm still snuggling in bed with a white spotty dog. Whatever else you can say about me, I sure do pick good ones.

Summertime and The Russian Prize

Summer's finally come to New York. Look, I'm not complaining -- it's the middle of July, and this is the first really irritatingly hot and sticky day that hasn't cooled off after the sun went down. Cold pasta, cherries, and wine for dinner, and the fans all going full-blast. When I turned on the floor fan in the living room -- first time this year -- a huge dust bunny came skittering out and Francis went crazy. He chased it, then he stalked it, then pounced. It had to have been a hell of a disappointment. The tenure of the other two cats has pretty much assured that this house is rodent-free, so he never gets to catch anything.

So my guest blogger gig at Bookninja is over as of tonight, since George is back. It was a lot of fun, and I hope that everyone who followed me there will keep checking it out on a regular basis. It's a really good joint. My fellow bloggers were awesome too -- they put me to shame, honestly, with all their energy. I see they all kept up with their personal blogs just fine. But hey, we all do what we can do and anyway, I have a few tricks left up my sleeve. Stay tuned.

Earlier this evening I was reading various newsworthy items and got myself worked up into a whole bloggy lather with one of my usual rants, which is how I dearly wish to see the farthest corners of world literature spread around to all readerly consciousnesses -- seriously, it should be as accessible and unscary as world music has gotten, and available in Starbucks as well -- and I came upon Margarita Meklina's account at The Quarterly Conversation of her trip back to Russia after winning the Russkaya Premia literary prize.

It's a good story, dark and touching. The other finalists she mentions, though, just stopped me in my tracks. Not so much the creepy wanking Ossetian, but Boris Khazanov, hoping to be handed a literary prize from the same state that jailed him for six years in the 50s for anti-Soviet propaganda. How in the world could that feel? Literally, how in the world -- a Google search of his name turned up some Russian language books and a Boris Khazanov who lives in New Hampshire and gave money to Obama's campaign. The one I want is a German expat, whose speech focused on "language, which becomes frozen in immigration as though in a fridge."

Or Andrei Nazarov, whose family was killed in the Revolution and who said the award should go to Nabokov and Bunin, who never received such a prize from their own government. The backstorie seems as far from the American literary prize machine as you can get, and I'm hungry to know more. Nazarov shares his name with a pro hockey player, and while I realize it's fully possible to both play hockey and write -- hey, I can -- I doubt they're the same person.

So for all my grand ideas of world literature for the people and how it would make us better citizens of the universe, I end up only being as good as my search engine, and I end up feeling very solidly American. But Meklina's essay is a really wonderful window into a whole different room, and I appreciate that. It's a big internet, and I like it that way.

Did I mention that it's hot? The dog is hot, the cats are hot. We've gotten off easy so far, but I guess summer's here now.

Spots and Stripes

The promised rain arrived and stayed, and all the members of this household have spent the day muddy or sleepy or both. In a sad bit of irony, my kitchen floor is immaculate -- which means I can spend every spare moment of the next week following the animals around with a mop, because our five-day forecast looks something like this:



Makes me doubly glad I spent so much time yesterday indolently lounging outdoors. Indolently lounging indoors doesn't have quite the same feeling of satisfaction to it.

Cold Spring

Why yes, it has been a cold spring. It even snowed last week for about half an hour. The daffodils and crocuses have come up, but everything else is resolutely brown and nothing's really budding yet.

Oh, wait... we're talking about that Cold Spring. As in the town upstate on the Hudson where my friends Jane and Heather and Dorrie and I went hiking a couple of weekends ago, which if I'd been any kind of good blogger I would have written about immediately, and I would have taken more than four pictures. Well, yes.
Seriously, it was a sublime day. The occasion was roughly Jane's birthday, and there were presents, but mostly it was a good excuse to spend time together and go somewhere outside of our regular orbits. It was an easy drive, just over an hour and almost all of it pretty, and Dorrie didn't throw up. While it was overcast and windy - we ended up turning back before hitting the trail summit because it actually felt dangerous, and it crossed my mind that Dorrie, at 50 pounds, could conceivably blow away - the day was still a beautiful and dramatic one, and we got a lot of hiking and bushwacking in at lower altitudes.
When I was little I watched Lassie obsessively. I'll never be able to hear "Greensleaves" without picturing that gorgeous dog launching herself neatly over the fence like a heat-seeking missile in her mission to reach Timmy. Probably all he'd done was call, "Here, Lassie! Here, girl!" and off she went.

I wanted a dog like Lassie more than anything else in the universe, a companion and protector who would trot at my heel and from time to time look up to see what I might want of her, the way Lassie looked at Timmy. We had a dog, a beautiful and unruly longhaired German Shepherd named Princess. But she was neither a companion nor a protector and she certainly couldn't care less what anyone wanted. She had done a week at obedience school as a puppy and my parents figured that was that - discipline and setting limits wasn't really their strong suit, as I would happily prove to them a few years later. So unless we were in our fenced back yard, Princess and I weren't going anywhere together. No one could walk her except my father - she once dragged my mother half a block and cracked two of her ribs - and she had to be sequestered when anyone came to the house for any reason. She was a sweet girl in her way, but Princess was not the dog I hungered for.
Dorrie is, though. Thirty-odd years later and I've finally got my loyal companion, and nothing feeds the fantasy fulfilled better than hiking through the woods together. My sweet little Milo was the most charismatic dog on earth, but I’m not sure I would have ever let him off-leash. He could go like a streak, and - granted, he was young - I never got that dependable vibe from him. Dorrie is faithful with every cell of her body. Off-leash she’s blissful, trotting one way and another, exploring, following scents but never straying far, and always popping up and bounding back if I call or clap. There’s something deeply peaceful about walking through the woods with friends, talking and poking at things with sticks, with a good dog ambling along beside us.
After we’d finished with Breakneck Ridge (seriously - that’s what it’s called) we noodled around for a while in the town of Cold Spring. Main Street’s main industry seems to be a series of cavernous antique/junk stores, rooms upon rooms of all sorts of cool knick-knacks. The places all seem to be struggling right now - this has to have been a long, cold winter for anyone dependent on a tourist trade. We did our bit to shore up the local economy - every place we went to was refreshingly dog-friendly, and Dorrie really seemed to enjoy sniffing all the old stuff - and walked around. I even ran into someone I knew, a guy I used to work with who departed for greener pastures, so we had a dog-patting and business-card-exchanging moment.

At the end of the day Dorrie was so exhausted she actually climbed in the car of her own volition, which as far as I know has never happened before, and curled up on her dog bed in the back. We took a bit of a scenic route home inadvertently, but it was all good, more time to talk and we got to see some of the less glamorous Rockland County waterfront. OK, a lot of the less glamorous Rockland County waterfront. But it’s good to know these things. Dorrie slept the whole way home.

So yes, that Cold Spring was as good as it gets. The rest of this cold spring I could do without, honestly.

But my tomato seedlings are sprouting! The cherry tomatoes first, followed by their Early Girl sisters.
And last weekend I planted a romaine mix, a greens mix, and snap peas - they’re under a bunch of bird netting, which is not so much to keep birds out as to discourage Shakey, who thinks he’s got the world’s best litter boxes there. I’ve even planted a $12.99 rosebush from Home Depot - as with the weather, so far it’s all thorns and no blooms. But even in a cold spring, hope springs eternal.
And here’s a gratuitous shot of Francis’ very handsome whiskers.

First Caturday in Spring

So yesterday was the Vernal Equinox, first day of spring. I was out in the back yard early in the morning, staring up at the top of our big tree -- a little black and white cat has been hanging out in our yard lately, and the night before Dorrie had chased it all the way up and it hadn't come down by bedtime. It was gone by that morning, but as I looked up I couldn't help wondering -- wasn't it just a bit early for pollen to be coming down?

Heh. Not pollen, snow. Happy first day of spring indeed. Francis thought it was very exciting.
(Yes, I do clean my windowsills. The little shits just mess them right up again with their dirty paws.)

After that he was all worn out and had to take a nap with Alvy.
Is that cute enough for you people?

Today Chester the beagle came over for a visit. Alvy didn't particularly approve but Mr. Bonkers definitely did.
P.S. Whenever I see "Caturday" I think of Mick Jagger singing it to the tune of "Melody." I don't know why.

Turbine

Yesterday morning I walked out of the house and said, out loud because I've obviously lived in New York too long, "This is a fucking great-looking day."

I'm not sure exactly what I meant by that -- it just popped out. It was a very blustery day, with fat puffy white clouds getting blown around so hard they cast moving shadows on the sidewalk. Dramatic weather. And I live at the top of a long hill, so when I go out my front door I get a big-sky urban panorama -- not something you see just everywhere. I've learned to pay attention to the first things I think when I'm walking down that hill in the morning, having finally pried myself out of my warm safe house and pushed myself forcibly into the world. It's a combination of taking my psychic temperature and reading emotional tea leaves about the day to come -- not always precise, but accurate enough to give me at least the illusion that I have a handle on things.

Seeing big wind blowing like that always makes me wish I had some kind of windmill turbine on my roof and a generator in the basement so I could harness some of it and live a tiny bit more off the grid, give up a little less money into the greedy clutches of Con Edison.

I'm feeling a certain amount of good energy coming from within me as well, and the same urge to harness it -- although that requires a lot less hardware and a lot more attention. The weather inside and out don't always match up, but when they do it does, in fact, make for a fucking great-looking day.