More basement archeology

I certainly do not want to suggest that this comprises the weirdest list of random items dredged from the parental basement and barn; nothing has yet topped, for sheer delight, the shelf of dusty, moldy & empty wine bottles, labeled “Empty Bottles with Good Memories”. But still, there are nuggets to be gleaned here:

• An Ethiopian one-dollar bill featuring a lovely portrait of Haile Selassie, the original Rasta (Who went to Ethiopia? And when? And why? That is to say, I know why I went - long story - but why did the procurer of this dollar?)






• Typed school reports my father and his brother, from Brush Hill School, Spring 1934. Given that we were raised to think that my father, from his earliest years, was brilliant, tri-lingual and able to perform calculus in his sleep, it is rather shocking to read this from Dad’s science teacher: “Philip has shown little progress through the year in extending his interest. Is interested in the things we do without caring to know why we do them.” (Hmmm.)
Or this from his PhysEd teacher: “Philip is keenly interested in baseball…He responds more accurately in rhythms. He is over-critical of others.” (Okay, that last bit does seem more like the Dad we know & love.)
However, this from his music teacher seems apt, then and now: “He still uses only one or two tones in his voice, and he ought to have one or two minutes of daily work to overcome this handicap.”
• A collection of certificates certifying the bearer to have circumnavigated the world, crossed the International Date Line, or the Equator, or some other landmark, imaginary or otherwise, issued by assorted airlines, such as the International Date Line Club, Northwest Orient Airlines (last name misspelled); Jupiter Rex/Pan American-Grace Airways/Panagra; Neptune Rex, TWA; Domain of Phoebus Apollo (first name misspelled).
• The House Beautiful Climate Control Project, printed in 1951 by the American Institute of Architects
• Among several items attesting to my wasted youth (all those A+’s in religion), a report made by yours truly when a student in parochial school, in which the sacraments are defined AND illustrated. As this example of genuine contrition:

But what I find most compelling is a brown manila accordion folder, the kind with attached matching ribbons, labeled in my grandmother’s unmistakable perfect convent script: Hans Lehner. That is my grandfather, my father’s father. The script is that of my mother’s mother. Inside this manila envelope I found:
• Hans Lehner’s passports for the years, 1947, 1951, 1955 and 1959
• A program of my Uncle Claude’s marriage to Nancy Mansfield in Seekonk, Massachusetts
• Several photographs of my father and uncle and their father, with lots of dead fish hanging from a string, somewhere
• Lists (both typed and handwritten) of the guests who came to my grandfather (Hans Lehner’s) funeral in January 1965. The lists are long, and only the male member of a couple is named.
• A catalog for machinery and supplies for carding, combing and weaving (50,000 spindles)
• An ink stained handwritten family tree, entirely in German, hence incomprehensible to me
• Three fond birthday cards from Reine (mother’s mother) to Hans (father’s father)

What was not found in the basement or anywhere else, what cannot be quantified or labeled, what is worth all the dredging, the inhaling of old dust, and the grimy fingers, are the stories that get retold, and sometimes, just sometimes, they are even stories I have never heard before.
Thus, peripherally related to the subject of having all this junk in the basement, my mother explained to CSB that when she and her brother and mother left Indochina in 1940, they left in a VERY BIG RUSH. Specifically, European women and children had exactly 24 hours to pack and get on the boat heading east, if they wanted to evade the Japanese army as it scorch-earthed its way south. My grandmother backed up her children, their toys & clothes & books, and left everything else behind. And among that everything else was her collection of Chinese jade.
I always knew that my grandmother loved jade, and I suppose I always knew that my mother’s father was color-blind, because all three of my brothers are color blind, and color blindness is a recessive trait carried by the female. But here is the part I never knew. As he traveled throughout Indochina, my grandfather Arnold, known to me as Bon Papa, often bought jade for his wife, but being color blind he could not distinguish between green jade and pink jade, and he bought numerous pieces of pink jade jewelry and carved pink jade figures, thinking they were green jade. Because he actually had no idea that jade came in many different hues and colors. And Reine, my grandmother of the convent script, known as Bonne Maman, did not want to disillusion her husband, so she gratefully accepted the pink jade, which was lovely, but it was not green.
According to my mother, that pink jade would be very very valuable now, but what do we know? We do not have it in our basement; it is in some Japanese general’s basement – or so said Bonne Maman – although I don’t think of Japanese houses as having basements, and we hope they are enjoying it, pink or green.

Re-moving the Whitney Bees - a performance piece

In case you did not know, the Whitney Museum, home to the happy hives of Let it Bee, is re-doing the entire roof its Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, and this means that the bees will have to vacate.
In case you thought this was a simple process, I am here to tell you otherwise.

This is how it went: First CSB had to build a bunch of new nuc boxes. Then we lugged them and plastic bins for honey supers and all our gear up to the roof. Then we suit up – but as we will discover, not enough suiting up for Chucker, as the bees stung him through his socks, and crawled all over the trapezoid of exposed back between the top of his jeans and the bottom of the jacket as it rode up while he worked.
Then he un-stacked hive #1. Once he started this process the bees became agitated, and then they became more agitated, and so they were flying all around us with more than their usual interest in our bodies. And once a bee stings you, she leaves behind her pheromones to alert her sister bees to this prime-and-ready-to-be-stung flesh. So imagine all that follows amidst thousands of flying and agitated bees.
CSB took out each deep frame, looked for the queen & then passed it to me to place into a nuc. We repeated this process about 30 times, filling up about 6 nuc boxes. Once each nuc was filled, I put the wire lid back over, and then CSB - barehanded in order to better manipulate the cordless drill – screwed the wire on to ensure no bee escapees. About 20-30 screws per nuc. I labeled each nuc with an X, except the one with the queen, which got a double XX.
Then the honey supers: CSB removed the honey supers, shook off the bees, and passed them down to me; I then brushed off the remaining bees and slid the sweet honey-filled frame into the plastic bin which I then covered with a Red Sox beach towel (ca. 1987), so the bees would not all return to reclaim their honey. This process was repeated 10 times for each bin, after which I put the lid on and taped the lid as tightly as possible.
We did this with 2 hives, of 2 deeps each, and about 4 honey supers full of 10 frames each. The plastic bins with the honey supers weighed about 40 pounds each, or 50, or maybe 60 pounds. A lot.

Then we carried everything from the hive location to the roof door on the other side of the roof, so we wouldn’t have to go through the utility room with its vents, AC’s, furnaces, pipes, knobs, valves, gadgets, and maintenance men who, despite our many cheerful and chirpy appearances, have not yet found a way to enjoy the presence of the bees on the roof.
We lugged everything to the roof door, but we didn’t open the roof door, because it is alarmed, and for this we had to call Delano, the chief of Whitney’s Physical Plant and the guy we see most every time we come in to see the bees. (Among his other talents, Delano is a painter and he just got married at about the coolest venue ever: The Housing Works Café) So poor Delano had to leave whatever else he was doing and hustle up a key for the roof door and then come up to the fifth floor and unlock and de-alarm the door so we can move everything from the outside (the roof) to the inside – very carefully. I cannot exaggerate just how insanely careful and frankly, a little OCD, CSB is about this, his determination that not one single bee should escape and enter the hallowed sanctum of the WMA. Then we carry everything down a flight of stairs – have I made it clear that we are talking about a few 100 pounds of bees and honey in aggregate? No? Well, then let me say again: these things are heavy, and I, for one, am a weakling. And finally, finally, we load everything onto the dolly and roll it out into the gallery featuring four mannequins dressed in museum guard uniforms (Guarded View, by Fred Wilson) and onto the elevator. Then we go down four floors, and roll everything out that we had just rolled in, we traverse the Whitney lobby, past the bookstore and the coat check, silenced on this Monday or Tuesday, since those are the days the museum is closed and when we service the Whitney bees.
Then we load everything in the back of our car, which already smells wonderfully of wax and honey and dogs, and return to Hastings, where we unload and install the bees in their new home for the rest of the season.
In case I have not flogged this dead horse enough, this was quite a lengthy and exhausting process, and needed to be repeated the following day with the remaining hives. So I had the brilliant idea of enlisting the aid of young hipster musician nephew to come and help, which he did, coming from Brooklyn to meet us at the loading dock, dressed in beekeeper whites and ready to document the adventure for his legions of FB fans. He may look like a hipster, but he is strong and did much of the heavy lifting and got his first bee sting ever, a badge of honor.
So for the next few months, the roof of the Whitney will be sadly bee-less. But the early season was a good one, hence the many, heavy, pounds of honey supers.

SQD Wedding and Pig Roast FAQs


Before you flood us with questions, clog the cyber wires and cause a national security breach of the likes unseen since the Flagrant Mouse Chewing Apostrophe of 1952, please refer to this convenient list of FAQs, answered:

Q: Why did you and CSB get married last week?
A: Because it was the night before the Pig Roast.

Q: Let me re-phrase, why did you get married at all?
A: Because I had exhausted all the possibilities for referring to CSB (boyfriend, partner, POSSLQ, mate, main squeeze, old man, better/taller/much taller half, consort, emergency contact) and found them all wanting.

Q: What’s with the Pig Roast anyway?
A: We wanted to have a joint 60th birthday party, and we had exhausted all the possible fun party themes in previous years, such as the guanaco and ostrich rides in the back 40; the parachuting clowns - this was an unqualified failure as it turns out there are more coulrophobes in the general population than there are clowns, hence clowns jumping out of the sky precipitated many trips to the ER and a run on certain drugs from the local apothecary; the opium poppy piñata; pin the tail on the hybrid car; and Exquisite Corpse meets the local Police Blotter. So CSB came up with the pig roast idea, which is a delicious one.

Q: Did you guys raise the pig?
A: We did not. We raised Hamlette last year, but she grew very fast and very large before we noticed. We were novices in the pig-raising field, which is not to say that we are now experts. So we hired two very nice young men from Brooklyn (Off the Hook Catering) who went to a very good school (Fieldston) and specialize in “whole animal cookery” and they did an excellent job roasting two piglets.

Q: But were the piglets as happy as Hamlette?
A: Despite the much-vaunted intelligence of pigs, we cannot answer that question. But they did grow up on a bucolic organic farm in Pennsylvania, a state notoriously founded by peace-loving Quakers.

Q: Would you recommend getting married the day before hosting a Pig Roast?
A: Are you insane?

Q: Please elaborate.
A: It seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, we had secured the attendance of most of our beloved family members for the Pig Roast when CSB suggested we make double use of the tent and get married. Naturally, I leapt at the idea, as visions of veils, Transylvanian oligarch brides, and French meringues danced in my head. It was the later introduction of reality, in the shape of folding & ironing napkins beyond count, sticking yellow and black ribbons onto bee-themed place-cards, worrying about whether there would be enough food for our families after the wedding, worrying about the weather, worrying about the champagne, worrying if our respective families would like each other, or even talk to each other, worrying if I would break out in a disfiguring rash the night before (the sort of thing almost guaranteed to precipitate said rash), worrying if the poison ivy on my left shoulder and armpit would spread all over my body & I would end up getting married with pus filled poison ivy blisters, worrying about the scuzz exuding from Daisy and Bruno’s eyes, worrying about the bees and if they would swarm, worrying more about the weather, the food and the tent falling down.

Q: Was there anything you did not worry about that you should have?
A: Iggy’s bowels, pre-ceremony. Also, what to do when I open the refrigerator door and a bottle of excellent champagne leaps out and crashes to the floor, sending fine glass shards and champagne everywhere, including all over my wedding dress. Also, sleep.

Q: Whose dress was more bridal, yours or your granddaughter, Leda’s?
A: Leda’s, of course. (Mine had a black sash). We also had matching bouquets.

Q: Who made Christine’s wedding ring?
A: Funny you should ask. A very nice elderly Zoroastrian who, with his elderly Zoroastrian wife, has a small jewelry store in town.

Q: Do you know any Zoroastrian jokes now?
A: As it happens, we do. But they are not funny unless you already know the Zoroastrian rituals regarding what to do with dead bodies.

Q: Do all Belgian women wear saris to weddings and parties, or just your mother?
A: As far as I know, only my mother.


Q: Could you have picked a more arcane reading from the Song of Solomon for Tristram to read at the church? From his iPhone.
A: Doubtful.

Q: What is spikenard anyway?
A: It’s a member of the Valerian family, has small pink flowers, and grows at altitudes over 3000 meters. They say it helps with insomnia, and also has anti-fungal qualities.

Q: What about calamus?
A: It’s a member of the palm family, Arecaceae. The Australian variety is called ‘hairy mary’.

Q: Are you changing your name?
A: I have always hankered for Wilhemina, but no, I will stick with Christine.

Q: --?
A: Sorry, no more questions.

Perhaps we will see the Transit of Venus today, perhaps not. It depends on the clouds. But Venus will transit across the sun whether we see it or not. This is a rare, but very predictable event. Transits occur in pairs, 8 years apart (the last one was in 2004), and then we must wait another 105 years, which is why most of us will never see another one in our lifetimes. The planet Venus (2nd closest to the sun, as you know from your mnemonic: My Very Existential Mother Just Served Us Noodles – no more pizzas since the demotion off Pluto.) transits between the Sun and the Earth, and we see it as a black dot against the yellow-orange-red solar disk. Do not look directly into the sun!

I read Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus long before I had a clue what the astronomical event was. I loved the book so much I wrote a fan letter to Ms. Hazzard, my first.
I visited the Transit Room at the Observatory Cottage next door and thought it was a very wonderful room, but I still had no idea what it was for.
Now I do. The room is peninsular, and at its end are two tall narrow casement windows facing each other. There used to be an opening in the ceiling as well. When the room served its intended function, a telescope and camera could track the transit – or other celestial movement - from one window, through the ceiling and down the other window, for long enough time to get a good exposure.
And this is a good thing to know, because over a century ago Henry Draper (1837-1882) lived in this house and looked at the skies from his observatory next door.
Draper was a doctor and an astronomer, the son of John William Draper who bought this house in 1849 and was the first person to photograph the moon through a telescope, in 1839. John Draper married Antonia Coetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, daughter of the personal physician to the Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, known as The Magnanimous. But even though he left us historic photos of the moon and his sister Dorothy, John Draper apparently never took a picture of his Brazilian wife, mother to Henry. I find that troubling.
Henry Draper was a pioneer in astrophotography. In 1874 he organized the eight US expeditions to the Far East to photograph the transit of Venus of December 9, for which he was granted a Congressional Medal of Honor.
He was still a young man, seeking to photograph the Orion nebula, when he became ill with pleurisy, and died in November 1882. He missed seeing the next transit, on December 6, by less than a month.
If you can see the sun later today, make a point of l viewing the Transit of Venus (safely, through welders glasses or a pinhole camera) because you never know when pleurisy will strike.

Meanwhile, CSB is rebuilding the lamellar structure to roof the blueberry houses, as the previous lamellar structures were crushed and then collapsed from the weight of the snow during last year's freak Halloween snowstorm. Will this one survive the next climatic weirdness? Will anything? A lamellar structure, like the blueberry houses, only different -->

How to Buy a Wedding Dress

My cousin Helga’s daughter, Lilac, is getting married next year and it is a well-known fact that brides need to wear wedding dresses. To this end, Helga and Lilac came to NYC to shop and I joined them, not because I know anything at all about buying a wedding dress (I do not) but because I was so eager to learn. Plus I like champagne. But first we went to see Prada and Schiaparelli and wondered what sort of shoes we might wear on our heads, and then we slid into Ladurée for some life-affirming rose petal macaroons, knowing we would need all our strength for the adventure to follow.
Our first appointment of this marathon was at Pronovias, a Barcelona bridal fashion line. I had hitherto imagined that any fashion emanating from Spain would reference black mantillas and bolero jackets. I had much to learn. For instance, did you know that all the salesladies at all the bridal salons wear all black?
We went upstairs (the stairs were mirrored and circling – could be dangerous) and sat on sofas. Helga and I were very disappointed that no one offered us champagne. Where did we get the idea that this was de rigeur at high-end bridal shops? Neither of us knows the answer, but we know that we have clung to this notion for years, perhaps for as along as we have had marriageable daughters. Meanwhile, Lilac tried on dresses with the black-clad Alana, and then emerged from the dressing room, teetering on high heels, to parade for us. There was a lot of lace and a lot of crinoline. At Pronovias the dresses had names like Delta, Diciembre and Denver. Their shapes were variously described as mermaid, tulip, trumpet and cupcake. We discussed the merits of capped sleeves at length, and like rock & roll coffee pruning, this is a subject on which there can exist many opinions. Do you know the difference between French and American bustling? (Bustling is what is done with the train after the church ceremony, when the bride would like to dance and eat.) French bustling takes the train and hooks it up in the back, under the dress, while American bustling is done over the dress. Now you too know the difference.
On the way back uptown to our car we passed right by Lanvin, and it turns out that the bride-to-be to be is a devotée of Lanvin. As she herself said, “I could die for an exposed zipper.” So we went in and Lilac tried on 2 gorgeous dresses. This time the salesperson was a young man in a black suit whose enthusiasm for gorgeous gowns was delightful. I suspect him of being a ballroom dancer in his other life, because he often skated across the floor on his smooth paten leather shoes, and came dangerously close to kissing the hand of the mother of the bride. After that, were well and truly exhausted. How convenient that Ladurée is located very close by Lanvin, so that we were able to limp across the street and revive ourselves with doses of chocolate and praline macaroons.
The next day the first appointment was at Vera Wang. And yes, we were still clinging to our champagne expectations, like the shipwrecked Ishmael clinging to Queequeg’s coffin. Our consultant was another black clad anorectic lady. We had heard that Vera Wang had featured some black wedding dresses recently, and we were definitely hoping to see these. We did, and basically they looked just like the white wedding dresses, only in black. We learned the difference between Chantilly lace and Alençon lace. Vera too seems to use an alphabetical model for naming her dresses; Winter 2012 featured H: Hilary, Hayley and Hildegard. Maybe I missed the I’s, because next came J: Joan, Jane, Jasmine and Jellyroll.
The bride-to-be looked beautiful but kept complaining that the dresses were so heavy. Of course they were heavy; many of them required serious armature. Most of them boasted enough fabric for Christo to wrap a building with. They were architectural and gravity defying. But what did we care? We just watched her totter in Vera’s 5-inch heels, up and down the black carpeted, mirror-lined corridor.

“It took 12 nail-biting minutes and five eager bidders for Edvard Munch’s famed 1895 pastel of “The Scream” to sell for $119.9 million, becoming the world’s most expensive work of art ever to sell at auction." NY Times, May 2
The art world is agog and rumors are flying around like grand pianos in a tornado. Who is the mystery buyer of The Scream? Who scrimped and saved and finally just embezzled the Church’s Golden Halo fund to acquire this iconic painting?
I can tell you right now, she is not a financier, a tycoon or a Qatari royal. She is me, a beekeeper upstate with a bad case of eczema that even multiple beestings have not helped, which is why I chose to conduct my bidding over the telephone.
Ever since my third husband gave me a five-foot inflatable Scream for Valentines Day,

I knew I had to have to real thing. Or soon thereafter. I still remember how he got up extra early that morning. Later, I realized that was because he was blowing up the Scream, and the truth was that his lung power was not very good after two decades of smoking unfiltered Gauloises. So he used the bicycle pump, which would have been a perfectly reasonable solution if he had not broken the middle finger of his left hand while pumping, which impaired his ability to signal his displeasure to fellow drivers on Route 19. Because the truth also was that his arm power wasn’t all that much better than his lung power, after two decades of professional curling.
Once inflated, he brought the Scream in to our bedroom, so it was the first thing I saw when I woke on that fateful February morning. It there is anything I like better than Demolition Derby and Corn Dogs, it is Angst and Ennui made Manifest in Paint.
Over time, I called her Sally Scream and took her everywhere with me. But let’s face it, she was a cheap inflatable toy and after a while she started leaking air. Then in the summer Butch, our dog, had an unfortunate altercation with a porcupine and in the throes of misery he ran straight into Sally Scream and punctured her beyond repair. Poor Butch. I had to give up my stash of Valium to get him calm enough to let me remove the quills. There were a lot of quills.
My husband offered to get me another inflatable Scream, or a set of Scream finger puppets, but I said, No more. I want the real thing. If my Angst is real, then the painting should be too. But I knew it would be hard. I wasn’t exactly opposed to stealing one of the versions of the paintings, but I knew they were in Oslo and I have always had a problem with herring, and Oslo just seemed too far to go during bee season. I also knew that in the normal course of events we would were unlikely to come up with the requisite millions to buy one of the paintings at auction. I started selling things on eBay, and while the clutter was demonstrably reduced, my PayPal account never got into the 4 digits. Then the Evangelical Church of St Feliximas and Her Thousand Haloes built a cathedral in our town, and they needed a bookkeeper. I altered my resume ever so slightly, changing double e’s into double o’s, so that beekeeper became bookkeeper, and voila, I had myself a job managing the finances for the Church. You may not have heard of St Feliximas and her Thousand Haloes, but you should know that she had many fine qualities, so fine that the members of the church like donate large sums for the gilding of her haloes. The thing is, they can’t tell the difference between real gold and fake gold, and the thousand haloes are way up high in the apse. Since Saint Feliximas hasn’t caused the skies to open or the earth to be rent, I am assuming she has no problem with my re-direction of the fund.
In no time at all, I had the money squirreled away in the Cayman Islands, and it was only a matter of waiting for the next Scream to come to auction. You know the rest. Though I should say that those twelve minutes were not so much nail-biting as hair-pulling, but that is just my way. The Scream hangs in our bedroom now. I told Fergus - he’s my new husband - that it is a reproduction, and as he’s more of a Mannerist guy himself so he doesn’t pay it much attention. There are still days when I miss the companionability of Sally Scream, riding shotgun with me in the Tahoe, but they are rare.

My father, reads SQD, but can't figure out how to leave a comment, and this is probably a good thing because his typing has become extremely creative of late. So he just emailed me - the email was dictated to Josephine, his dictaphone, and then typed by his secretary, hence it is legible - this comment to the blog about hairdressers.(See below).
"You might want to mention that I am probably the only man in America who has his eyebrows combed each morning and the stray larger ones removed every month or two."
Of course he is referring to his excellent hair care by his wife,my mother.